Hostway Merchant Manager – My First Impression

As part of my “Ask Dave” initiative I received an intriguing question from Kenny, who asked the following:

Dave, what’s your opinion on Hostway Merchant Manager shopping cart? How does it compare with BigCommerce, Volusion, etc.? It’s offered thru Costco and gives Costco members a big discount, so price-wise, seems very attractive. Thanks! Kenny

When I first read the question I knew that Hostway was a popular web hosting provider but I didn’t realise that they had their own e-commerce offering. Plenty of web hosting providers allow you one click installation of some of the more popular open source shopping carts such as osCommerce and ZenCart, or have set up reseller deals with commercial providers such as X-Cart or Interspire.

Developing and maintaining an e-commerce application such as a shopping cart is serious business and not something that you would want a web hosting company to go it alone. A smart web hosting company should be looking to partner with a specialist e-commerce provider.

On first impression if Hostway had partnered with somebody it was going to be private label as there was no indication on their sales page that they were using a third-party (not that there’s anything wrong with that).

What are the Hostway Merchant Manager Features?

When viewing the features on the Hostway Merchant Manager sales page things were sounding promising;

• one click installation,
• easy to use SEO features,
• increase sales with reviews, ratings and special discounts,
• customise your stores look and feel,
• online inventory tracking tools,
• multiple payment and shipping options,
• target and test advertising with online testing and analytics tools,
• a personalised shopping experience,
• and a quick and easy checkout process.

Time to Explore the Hostway Demo Version

Hostway Merchant Screenshot

Fortunately, Hostway provide you with a demo version to explore and evaluate. I say fortunately because after entering my details and activating the demo I soon recognised a familiar interface… surely it can’t be!

Upon clicking through to the customer interface I became even more convinced that it was a familiar old friend that I hadn’t seen for years.

So what is Hostway Merchant Manager?

To most people this old friend is more identifiable as osCommerce than Hostway Merchant Manager.

From my initial testing it really does look like Hostway have loaded up osCommerce with a number of the more popular and useful contributions and rebranded it as their own e-commerce solution. There really is nothing wrong with this except for the fact that osCommerce has become a very tired e-commerce application that I no longer recommend to anybody who is serious about building an online store.

My Recommendation on Hostway Merchant Manager

I would encourage anybody who is serious about starting out in e-commerce to bypass Hostway Merchant Manager and explore specialist shopping cart providers such as BigCommerce, CoreCommerce and Shopify. You will definitely get a lot more bang for your buck.

My recommendation on whether you should explore Hostway Merchant Manager is based purely on what I believe they are offering as their software platform, osCommerce. I have absolutely no experience with them as a web hosting provider and this recommendation should not be looked upon as a reflection of their hosting service.

If Hostway a serious about offering their customers an e-commerce platform they should be exploring applications that still seem to be investing in the ongoing development of their platform, unlike osCommerce, which has been stalled at its current incarnation for years.

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