V18.1 Warning

[Josh Barling]

I appreciate my response is not exactly the same issue with 18.1 but it is relevant to others considering upgrading to 18.1 e.g 18.1 Warning.

We sell digital downloads and had SagePay (Opayo) and PayPal Express Checkout. We were keen to get 18.1 for the compatibility with WebP images and improved Google Rankings.

I spoke with SellerDeck support prior to upgrade and looked on the community/knowledgebase and at the 'available' upgrade information prior to upgrading, including this thread, and I did not come across anything to put me off (e.g we are not on Host-It). I then upgraded my 6 sites, in the same way I have done for 17 years. This time however, during the upgrade I noted the upgrade removes PayPal Express Checkout, replacing it with 'Paypal Commerce Platform'. After having switched all my sites over, and try to set up PayPal Commerce Platform, I find that I am being asked to agree to new terms and new fees. The new fees are an extra £20 a month payment plus an increase in fees from 2.9% to 3.4%. In addition going through the SellerDeck help files during to set up PayPal, its states "Note: this option will not be available if the cart contains only downloadable products." Given that is what we mainly sell, that is not great as it affects say 50% of our customers.

I asked SellerDeck about this. Q) "Please can someone explain what is going on as I have upgraded the sites only to find out these fee increases and reduction in function, when trying to set up PayPal." and the response was R) "Sorry I cannot help you there, I can help with the technical aspects of the new PayPal integration, but you will need to take up any financial aspects of the transactions with PayPal." I spoke with PayPal and there is no obligation to switch over. They were happy I was on Express Checkout. So why are are we being forced into a change by SellerDeck?

As a cover customer spending something like £2k plus a year after 17 years of loyalty to SellerDeck, I would have hoped for something better in terms of looking out for their customers and understanding their businesses. I am trying to get my head around all of this but feel somewhat upset by it all. Its not how SellerDeck started.

Hi Phil,

I'll reach out to my PayPal contact and ask their thoughts on the above.

In terms of the overall approach to adding PayPal Commerce Platform and removing previous legacy integrations, that wasn't only a decision by Sellerdeck.

Thanks, Josh.

[Phil H]

I appreciate my response is not exactly the same issue with 18.1 but it is relevant to others considering upgrading to 18.1 e.g 18.1 Warning.

We sell digital downloads and had SagePay (Opayo) and PayPal Express Checkout. We were keen to get 18.1 for the compatibility with WebP images and improved Google Rankings.

I spoke with SellerDeck support prior to upgrade and looked on the community/knowledgebase and at the 'available' upgrade information prior to upgrading, including this thread, and I did not come across anything to put me off (e.g we are not on Host-It). I then upgraded my 6 sites, in the same way I have done for 17 years. This time however, during the upgrade I noted the upgrade removes PayPal Express Checkout, replacing it with 'Paypal Commerce Platform'. After having switched all my sites over, and try to set up PayPal Commerce Platform, I find that I am being asked to agree to new terms and new fees. The new fees are an extra £20 a month payment plus an increase in fees from 2.9% to 3.4%. In addition going through the SellerDeck help files during to set up PayPal, its states "Note: this option will not be available if the cart contains only downloadable products." Given that is what we mainly sell, that is not great as it affects say 50% of our customers.

I asked SellerDeck about this. Q) "Please can someone explain what is going on as I have upgraded the sites only to find out these fee increases and reduction in function, when trying to set up PayPal." and the response was R) "Sorry I cannot help you there, I can help with the technical aspects of the new PayPal integration, but you will need to take up any financial aspects of the transactions with PayPal." I spoke with PayPal and there is no obligation to switch over. They were happy I was on Express Checkout. So why are are we being forced into a change by SellerDeck?

As a cover customer spending something like £2k plus a year after 17 years of loyalty to SellerDeck, I would have hoped for something better in terms of looking out for their customers and understanding their businesses. I am trying to get my head around all of this but feel somewhat upset by it all. Its not how SellerDeck started.

[Mantra]

The development team have been investigating some of the specific reports raised. We had seen isolated reports previously and have completed initial investigations with a fix scheduled in a future release. We are now bringing this forward.

Once we’ve got the information together I’ll share.

The pressing issue reported concerns Sellerdeck utilising Crypt SSL and Net SSL.

When can we expect the fix to address this?

[Josh Barling]

Hi Jason,

No worries. I hear what you are saying, thanks for the feedback.


Thanks, Josh

[Buzby]

Hi Josh,

Many thanks for the reply.

There was a short time frame between 1 question I asked and my post, however no update was ever received for the main issue, only a secondary question.

The ticket is now closed, as mentioned we have now moved server. This will however help others in the future if you readily know this information.

I think the real issue here causing my frustration with Sellerdeck support is the fact this information wasn’t readily available, with advice for a fix. The issue had to be diagnosed by someone I don’t pay a support package to.

The only thing you could offer me was getting sales to phone me to see what you could sell me.

Had I been waiting for a fix, or advice I would now be 2 weeks in with websites not able to take money, and still no resolve on the horizon.

I like Sellerdeck software, I like the fact I have control of it and it’s not in the cloud. It’s these reasons I continue to be a customer but I do think that some issues need to be greatly improved.

[Josh Barling]

Update,

Host-it

Host-it have successfully moved 10 sites for me to the new server. 5 of these were Sellerdeck sites.

It took longer than needed, as I only wanted to move 1 at a time to address any teething problems. We started with the least busy site, and finally moved the busiest site today.

All moved with minimal downtime, and Sage pay, and PayPal are all working fine.

Most of this was also carried out over a bank holiday weekend as well.

Host-it are a fantastic hosting company that I would fully recommend, and Marc in support has been brilliant.

Sellerdeck

I asked them a question 13 days ago. The question was “what is the latest version of Perl Sellerdeck will run on?”

Having chased them up and told it was with development, I still await an answer.

A few weeks back they logged in to my computer and changed a script for error tracking. On Friday I asked what I needed to change back. I still await an answer.

In my opinion Sellerdeck have to up their game significantly to retain the loyalty of customers.

Hi Jason,

Just catching up on forum posts.

I saw that your ticket was already responded to on Tuesday (before end of day I believe), looks like you must have missed the email when writing this post.

The question you ask about the perl version unfortunately isn't a simple answer due to the dependencies on core and non-core modules. The answer will vary based on other factors.

At the moment, the development team want to do a bit more testing so the answer is as accurate as possible. We're firing up our test servers now.


Thanks, Josh

[Buzby]

Update,

Host-it

Host-it have successfully moved 10 sites for me to the new server. 5 of these were Sellerdeck sites.

It took longer than needed, as I only wanted to move 1 at a time to address any teething problems. We started with the least busy site, and finally moved the busiest site today.

All moved with minimal downtime, and Sage pay, and PayPal are all working fine.

Most of this was also carried out over a bank holiday weekend as well.

Host-it are a fantastic hosting company that I would fully recommend, and Marc in support has been brilliant.

Sellerdeck

I asked them a question 13 days ago. The question was “what is the latest version of Perl Sellerdeck will run on?”

Having chased them up and told it was with development, I still await an answer.

A few weeks back they logged in to my computer and changed a script for error tracking. On Friday I asked what I needed to change back. I still await an answer.

In my opinion Sellerdeck have to up their game significantly to retain the loyalty of customers.

[Josh Barling]

Hi All,

We’ve been keeping an eye on this thread while also investigating the points raised. Myself and a few others receive notifications of all posts and are aware of all comments even if we do not always engage. We do really appreciate the people who make positive contributions to it.

Firstly, I would like to say it’s great to see Host-It commenting on our forum and providing a high level of support to our mutual customers.

We test and build new versions against our own infrastructure, so it is always 100% compatible. However we recognise that as a self-hosted ecommerce platform, many customers want to choose which hosting provider to use and we want to allow for that.

The development team have been investigating some of the specific reports raised. We had seen isolated reports previously and have completed initial investigations with a fix scheduled in a future release. We are now bringing this forward.

Once we’ve got the information together I’ll share.

I would also like to address the comments made on our Cover contract, as I think its important to highlight a few key points. Each customer who subscribes to Cover or Desktop 365 Plus is adding value back into the platform and our services as we reinvest that revenue to offer more value to our customers. We’ve recognised that customers want to see more value from those contracts and so we’ve been adding in more value through the likes of Swift, Widgets, Extensions and new versions. We plan to continue with this approach.

In regards to the support service, I see that you all get a lot of value from the forum as you are able to discuss issues with extremely experienced Sellerdeck Desktop users. You generally all have a very high threshold of knowledge on the platform and your websites; that often means we need senior developers to investigate your requests / issues which can take longer to return a response than either of us would want.

We know there are areas we can improve on and are always open to receiving constructive feedback.

In regards to Page Speed and Web Core Vitals, this is a subject we’ve been investing a lot of energy into. We have been building a white paper with information and also an audit service – as you can guess, this will only be available to Cover or Desktop 365 Plus customers. More information on this will be made available when ready. V18.1.0 included the support of webp which is an important area to improve page speed.

Thanks Josh.

[Mike Hughes]

I must agree, our speeds on Google insights have slipped, however visitor numbers, sales and conversion % is up with the Swift design.

That's good to hear because I don't think it would take much to fix the layouts. It's mostly common sense and a bit of digging into the details.

[Buzby]

PS. The 'Swift' sites I've looked at are not doing that well on mobile either. It would be good to see Sellerdeck fix this as I'd rather not have to go through it and fix all the problems myself.

Mike

I must agree, our speeds on Google insights have slipped, however visitor numbers, sales and conversion % is up with the Swift design.

[Mike Hughes]

Hopefully Sellerdeck are now fully aware of the issue and putting a plan together to fix the problem. With a bit of luck we should hear about it soon.

I will add that Sellerdeck is still a great piece of software that produces sites with some big advantages. Google's May update will use Core Web Vitals as a ranking signal and from what I've seen the alternative dynamic ecommerce sites are all going to face a big hurdle getting anywhere near good enough. With Sellerdeck my product pages are now getting around 92-93 on mobile and 99 -100 on desktop. Looking at some of the UK sites using one of the larger ecommerce software solutions they're only getting 15 on mobile and 68 on Desktop and are failing Google's Core Web Vital assessments. The shakeout is going to be interesting and I can't help wondering how far Google will push the poor performing sites down the SERPS as it's objective is for businesses to improve their sites, not to kill them off.

PS. The 'Swift' sites I've looked at are not doing that well on mobile either. It would be good to see Sellerdeck fix this as I'd rather not have to go through it and fix all the problems myself.

Mike

[zgap111]

We cancelled on similar reasons... we still using SD Payments - it's now the only revenue SD now gets from us...

And host-it are fantastic - helped us switch away from SD 365 with zero downtime.

Not too pleased that a new license is required when it's not even a new release (v19+)...

I never knew of security issues until I did that scan of our sites a few years back... I don't like knowing that there are potential security on the SD sites, that anyone with knowledge can exploit every SD site - goes against all GDPR and PCI DSS compliance

[Buzby]

Guccij,

We cancelled cover when they had that huge price hike a few years back. Never found support any good and any issues were either resolved by myself or from the help of this forum before Sellerdeck support ever solved it.

This time I had to purchase to get the Swift theme and this is my first encounter with support for years, and it doesn't seem like it has improved.

[guccij]

We've been paying for cover for 13 years. Daily, now, as we struggle to get the most basic things fixed and questions answered, we wonder why. Host-It by the way, are the best hosts ever. Cannot fault them.

[Buzby]

Many thanks James

I must say Host-it support has been top notch whilst Sellerdeck support has been poor.

With no update from them regarding a question I asked a week ago.

The question was what is the latest version of Perl Sellerdeck will run on? You would think they would know, but a week later the development team are still working on it.

Last message from Sellerdeck was shall I get sales to call you to quote for hosting.