January 3, 2012
Big Commerce Review - Store Statistics BROKEN
I've been using Big Commerce as my shopping cart for several years. Overall, I'm pretty satisfied. But it has a massive defect and my requests, filed for over THREE years, have fallen on deaf ears.
What's my beef? Simple. When you ask the cart to return your Top 20 Customers, it brings back total garbage. I'd LOVE to reward my top customers with personal Thank You's, maybe a private Promo Code, or some other gift - that's if I knew WHO they were.
Here's but one example of how crazy the data is. Laura indeed bought things from me, but she didn't buy 19 things in the month of October, 2011.
Here's another one for you. This one is about Carolyn. Looks like she's a great customer, right? After all, she's ordered 159 times from me and spent over $6,500.00
Think again. She only has ordered twice and spent less than $150.00.
The problem with these grievous errors is that you start to lose faith in any other numbers at the cart. For example, are the total sales correct? What about the Best Selling Products? Are the ones the cart says are best sellers REALLY the ones people are buying the most?
Who's got the time to determine this using an abacus and the raw data? I expect a powerful shopping cart like Big Commerce to be right - especially with a trivial task of telling me what customers buy the most in any given date block.
Good grief Big Commerce, get it right!
Posted by Tim Carter at January 3, 2012 2:44 PM
Tim,
I am a team lead here at BigCommerce and I am aware of the issue that you mention here. The issue is not that BigCommerce simply creates a new number that Laura actually purchased, in this case 19 items, but that your guest orders are being associated with a single customer on top of the orders that she actually placed.
The last we checked, this data discrepancy came down to an issue with MySQL where if the data being queried is not associated with a key value (in this case Customer Name), then it would dump that data into the oldest key value in the range of dates that you are trying to query. So I would assume that Laura in your example above was the oldest order in your date range that was not a guest order and the query is associating all guest totals to that single customer.
That being said, I do apologize that we have not worked out a solution to this issue. I assure you that our dev team takes all reported bug reports into consideration when choosing where to focus resources and it is hard to prioritize a statistical data issue over say a shipping integration, especially when there is always a way to get to that data with custom export templates.
I can tell you however that there are some very exciting projects on the horizon and it sounds like this issue may well be addressed by an enhancement to the software on the current development roadmap. I cannot give more detail nor give an ETA, but I would ask that you please have a little faith in BigCommerce and we will surprise you at just how much better things will get with respect to statistics in 2012.
I appreciate your patronage of BigCommerce and look forward to wowing you in 2012.
Best Regards,
Kris Westlund
COMMENT BY Tim Carter:
Kris,
Thanks. You can Wow me now by having the Dev Team working on past problems instead of possibly creating new ones.
Just a suggestion.
It's simply not acceptable to have unreliable statistics. How can a business like me survive with bad data? Every Big Commerce customer feels the way I do. Just do a survey. I can do the survey if you want.
Please print out this saying of my oldest daughter in very large font and post it in the Dev Team area:
Excuses are Reasons for Failure
Maybe that will get them motivated.
Posted by: Kris Westlund at January 16, 2012 6:25 PMTim,
I apologize if you felt I was simply making excuses as that was not my intent. Our team was able to see a demo of a solution today from a BigCommerce partner that may already be able to assist you with gathering statistics in your BigCommerce store.
We already have an official forum post describing the integration and what to expect in the upcoming months. I know that words cannot change your mind by themselves, but I do have full faith we can convince you soon and I hope this may help:
Again, thank you for your patronage of BigCommerce. We look forward to more feedback and will make sure your feedback does not fall on deaf ears.
Best Regards,
Kris Westlund
COMMENT BY Tim Carter:
Kris,
Let's look at the facts. My team entered a ticket a year ago about the faulty reports in the Statistics area. We NEVER heard back.
To this day the Statistics are still broken. This is a hosted solution on your servers. It's your software.
It's insane that simple reporting features that require basic mathematics don't work.
Business people like me need results, not excuses from the dev team and promises that the issues *might* be fixed on the next update whenever that is.
I'm astonished that we're even having this exchange.
What's more, last week when I used your Contact Form I put in a simple request to talk to the president of Big Commerce. I've not heard from ANYONE about this.
Is that the way to run a business? Who is the President of Big Commerce? The management team is not listed anywhere.
Can you *feel* the level of frustration in me?
Posted by: Kris Westlund at January 17, 2012 5:32 PM