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Dave K.

2
Level 2 Contributor

Contributor Level

Total Points
591

About Me

Family man of 15 years, my family always comes first. I am a proud father of 2 and on any given weekend you can find me at the beach or coaching my sons baseball team. We love exploring the OC so I will have plenty of fun reviews pointing you to the coolest places in this area. I work as a web designer for one of the largest online retail chains in the world and love my job. My background is in marketing but programming experiences and roots just couldn't be ignored!

How I Can Help

Web design, web marketing, general IT, local hotspots and hidden treasures

Interests

Family time and baseball season!

6 Reviews by Dave

  • 3dCart Shopping Cart Software

9/12/12

Let me first start by saying that I have dealt with many cart softwares over the years (CommerceSQL, osCommerce, osCMax, zencart, x-cart, magento, volusion, and now 3dcart).

I quickly found out that free carts are nice but you get what you pay for and eventually the business required a better cart. The hosted solutions fixed so many issues for me and I was happy with both Volusion and 3dCart but recently have been liking 3dCart because it seemed that they were listening to the feature requests from users more seriously than V was. Users requested a feature "Make an Offer" which allows the site visitors to offer something on certain products and was great for used items or items where MAP (minimum advertised price) was a problem. V had MANY requests for this starting in 2007 and it never happened. 3dCart had this request and included it in an update after only 8 months!

I still do some freelance web work and use both products Volusion and 3dCart. I like both and they both have their advantages but recently friends and family that call asking for advice in this area I have been sending them to 3dCart and so I had to come here and at least give my opinion to all of my Jabber brothers and sisters as well!

If this changes or tilts I'll come back and re-comment later but if you are wanting to start an online business as someone with no affiliation to this company that has sites with them and others and is making good sales (100k-400k annually) I can tell you to rest easy and go with these guys.

Best of luck with your new E-com adventure!

  • Geeks.com

9/12/12

I have been using these guys for years. Their prices are great and because I am in southern California orders get to me within 2 shipping days sometimes next day! I have never had a mistake in my order or a problem. I also like the site because of how simple and easy to use it is.

I notice some bad reviews here and am sorry to see that this has been one of my favorites and I go looking for weekly deals all the time from here. I have also had a couple of friends get refurbished laptops and haven't had problems so I am glad that they didn't have the experience the other reviewer had. I hadn't known they don't test that would make me think twice about suggesting those products to friends or getting one myself. Since my experiences have always been good I have to give these guys a 5 star!

  • PayPal

9/12/12

Background:
My wife is a stay at home mom that started a home business that we created a retail website for. This website currently does 5-10 transactions a day and 1-2 phone transactions from people calling from the web or from tradeshows we attended.

Options:
We had to go with a merchant company to accept credit cards. While the business was growing we used paypal for payment and figured that we would sign up for a merchant account when sales called for it. When the sales level grew to more than 10 transactions a week we decided to sign up and looked into several merchant companies. We ended up signing up with Paypal Merchant services (Paypal Pro) It costs me $30 a month and 2.9% per transaction

The good:
-All of the money is deposited into our Paypal account along with Paypal user payments.
-They have never had a service outage that costed us a sale.
-We have the debit card so we have immediate access to use the card for sales and it gives us 1% cash back.
-We get 1% cash back on all of the business costs since we use the Paypal card for everything business related.
-We can accept credit card payments in person using our smartphones
-Chargebacks or complaints are handled through the Paypal website and is really simple to resolve. (we have never had a chargeback just customers that didn't remember the charge so its been easy for us)
-The Paypal Pro payment gateway is already setup on most major softwares so you can get just about any shopping cart out there and it is ready to just plug in 3 easy numbers from your paypal account and it is up and running.
-Customer service for the Paypal Pro is here in the US and the people are VERY knowledgeable and got everything done for me every time I have called so easily and quickly with great attitudes. I don't know any major company with support like that.

The bad:
-Payments don't get deposited directly into our account. Normal merchant accounts deposit the charges 2 days after they settle. In Paypal we need to move the money over manually into our account and it takes several days to do.
-The monthly charge is $30 which includes gateway. Normal merchants are free monthly and normally $20 for the gateway (Anet or equivalent) so it is $10 more a month
-They take 2.9% per transaction, normal merchants are 1.9 - 2.9 so they are on the higher end
-You can't log in with Chrome Paypals sites have issues with Google Chrome not updating regularly so you have to use Internet Explorer (this does NOT mean that customers with chrome have issues just the people signing into paypal.com)
-The charges on customer cards says "PAYPAL: Company.com" where Company.com is your site. I would prefer they don't place their name there other merchants don't.

So far we have been using this service for a year and have grown and not had any problems or issues. In total they may be just a little more expensive but unless you are doing more than 300k a year in sales it is worth the extra money for all of the ease of use and 1% cash back on business expenses.

I hope this helps some people considering their merchant options out there.

  • Amazon

9/12/12

Been using Amazon for years and have never had a bad experience. The one time I had a problem they took care of the problem quickly and refunded a portion of the sale to make me happy.

The only warning I would give is that when purchasing through Amazon sometimes you are buying through another company that is listing their product on Amazon. You can see several companies may be listing the same item and you can chose which you prefer. The biggest problem is that people jump too quickly onto the cheapest price. Remember cheaper isn't always better look at the ratings and know that the reduced price could be because they have bad ratings so the price is to entice you over to them.

I always go with the more reputable option and to be honest the price difference is normally only a few dollars. Not worth the headache of chasing the other company down to get your order!

  • Reliable Places

9/12/12

I was getting robo calls every day from a company claiming to be Google compliance department trying to get me to pay $199 a month for a front page placement in organic search under local listings. Later I found out these guys are really 29 Prime in Irvine and now the same people are calling me daily and saying they are Relaible Places.

I found out that Reliable Places is the new business name for the sister sales company 29 Prime started so they just basically changed the name but keep robo calling! I have done everything to stop them, complained, asked to be taken off the list, registered on their website to stop calling, informed them that I am on the do not call registry, let them know it was a cell phone they were calling... Nothing has worked.

The first call I was tempted to go with the service they said it was 199 a month for organic first page listings with a money back guarentee... I am SO glad I didn't do it. Just google their company names and you will see how bad they really are!

Buyer Beware! They are also running under several small site names claiming those copied sites are "independent affiliates" but it is their website, their material, their services being sold!

  • 29prime

9/12/12

These guys robocall me every day, not matter how many times you ask them to remove you. If you google them you will see that they are a complete scam and they are using services to post fake reviews on sites like this that won't catch it. Check the yelp reviews! Hard to fake that!

Dave Has Earned 11 Votes

Dave K.'s review of PayPal earned a Well Said vote

Dave K.'s review of Reliable Places earned a Very Helpful vote

Dave K.'s review of Amazon earned a Very Helpful vote

Dave K.'s review of Geeks.com earned 3 Very Helpful votes

Dave K.'s review of 3dCart Shopping Cart Software earned 3 Very Helpful votes

Dave K.'s review of 29prime.com earned 2 Very Helpful votes

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