Drop Shipping & eCommerce Frank Ross on 22 Feb 2008 08:36 pm
MonsterCommerce Upgrading to Network Solutions Shopping Cart
MonsterCommerce is a long standing, mature provider of shopping cart software. They have been especially popular for home-based businesses using a Drop Ship model. In late 2005, they were acquired by Network Solutions. Now it appears they may be actually winding down their name. In fact, the MonsterCommerce.Com URL redirects to a Networks Solutions page which only mentions MonsterCommerce in footnotes.
This is news that has been bubbling for quite some time. If you have a MonsterCommerce website, you probably already know that Version 4x is being supplanted by Version 7x. As the jump in version numbers indicates, this is not a minor update. In fact, it’s not an update at all but a full migration to a different platform.
I’m a bit unclear on this but it appears that the 7x platform doesn’t carry the MonsterCommerce name any longer and everything will be referred to as Network Solutions. This isn’t surprising considering the big fish / little fish nature of such mergers and acquisitions. I will look into this further and try to get more clarification.
This change is actually long overdue as MonsterCommerce really has an older shopping cart platform with lots of back-end things that need fixing. There are far too many things to discuss here, but most notably is the PCI/CISP compliance for payment processing. If you’re a current MonsterCommerce web store subscriber, you should take some time to read up on the upcoming changes at this forum link (you must log into the forum to read these forum threads).
The migrations will occur sometime in the spring and summer time frame. Network Solutions/MonsterCommerce is giving its current merchants a 30 day window on migration. In other words, the site will be migrated to the new platform in test mode for 30 days before being made live. This will give site owners the opportunity to preview the new site before allowing it to roll over.
If you are considering MonsterCommerce as a shopping cart platform for your home-based business, this would be a good time to wait things out. There are big changes coming with this provider! The times are a changing at MonsterCommerce. New platform for this mature shopping cart provider is in the works.
on 15 Mar 2008 at 5:49 am 1.ArcoJedi said …
I agree with most of what you wrote except for this - “If you are considering MonsterCommerce … this would be a good time to wait things out.”
New clients that sign up today will be using the latest version right away. If a small business owner is considering e-commerce providers, they will be provisioned from their first day with NetSol on the v7 platform, which is live, stable and has many hundreds of clients using it successfully today. The upgrade for ‘legacy’ clients on v4 is still in process and development and will most likely be completed in batches over the coming months.
While things are changing for us throughout the e-commerce division of Network Solutions (formerly MonsterCommerce) as well as the company at large, they are from my POV for the best. Having been a team member at MC since early 2003, I hope the point comes across.
Thanks!