1) Is the price worth it? I believe it is fair price to pay. I have tried various platforms including building my own as well as lately Joomla. A custom site with such manageability of contents will cost more (Pls understand that manageability of contents is key to SEO). A platform such as Joomla takes more technical know-how, although it is very flexible and extensible.

2) Is it as seamless as they say? No. The platform has got certain strengths such as Search engine friendly URL out of the box and integrated shopping cart with inventory management. This is not the case for many platforms out there.

The page hierarchy structure is a lot easier to understand for beginners compared to platform such as Joomla’s menu driven ones. I do however find the Storesonline platform lacking in areas such as template design and editor. These are however not limitations that will be enough to restrict your site’s success online in my opinion. Content is king after all when it comes to SEO.

3) What I find most valuable? For me it is a good starting point. The online knowledge base included is good for someone who has no prior knowledge to get up to speed. However, they are not complete. I find it useful to start my learning from there and have extended my knowledge online and through more in depth research off line.

4) How do I feel about the company? When I first started, I had relied on the help desk more. As someone might have pointed out some where in this forum, that can some times be frustrating especially when your problems cannot be solved. Guess no company is perfect. I got this far but I still hope that the company can engage the users better and have a stronger group of support staff that can handle more complex problems.

5) Would I recommend this to someone else? Yes & No. If you are expecting the platform to make you rich fast, I would not recommend this route. However, if you are keen to learn how to do internet marketing and do not have any idea where to start, this is a good starting point. The online documentation and a ready platform is a great way to learn.

6) Word of advice? I would advise you to limit your exposure by starting with one or two licenses although that would mean you pay more per license. I have 6 licenses and only one is live. One I use for testing purposes. There rest still dormant. You can play with the platform as much as possible. You only need to start paying when it goes live. I played around with my 1st license for more than 6 months before it went live. I still only pay for one live site after 2 years.

Also, hard work pays. Any chance you are sitting around doing and learning nothing expecting something to happen, you need a change of plan.

Good luck!

Anyone with any sort of updates or (if any) suggestions on getting my money back.. even tho 6 years ago or so, feel free to email me.

I do not know if SOL even does business anymore.

adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Ian

Having already gone through a scam of sorts over software with a company dealing with budgeting your finances, we had already agreed that we weren’t going to be suckered into buying anymore software.

I did pay for the workshop because I want to glean some of the information offered and see if it’s anything that I can use. I didn’t feel comfortable using my visa because they didn’t have a visa machine and all of the information was written onto a form. So I wrote a check on one of my smaller accounts. In the information that they gave me was a license and password for a website. After reading the agreement, I don’t intend to use this key, because once activated they will be able to charge me the $24.95 a month. During the 90 minutes they had said you could use it for 45 days. I know how fast 45 days is and how we sometimes forget to cancel things. However once the site is live, they can start charging you.

So I won’t even activate anything or start building a site because I have my own domain and website, and I’m perfectly happy using Etsy to sell my products. I pay a small fee each month to advertise my products and use pay pal for people to pay for my products.

The only reason I even went to this 90 minute seminar was because my husband was curious about what they had to say. I’ve been online for a long time, and pretty much know how to be successful with an online business but have been a little lazy about putting forth too much effort.
There is a whole wide world of customers out there and with the right marketing tools you can reach those customers.

The internet has many free tools available, as well as, software for a minimal price. Search out the tools, read the information and learn all that you can about starting an online business. Don’t expect anyone to do your work for you, and if they say you can go to sleep and make money, well, that’s only a small portion of truth. Yes, you can go to sleep and wake up with an order in your inbox.
You still have to package and send off that product, plus transfer their payment into your bank account.

Do your research. There is a lot of wonderful information available online, you just have to search it out.
Don’t stop at the first page of links in your search engine, go to the next page and the next page.

And lastly, the only way to be successful with any business is through good old fashioned work, time, and effort.