The disclaimer:

First, I’m not currently or in the past, an employee of PDG. PDG graciously provides the demo license that powers the PDG Commerce demos on this site and if you purchase any PDG product through my site, I do receive a commission. I just needed to get that out of the way first so we’re all on the same page. This does not however sway my honest opinion which I provide here and should be backed up as I present my personal “bad” and “ugly” sections.

The background:

I’ve been using PDG commerce since version 4 back in 2004 if I remember correctly. I’ve managed e-commerce for several sites and have used/tested several shopping cart systems yet I choose to use PDG Commerce for several reasons. I aim to inform potential buyers of the good, the bad and yes, the ugly of the software with my honest opinions of this cart system. The opinion expressed in this piece is solely my own and derived from my extensive use of the software. PDG Commerce has a lot of great features and for a shopping cart system, it does very well. But, like ALL software, it does have its short comings. Let’s get started…

The good:

PDG Support: If I could only choose one reason why I use this software, this would be it. PDG support in my experience has been the most helpful support team I’ve ever used. They all speak English and are located within the borders of the United States. I think that just about says it all! While support cost’s a minimal fee, they also have a free support forum that they frequently respond on as well as an experienced user base that is always willing to help if you ask.

The Admin: Polished and intuitive for the most part. If you used version 4, this admin is a major upgrade and adds some new bells and whistles. Some of the new features include the sales summary on the splash screen, the new tree menu system and new product management section to name a few. However, the admin has some short comings as well, read on…

One Product, Many Categories: One of the new features of version 5 that was my favorite was to allow one product into multiple categories. Now you can create one product and “share” it to several categories throughout your site without creating multiples of the same product (version 4 users will understand this pain). This allows for maximizing the exposure of a product but at the same time, not creating a maintenance nightmare.

Product Maintenance: This is what it’s all about right? Very easy to use and allows for unlimited product options. Version 5 also adds a lightbox type feature with the ability to show multiple products images. I don’t personally use it but don’t let that diminish its usefulness. The new category tree menu system also makes managing your products a breeze compared to version 4.

Third Party Integration: PDG has done a great job of allowing you to set up third party accounts like UPS or Authorize.net. The admin allows you to simply fill out a form(s) with your chosen third parties information (and they have set up a lot of third parties for you) and PDG does the rest.

You Own It: That’s right, no monthly fees. Just buy the license for the number of products you want to have and that’s it, no reoccurring charges. And they don’t kill you with upgrade fees. They do put out a lot of patches to fix or add functionality but they don’t charge you for it!

Customization: They really nailed this one for the most part. You can use one of their out of the box template sets and be set up very quickly but if you are familiar with html/css, you can really have a field day with your creativity. They provide what I call “all in one tags” (for novice users) that will return a whole page of data with just one tag on the page but they also provide a separate tag for just about every part of the page if you want to break it out for the ultimate in customization. Learning all the tags for a page can be daunting at first but this isn’t any different than any other ecommerce package out there. And READ THE TECH MANUAL if you want to go this route. Everything you need is in that manual!

The bad:

User Product Reviews: This is typically included with many free shopping cart systems and is really kind of a standard these days. You can integrate third party review software (minimal $29.00 price tag) and it “looks” like there are plans to add it but as of this writing, it does not yet exist natively in the software.

Email Marketing to your Customers: Again, does not exist. I suppose this is not really the responsibility of shopping cart software but at the same time, it seems like it should… At least provide me with the ability to export my user email addresses easily so I can put it into another program to manage my email marketing. You of course can send your customers text or html emails automatically when they place their orders but you can’t follow up with them with additional emails without using a third party.

Inventory Management: PDG Commerce will manage your inventory and it does it well if you use QuickBooks but if you don’t use QuickBooks, managing inventory can be a pain. In other software packages I’ve used, managing inventory is on the same page as your products. Unfortunately, this is not the case with PDG, you must manage inventory in a completely separate area of the admin, and not easily…

PDG Search Tool: I guess this works like any other ecommerce search function but I hate it. I want something that crawls my entire site and bases results on the text of the pages like Google (which you can use for your site by the way). PDG’s search tool relies on you manually creating and maintaining keywords and stashing them in different areas. Forget to add an important keyword to your products so they will show up in a search, well, then back into the admin you go to add them to each and every product. It also will not pull results based on text in the product long descriptions which seems a bit silly to me. Why is the long description not stored in the database! (That last line may be a bit geeky but if you ever have to set up the PDG search tool, you’ll understand my comment).

Documentation: Their documentation is actually very good for version 4 and everything that works for version 4 works with version 5. However, inexplicably, they have neglected to update their manuals for version 5’s new tags. They also no longer provide a change log for patches which was invaluable to a designer like me. And their support videos are sort of non-existent in their support section of the admin. A shame since the videos they do have are so well done. They have kind of missed the boat in this area of their support.

Reporting: While they have added some interesting stats on the dashboard and have carried over their reports from version 4, they still are not very good. In fact, they are terrible. Do yourself a favor and install Google Analytics from the get go to get any useful reporting.

Order History: I kind of hemmed and hawed on this one whether it should be in the good or the bad. The good is that they simply added this feature for the end user. Your customers can now log in, see their order history, check the status and reorder if they want. However, managing it in the admin like entering tracking information and updating order status leave a bit to be desired. And what is really disappointing is how much you can customize the design on the pages. They do a fantastic job for designers on almost all their template pages allowing for a ton of control on how pages look but they seem to have abandoned that philosophy on these pages.

The ugly:

QuickBooks Integration: Don’t get me wrong here; PDG integrates with QuickBooks just fine as they claim. I’ve personally designed many websites that integrate with QuickBooks and they all function very well. However, if you want to integrate QuickBooks AND control inventory with QuickBooks, then you need to be prepared to make some sacrifices with the functionality of the cart.
1. PDG’s new product display lists will become virtually useless in this scenario.
2. If you have a product that has options, you have to create a separate product for each option combination. (This is what makes the product display lists useless)
3. This can affect the license you purchase. Imagine if you only have 25 products you want to sell and decide the 100 product license is all you need. But what if each of your products comes in 4 colors and 4 different sizes. Do the math; you need a more expensive license that allows for more products since they all have to be entered individually. This is just poor design to me.
4. You have to use a work around to display the product pages. It’s not a huge deal but it makes the cart not flow as expected for the end user. This is especially evident when you decide to use PDG’s built in search tool which will now return search results with each product option listed as a separate product which is completely different from how they are displayed if accessed from the product menu system on your site. See my gripe above about options and having to create individual products.

Admin Category Tree Menu (wait, didn’t you just praise that in the good section…?):
Why yes I did. This feature is awesome provided you only have a couple hundred categories and say, fewer than 2000 products (rough estimates here, your results may vary). However, start getting above that and the performance of the category management suffers. There are some things you can do to help this like use Firefox to manage your products (seems to work faster than IE), get a faster server, faster internet connection, etc… but that really shouldn’t be a requirement to manage your products should it? However, they can set a system variable to revert this part of the admin to version 4 which works much faster but you lose the cool functionality.

Of course, I don’t cover everything in this document (good or bad) as everyone’s results may vary depending on your type of site and needs. However, the bottom line is that this is definitely well above average shopping cart software. It’s got some short comings but nothing that can’t be compensated for. As I said in the beginning, I’ve used many shopping cart systems but I always seem to stick with this one!

DaK