CORESense

A platform so nice we used it twice.

Kommentare: We first found CORESense when we were looking for a more robust platform for our web store. After numerous calls, meetings, and one failed "trial" and design layout with other companies we found that the people at CORESense "just got us". Working with their professional services, we created our store with some fundamental custom functionality for our specific business needs. The overall process was easy and relatively painless, one of the benefits to working with a group that understood our business needs. To this date that original store was our best performing online store/business generator. Fast forward a couple years and a change in ownership, we left the platform for another due to the new owners "knowing better". After spending more money than we had for CORESense the first time around on a "free" platform, the company changed hands again and we're now back on the platform that served us best to date.

Vorteile:

It's incredibly feature-rich, with new features rolling out often. The developer preview area is very useful tool for anyone managing their own store.

Nachteile:

Features and options sometimes "get lost" or are hard to find in all the text-heavy menus.

Gives us a competitive advantage

Kommentare: We've been running our retail business on the Coresense platform since 2005. With Coresense, all our sales channels are running off the same back end. Coresense handles our POS (multiple stores), phone orders, web sales and gift registry. This allows us to manage our inventory most efficiently and economically. Also, customer management and email communication are integrated within the Coresense environment, which allows us to easily track all client interactions. We can generate robust reports using the parameters we choose and export the results to Excel. Inventory management, shipping, purchase orders, bar code labels -- everything is handled easily and seamlessly in Coresense. Web updates are simple. Coresense is web-based, so it runs on any web-enabled device and anywhere there's an internet connection. In short, Coresense provides small to medium size retailers with the feature set needed to compete effectively with much larger retailers, and at an affordable price. Having looked at other retail solutions over the years, I haven't found another that can come close to offering everything that's available in Coresense.

Vorteile:

Robust feature set. Web-based, so it runs anywhere there an internet connection and a web browser. Almost no down time, and no IT department required on our end.

Nachteile:

The feature set is so rich, it can be intimidating to a new user.

Has some nice features but some have odd holes and don't work as expected. Checkout is sloooow.

Kommentare: High cost and usability/functionality holes outweigh the benefits.

Vorteile:

The main thing is that it allows us to support all our channels from a common database. It offers some but not a lot of 3rd party integrations.

Nachteile:

Customer logon and going to the checkout screen is slow, generally takes 8-10 seconds to make the transition. It has an antiquated back office that's very hard to use, even by experienced IT folks. Typically the edit, delete/deactivate, etc. icons in the back office are too small/close together for ease of clicking the right icon. Not all icons have ALT/Title tags so you miss out on screen help if you're not familiar with the icon on a particular page that you don't visit often. Often the help offered is of little value. The back office is littered with all sort of artifacts regrading options/programs you aren't using. Back office has no sorting options for functions like the product and customer managers. The choice of how many items to display on a page ought to use a cookie so you don't have to override the default 20 per page every time you visit a page. Your only option for advancing to the next screen is Next/End instead of incremental choices, ala Google results. It has odd differences with what you can do via the SOI versus what the public user can do. Many of its templates aren't entirely responsive so you have to do custom work. It uses a single state/country table for both the public side and the back office. Clients may want to limit the public side to US locations but be able to order from vendors in non-US locations. Email template process is very poor. While it's expected, it's always disappointing be misled by sales.

Does it all

Vorteile:

We've evaluated a number of alternatives and even considered building a custom solution. No other system provides the same level of features as Coresense: eCommerce, POS, back office, fulfillment, multi-brand. As an added bonus, even as a SaaS platform, we can pay to customize the software, which we've done quite extensively.

Nachteile:

The back office software is quite complex and the design is showing it's age. That's to be expected though as the software has a lot of features, but it gets the job done.

CORESense is scale-able and flexible platform that will work with you to meet your needs

Kommentare: I've been using CORESense for over 6 years now and have had good experiences with the platform. It's an excellent platform for non cookie cutter e-commerce businesses. In my opinion CORESense excels at making the software work optimally for your business. If there is something you want added (and are willing to pay for it), CORESense will happily make it happen. It also does a fantastic job of running multiple brands (companies & databases) on multiple channels from one login. You can also create logins that only have access to certain brands / channels. It makes it easy to run multiple brands with multiple locations. I am especially a big fan of the closest to customer feature that will automatically choose the warehouse a product will ship from based on the customer's location. CORESese is a complex program that can accomplish a lot, but once you work in it for a little bit you will find that it's intuitive and easy to learn and work in. I enjoy how it handles almost every aspect of business for us. From order placement (website, SOI, eBay), warehouse locations, inventory tracking, and shipping to almost everything in between CORESense handles it for us. As a whole, it is an excellent platform that works well for us, but it does have a few drawbacks. The cost of custom work (conforming the platform to you) is a little high, but I understand that developers are expensive. Also, on a couple occasions in the past they have pushed out stable releases that caused some issues with our daily operations. In there defense, they have addressed this and we have not had any issues recently. Whenever we have had issues, their support is top notch and get things resolved very quickly. It is truly a pleasure working with their support compared to many other tech companies I've dealt with.