Hi David,

Thank you for your input, all features are up for review at all times and your suggestions help shape and prioritize our software updates. We at liveBooks are constantly looking to improve our offering to best suit the needs of a wide variety of creative professionals and small businesses. We find that flexibility is key when working with diverse business models especially when it comes to e-commerce. One feature that adds great flexibility to your website is the Image Info linking feature which you can find more information on here.
Many clients set up storefronts through popular services such as Etsy, Storenvy, Big Cartel, and even Amazon, and use the Image Info linking feature to direct traffic from an item featured on their liveBooks site, to a corresponding item in their online storefront. Feel free to let us know what features you'd like to see included in the shopping cart to better suit your needs.

Hi Jericho,

Thanks for the prompt response.

I giggle as I see you reclassify this as an idea, and I respectfully insist that actually this is a problem.

See, liveBooks actively promotes the shopping cart feature as a service, which is advertised as included for the price of the website. But, as described in my initial problem report, the shopping cart functionality is unusable for any reasonable professional means. Literally.

Telling me how to use an external service is a bit of a cop-out, and has two fatal flaws. 1) The entire point of liveBooks is to have a tightly integrated look at feel; linking to a third party site breaks this model. 2) I thought I was paying for (among other things) a shopping cart feature, why should I have to go to another provider which of course will mean paying them?

Why have a middle man when I thought I'd be able to deal with my customers directly? Respectfully, the shopping cart feature is not fit for purpose as advertised, and as such this *is* a problem.

I should have investigated more thoroughly before I invested time into this, but one of my employees just put a great deal of work and effort into researching how we can leverage print sales, and we fell over at the last hurdle of actually implementing the shopping cart feature because it simply doesn't serve our needs.

Obviously, this won't be fixed overnight, but I would like to know when this will be actively worked on?

Thank you,
David

I agree with David this is a problem. I purchased a Livebooks site for a friends business for the exclusive purpose of selling products through the Livebooks shopping cart. We only purchased the site for the shopping cart features. I happened to be reviewing the support topic before I start working to build the site. Now What?

David, to address your initial inquiry, whenever an item has been added to the liveBooks shopping cart a 'view cart' button will automatically appear alongside the other shopping cart menu items (normally titled 'prices' and 'add to cart').

Shoppers can click this button at any time to review the contents of their cart, then choose 'Continue Shopping' or 'Check Out' when they're ready to move on. In this respect, our shopping cart feature does provide the functionality that you mentioned above.

The inclusion of sales tax (when applicable) is a common question and I generally recommend that clients either factor this into their pricing groups for individual items, or include a small fee in their shipping total -- you can manage both pricing and shipping groups via the SHOPPING CART module in editSuite.

We do have many clients who find the liveBooks Shopping Cart feature to be a useful and efficient way to sell merchandise directly through their sites. A great example is http://www.chrishoneysett.com/.

However, for clients who find the current Shopping Cart feature limiting, we've incorporated the ability to set up hyperlinks within the image info (title and caption) fields for any portfolio page, which allows these users to sync directly with any other e-commerce provider. Jericho linked to an overview of this process above, and I think that his mention of http://bigcartel.com/ is a good one -- this is a cost-effective service that allows you to customize the appearance of your storefront and offers some different functionality that may be better suited for your own business.

I can assure you that we are constantly working to revise and improve our current product features, in addition to creating brand new ones. Your suggestions are extremely helpful when it comes to our product development 'road maps' and I'm happy to pass your feedback along to the Development team for review. Please feel free to outline any features that you feel would dramatically improve the overall liveBooks shopping cart experience and/or any integrations with existing services that may be helpful. Thanks again for your patience and support!

Perhaps we should post dates in manually. 1.19.11

Hi everyone,
Here are some screen shots of my thoughts...please add as you think of things.







• also there is no place for me to give a discount code or something like that...and I would find that helpful.
• And I have found that when my customer is in the paypal check out area and they just close the window I still get the order in my inbox, but they haven't paid...is this normal?

Why does the file name not show up when someone sends through a shopping cart order? This omission can make it difficult to identify pics from the small thumbnails.

This reply was created from a merged topic originally titled
File names in shopping carts.

I signed up to LB site because of the Shopping cart feature and i have only used it once and stopped using it almost a year. It's so frustrating when the orders comes in via email with only the thumbnail image and not the filename. I had to go thru the images trying to find out which is the right order as some of the 2 image are rather similar (people with different expression).

I totally agree that why do we need to use a 3rd party application as a shopping cart when you advertise that you can provide one.

Despite all the bad coding, the lack of features of the shopping cart and the bureaucratic and faulty way to make business using LB, what really bothers me is the lack of attitude of you guys at LB.

It is like no one is paying attention or care about us, not to say taking action based on all the great feedback given above. See all the great screenshots from Athena.

The first complaint of this thread has made a year already. A really "sad" birthday.

What really makes me frustrated about LB is the long wait we have to come across to see any minor improvement upon a lot of stuff that doesn't work well about your services.

I just didn't give up from you already because I'm a long term customer who paid a good deal of cash upfront for a fully custom website (and have just upgraded for the scaler version) and some improvements, like the video feature when you first launched it. If I had a predesigned website, which is paid monthly, I would be off long ago.

Instead of having people just giving excuses and answering all the complaints above, you should have people actually working on the fixes needed for the shopping cart to work properly. Not to mention some other important features like giving us more freedom to customize at least simple things like adding menu items and drop down menus, changing website fonts, replacing logos etc... without having to pay $ 50 to $ 100 for every minor adjustments we need.

Not a rocket science here folks! You just need a bit more of commitment and a true willingness to work on what we really need.

Is not a matter of time (you had plenty of it to have already fixed the shopping cart, for instance) but a matter of a real sense of care for your customers. I think I speak for many of us when I say it looks like you are giving a "S*" for your clients.

Lets see how many years it will still take for you to finally work on the shopping cart problem.

One year already and counting...

I am in total agreement with Enio. The ironic thing is that changes that need to be made to the shopping chart shouldn't take long to fix. I have a programming background and this stuff isn't rocket science. Athena already provided you with a details requirements document. I really don't understand what the hold up is.

Also the idea of having to spend additional money to change a logo or adding menu items, something that should be very easily customizable make me feel like I'm having my pocket picked...

Thank you all for your feedback on the need to improve the shopping cart feature, and for the specific suggestions on how to improve it, most notably from Athena who provided screen captures with great notes.

For starters, shopping cart improvements are on our road map for 2012 along with other improvements that are requested by other customers just as passionately as you have all been in this thread about the shopping cart. It is one of many things we are working hard to improve. As someone pointed out in a recent post on this thread, it has been a year that the product development team has not addressed this feature directly in this forum post, and I apologize for not being more active here. While we haven't yet addressed any of the big issues pointed out in this thread, the shopping cart issue we received the most feedback about by far was foreign currency support - and we fixed that issue in a release this Summer (2011). In addition, during this last year we have brought our customers Scaler (full-browser sites being the most customer-requested feature of all) and we are about to launch what we believe will be the best iPad sites in the industry (the second most requested feature), along with many other bug fixes and minor features.

While that might not seem like a lot of development in a year, I would like to remind you all that we are still a relatively small company with limited development resources and need to carefully prioritize projects that add the most value for the widest range of people. More importantly, however, is that when we develop new features, we develop them for all of our customers, not just the new ones. You all benefit from from new feature development because we keep you all upgraded to the latest version of the software - we don't keep you on the version you bought-in at. That would be the easy, inexpensive way for us to go, but we sincerely do care about all of our customers, and understand that our success depends on providing all of you with the best possible website solution.

Please be assured that we will improve the shopping cart feature. In the meantime, when we launch iPad sites this month, you're all getting them - even the non-Scaler customers that have been so loyal to liveBooks for years; we aren't charging anything extra for them. In fact, with the exception of an upgrade to Scaler, we have always provided software updates for free to all of our users. Unfortunately, we were unable to do this with Scaler because converting a site to the new platform requires a complete rebuild of the site itself. We want to thank you again for your feedback, as well as your continued support, patience and understanding. We are confident you will be as excited as we are about the new developments on the horizon!

Scott Kozinchik
Director of Product Development
liveBooks, Inc.

This is crazy. After all the effort to create a beautiful livebooks site, the shopping cart module is truly pathetic. Who cares if the images look great when the actual sales process is the opposite of user-friendly? The posts dating back to a year ago that outline the shopping cart problems are clear and concise. A year later, the shopping cart is still pathetic. You're still referring customers to a third party site for e-commerce, which tells me that you KNOW that your shopping cart is pathetic. How can you claim to have great customer support when you're woefully behind on these improvements? Your customers are leaving because of this. I've already started researching other sites.

I'm with Dana here. If this is still an issue when my contract is up, I'll be moving on. I've also held off doing any additional improvements to my site until this is addressed. Right now my thought processes is, why spend money when I might be leaving.

I am also researching for other provider. If the shopping cart issue is not resolved, I Might leave when my contract is due, the only reason i am still with LB is the money spend on a customized site.

Actually another reason that I will leave is the limitation of 32 images we can put up at the client's log in page. This is really frustrating when we would like to put up 100+ images for a client to access !

I agree with Mabel. Ever since I joined live books I have asked for the number of files allowed in the client pages to be effectively unlimited. Having to break them into batches of 32 is bizarre and clearly not designed by a working photographer. Equally the upload end should not be limited to batches of 32, I don't understand why there was not just one big library from which we could populate our pages.

To make all this worse, I asked for this when I was joined and was told it had been passed to the development people and would be probably be added. Instead, over the last three years, I seen lots of glossy, but insubstantial, bells and whistles added and no development of the fundamentals!!

Hi All,
So I am working on a different way to use shopping cart for my business where tax hopefully wont be an issue. But, I still agree that for "material" goods purchased, we need to include a tax collection function as we do have to abide by local and state tax laws. Including tax in the price will not be the right thing to do, neither is creating a tax in the shipping group. I think this is clearly agreed upon by everyone here, and I hope livebooks see's that the implications of not having a tax collection method is more than a customer satisfaction issue, we (the photographers) are put in a legal issue with our local tax laws. So LB, please be mindful of the priority of this feature request.

Regarding additional features, in the checkout feature, it would be great to have the ability to capture additional information from the client. Currently your system provides a very basic name, e-mail, phone number, address. I would like to have the ability to add some custom fields. For example, I do plan to use this as a wedding gift registry for photography gift cards and gifts. It would be imperative for me to have captured the wedding couples name and their wedding date. Also, a notes/comment box would be great so the person placing an order can add any special instructions to the order.

I also agree that having the file name show up in the "order placed" e-mail is important for both the customer and the photographer. As photographers, we often have hundreds of images and our image management systems are solely based on file/image names. This is how we reference. For customers, they have absolutely no record or reference of the file number they just ordered. So should they ever contact us, they cannot tell us what image number they ordered. This would provide poor customer service.

In the automated "order placed" e-mail that the client receives to confirm their order, it would be great if you included the photographers address and phone number so they can contact us for any questions regarding their order. Also, please improve the language to some friendlier "Thank you for purchasing" statement that is either customizable by the photographer, or friendlier than the current statement. Any client/vendor relationship is not defined by the image they like, but the customer service they receive from us. This will go a long way in having satisfied clients and reassuring that they made a trustworthy purchase from us using our livebook site.

An order summary form that the customer re-confirms after they hit the submit order button would be excellent as stated earlier in the thread. This just verifies the complete order so there is no mistaking any amount that gets billed.

BUG FIX:
So I did find a bug or a limiting function that you may not have considered. When connecting to a pay pal for payment, it all works well, when the customer enters the correct credit card data in PP. But here is the issue. When a client submits an order on LB shopping cart, we (the photographer) will get a order placed, and the client will received an order placed mail. However, if the customer decides not to enter any credit card information on PP, we do not get any information that states that the order is not paid for or that a PayPal transaction was not completed. So we don't know whether the order was paid for or if an alternate method of payment is preferred. So my suggestion is a) Add a payment choice option during checkout (pay by check, paypal, or credit card over phone) drop down. b) Have some sort of verification statement placed in the order received/placed mail that states the method of payment preferred. The only thing we can do is if someone selects paypal in their payment method, then we can confirm that with the receipt of paypal's credit card transaction mail we receive and cross reference the payment method used.

I have been a loyal LiveBooks client of many years paying for two full sites and have spent a lot in customizations and upgrades over the years. I am sure that you will do the right thing for all these folks requesting features for a service that is in many ways the only way of making income. In the economic environment that our country is in, I would hope that LiveBooks prioritizes the shopping cart improvements to help us photographers who own independent business drive improvements to our revenues and bottom line. Any lack of action to help the small photography business owners in having the ability to effectively transact commerce will only contribute to the difficulties in the economic growth and recovery of our nation. For a company, such as Livebooks, that markets it's business in helping the development and growth of photographers through it's custom websites, I would imagine that your senior leadership would agree and view this as a top priority and competitive marketing opportunity for livebooks to lead in this area.

I look forward to your improvements,
Jeff

Well said Jeff, I appreciate you putting the time into sharing your thoughts.

wow!!!! this was a super disappointing thread. but useful in that it confirmed the worst for me. in that now i need to start researching and move my website. i can no longer justify the monthly fee if i will need to pay another service provider as well for my client galleries and customer orders. the shopping cart feature is just unacceptable. ESP the tax issues.

I have totally given up with the shopping cart issue and the gallery (32 images) issue. Just build another site that i can easily host my private gallery (uploading of hundreds of images under 1 folder) for a year of US$60 no hosting fee required. Will upgrade with the shopping cart package (US$150 per year)later.

I am keeping my site with Livebooks for the time being as i have invested for a custom design which i am so disappointed about the 32 images per gallery and the unfriendly shopping cart facility.

Has there been an update to fix any of these issues? We're currently using Photoshelter but we'd prefer to have it directly on our webpage. It doesn't sounds like switching back to Livebooks to handle our galleries and sales is a good idea...

Hello, has the shopping cart thingy be updated by now ??
Would be great to get any Info regarding an update!
Thaaaaaaaaanks
1 of July 2012 !

is livebooks doing anything at all about this? It seems this thread goes back for more than a year from 08/02/2012...... How long does it take to sort out the shopping cart issues?

Just curious where things stand with improvements for the shopping cart? I just created a website for fine art prints and hope changes have been made. Thanks!

hello Dan Donavan

I'm embarrassed to tell you it's the same. And as time goes on it just looks more and more 2003. I'm still crossing my fingers that they will see the importance and upgrade, fix and make it killer.
thanks for asking, they need to know a good shopping cart is wanted and needed.

Really... none of this has been resolved yet??

I just went into the cart to try to set a discount code for a promotion this month and nothing there? No custom field for referrals, etc. !

And all the other elements above.

How is it that could pay for the LiveBooks site with a Discount Code - for their sign up process (so the concept is known) - and yet nothing for their customers.

Any input on these functions?

Any referrals by those who moved away from LiveBooks for these reasons, to a more comprehensive, functional solution?

Would like to hear. Beyond looking good, basic revisions to site, and extremely common standard functions in cart, are essential to have this work, for all of us who chose LiveBooks as a potential web solution. We need what works.

Thanks for time and any practical, immediate solutions.

Hello,

As you may already know liveBooks has recently acquired Fotomoto. This will bring the highly desired e-commerce functionality to our clients. The ability to sell images and print-on-demand product right from your sites is something that has been long requested, and we know you are ready to take full advantage of all that Fotomoto offers.

Currently we are aggressively working on integration efforts, and our expectation is that we will have an efficient integration of Fotomoto widget and dashboard applications for all LB clients in coming weeks. We will keep you apprised of exact timing. In the meantime, we encourage you to get to know Fotomoto's functionality. Thank you!