The facts about ekmPowershop
It was recently brought to our attention that ekmPowershop (or the company behind them) have been approaching our customers quite aggressively via email and phone.
To be clear we welcome fair competition from ekmPowershop as this only encourages improvement and increases customer value. I would hope that ekmPowershop would concentrate their effort on supporting their own customers or improving their offering and not spreading lies about us and our system.
We have had reports of ekmPowershop making some quite personal attacks and extremely dubious claims, we have first hand evidence from our valued customer's of this. We also have copies of claims and aspersions ekmPowershop have been making about ourselves via email to our customers and agents. The email they have been sending is factually incorrect at best and an outright blatant lie at worst. We can only assume that the purpose behind it is a deliberate and completely false and illegal attack on our company's good and established reputation.
What should I do?
If you already use a hosted ecommerce system such ekmPowershop or are interested in starting out with one we would suggest you read this page first before deciding what company you would like to do business with. We would obviously prefer you to choose ourselves and our professional easywebstore system, please visit our overview page or home page for more information. We do however recognise there are other choices you can make and we would suggest you spend a little time doing some investigation and look at more information on ekmPowershop and also the ekmPowershop website itself.
ekmPowershop facts on this page
This page contains factual information regarding false claims made by ekmPowershop about ourselves and easywebstore. The sections of the ekmPowershop email are highlighted verbatim (spelling errors included) along with our rebuttal underneath. As a professional organisation we make no claims or criticisms of their system or company and would not wish to do so.
ekmPowershop claims about easywebstore
ekmPowershop claim is in the highlighted quote box, our response is below each one
Manual sitemap submission - whereas we do it for you.
our response - not only do we have a free
and automatic submission service but in addition we also allow
you to have access to the Google sitemaps tools yourself, in fact experience has taught us that you need the information available there to run a successful store and you may be missing out on this if you don't have a Google account. You will be fully assisted by our support team in a once only 5 minute process of signing up for a Google account.
The Google sitemaps admin area contains a wealth of useful information on how your site ranks in the search and also full details of where your inbound links are coming from. In fact you would miss out on this mass of information if we did the submission for you. We are happy to either talk you through the process on the phone or if you prefer we will actually sign up for a Google account on your behalf. In additiona to this you may like to take a look at how much effort we have put into making sure easywebstore is as search engine friendly as possible.
ekmPowershop claim
Less templates - there appears to be quiet a few but most of them are colour variants of just a few basic ones.
our response - not true (but someone really should invest in a spell checker over there are they saying their templates make less noise than ours?), you start by choosing a template and then all our basic templates allow the following customisation options without any html knowledge further design assistance is available from our expert designers and we will be releasing a much improved template management system very soon which will be included in our standard product. Customising your store is ridiculously easy with no technical or design expertise required at all. You can start by having full control over the options below.
- Choice of colour and styles
- Unlimited customisation of header and footer areas
- Changing the layout of product description boxes and side panel boxes
- Changing between 1, 2 and 3 column layouts
ekmPowershop claim
Very basic delivery system - we have a comprehensive weight matrix based system which basically allows you to charge any delivery rates you require.
our response - totally incorrect, easywebstore has a comprehensive weight based matrix system that supports any shipping method you like, this functionality has been in our system for years, this is a fabrication and lie
plain and simple.
ekmPowershop claim
Adding products is done via a horrible interface - unlike ours which is done in the 'View Shop' section so you can see and are clear on where the items will be added.
our response - everyone is entitled to their own opinion and that is just what this is, an opinion. Most of the feedback we receive about our interface is good and we would recommend you make your own mind up.
ekmPowershop claim
American servers - they do submit to search engines but if the servers are not in the same country as the search engines then you will get a poor ranking.
our response - totally incorrect and perhaps the most outrageous claim this is a lie and is completely untrue, our servers are located in the UK with what many describe as the best provider of dedicated hosting in the world and we are proud of it. Anyone considering choosing easywebstore or any competing product (including ekmPowershop) would be highly advised to do some research on this point.
Our hosting solutions provider is Rackspace (who we have been using for some time) and full details of this company can be found on the Rackspace website.
ekmPowershop claim
No comprehensive discount management (not as good as ours if they do have one - I couldn't see it.
our response - easywebstore has comprehensive discount management and coupons can be created in a variety of ways. It isnt that
hard to find its right there in the admin area in the orders section.
ekmPowershop claim
Bad user interface - ekm Powershop is very clear and very easy to use. This interface makes it more of an effort to get the same thing done than in ekmPowershop.
our response - a lot of feedback and effort has gone into
our admin area design and interface we would invite you take a look at our demo store admin area and make your own mind up.
ekmPowershop claim
Price - we cost exactly the same and we are the UK's number 1.
our response - at the time we received this email our base price was the same. Again I would advise anyone looking to purchase to do some investigation and not just look at the base price. There are no hidden extras with easywebstore all the following features are included as standard and we have tried to keep our setup fee as low as possible. Our pricing is clearly defined on a single page for easy comparisons. You may want to check exactly what is included with a competing solution.
- No hidden extras - everything you need is included
- Free domain name
- Email server (including webmail)
- All future upgrades and updates will be applied automatically
- Free maintenance
- Daily backups
- No contract
- Instant setup
- Friendly helpful technical support
- Search engine submission service
- Shared secure server certificate
As for being the number one? the number one what? we guarantee to be the uk's number one.
ekmPowershop claim
Personnel we have 10 - 20 members of staff. Easywebstore is a one man band - two people there at most.
our response - another lie. I am confused why they would make such a claim, and if they really think we are so small why spend so much effort targeting us in such an unprofessional manor. Here at easywebstore we employ 5 people, with 3 fulltime staff who are responsible for supporting customers our names are Dave, Paul and Chris and you can feel free to call us up to ask us to help you. Now by ekmPowershops own figures we are smaller but we are growing and we will hire extra support staff as and when needed. We believe we have a lower customer to support staff ratio and we believe this means we can offer a better and more personal service.
ekmPowershop claim
Not much scope to play around with the tax settings.
our response - not true, easywebstore has a full and comprehensive
tax management system.
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