daniel's dashboard

Just a quick review from a new user... I've seen GoodBarry.com's display ads on several web designer blogs so I was curious about their offering. It's quite the interesting service for anyone building typical ecommerce web sites for small- to medium-sized businesses. For prices ranging from $39/mo to $79/mo (depending on the number of administrator logins you need), you get a hosted ecommerce application that provides a content management system (CMS) including blogs and forums, ecommerce shopping cart and catalog and payment gateways, facilities for email marketing (newsletters and autoresponders), analytics to track web site visits and customer activity, and a customer relationship management (CRM) system that maintains a database of a business's customers. Sure, it's pricier than the cheapest web hosting services but it eliminates the cost and hassle of integrating a suite of services that you'd otherwise pay for separately. And since the GoodBarry service is a hosted app (Software As A Service), you can quickly roll out a sophisticated site without web application development or system administration. The suite of integrated apps are full-featured and sufficient to build almost any typical business site. There's a learning curve, or course, mostly due to the large number of available features, but the user interface is clear (for the most part, aside from a few departures into the Australian vernacular, such as "bookings" for what we'd call "reservations" in the US). Recognize, or course, that you'll be locked into GoodBarry as your vendor (this is not open source, is it!). All in all, you'll be getting very good value, as it just makes a lot of sense to use a well-integrated, hosted service for building a typical business site, rather than rolling (and maintaining) your own.

GoodBarry is a subsidiary brand of the company Business Catalyst Systems LLC, which has offices in Sydney, Australia (where it was founded) and San Francisco, California. Business Catalyst offers the GoodBarry service to web designers and developers for resale to clients as an unbranded or private-labeled service. You'll have to sign up for a sales "webinar" presentation before you can become a reseller, where you'll find that you'll pay $995 (for the unbranded version) or $1995 (for the private-labeled service) for the privilege of becoming a reseller. Whether that's good value for you, or not, will depend on the your own business model as a web designer/developer.

As a new user, I was particularly interested in evaluating the quality of support I'd receive from Goodbarry. It's great to have a full-featured hosted application but when you're in a hurry to deploy a new site for a client, are you going to get the help you need? Especially considering how many features are offered and the learning curve you'll encounter. Access to GoodBarry customer service is limited. There is no phone support, IRC or live chat, so no opportunity for immediate help. You won't find the email address for support anywhere on the site (at least I didn't!). You can try emailing support@goodbarry.com,which will get you an autoresponder acknowledgment and a promise of response within eight hours (though after 48 hours, I hadn't received any response to my first inquiry). Support seems to be solely offered through a wiki (which users can't contribute to) and a bulletin-board forum, with responses from the company support ranging from quick (20 minutes) to non-existent (some forum posts for help seem to go unanswered). Your initial post to the forum has to be "approved" (presumably to prevent spam) so you might encounter delays the first time you ask a question. Now, every company has different strategies for providing support and sometimes it takes time to find exactly how to best get help. So far, I'd say, I like the Goodbarry product and hope to find out that there's ways to get good support.

There are very few Goodbarry reviews by users on the web, so I'd love to see some comments from people who've tried the service and can share their own experiences.