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It’s the same, or a fork. Just look at the two features lists…

I have been using Good Barry for about 2 months now and have used it to build a site for a BJJ/MMA training school with 4 locations.

First the cons:

I’m used to designing on my local system with pretty much instantaneous response. Using GoodBarry over the internet, even with cable connection, things like inserting images, creating page titles, saving, previewing, etc. seem to take forever – I spend a lot of time waiting.

Announcements/Events – I would love to see separate modules for this. Currently they’re handled by the same module which requires extra tweaking on my part to make that work out.

That’s it for the cons so far!

Pros:

When the site is all done — it’s all about the business. The sheer power GoodBarry is going to give my client over the management of their customer base is something I have not been able to offer before and I’m VERY excited about it. Sure $59/month for hosting sounds pricey compared to the 9 bucks they were paying for run-of-the-mill hosting. But GoodBarry offers the kinds of features my clients have been asking for and that I haven’t been able to deliver without the help of a pricey programmer. If used properly, the CRM features alone will keep the community tuned into my client’s business like no other BJJ school in the area. As long as they keep providing a quality service/product – my prediction is that in 2 more months, no one’s going to be giving a second thought to the cost. (Actually, they’re not even complaining now – they already see benefits just 2 weeks after going live).

Another pro: nice photo galleries.

And another: The support is great.

Bottom line: I don’t mind the learning curve and I suspect I’ll get more efficient with time. I’m going to work with it for a few more months and if things continue to go well, I’ll be looking to migrate past clients to this system.

Hi, thanks for the review and your comments :)

This is some great feedback for us – both in the comments and in the review! I’ll definitely take it on board.

Specifically to Oli, Thomas and Capt: We have a network of resellers (we call them partners) who rebrand our product. You can find out more about that here – goodbarry.com/designer.

Just so you know, though, we are the creators of this software – goodbarry.com/about

Finally to Keita, I’m sorry it’s a little slow for you. Have you tried our Dreamweaver extension, Triangle (goodbarry.com/triangle). We have datacenters in North America and in Australia, and while I can’t give any timelines at present, we are planning to open a datacenter in the UK. I’m hoping this will assist you and give you a better experience in using the system.

Thanks guys!

I had high hopes for GoodBarry and was considering buying a reseller license and offering it as the ecommerce solution of choice in my web dev business.

Luckily I did the due diligence before I bought the rights.

Heres my opinion on GoodBarry:

Support – woeful. I had a simple support question and I had to follow up with them a second time to get a response. When the response came there was a “sorry for the delay” but no explanation.

That may not sound so bad – but you wait until you have a customer in your face and goodbarry aren’t replying to you….
Worse still – my trial site went down “ server not responding” for the best part of 24 hours. And get this – the Goodbarry people did not respond to my support request. I am STILL yet to hear from them about why the site went down for so long.

Imagine you’ve built a store for someone and then it goes offline for a day – and Goodbarry don’t even respond to your support request and explain why! Shocking…

Features – Yes, there are definitely some nice features – particularly around the integration of CRM, cart, email and analytics. My feeling though is that they will only be useful for online stores. The reason is for Goodbarry to do its much touted tracking and reporting the visitor will need to identify themselves on the site – for example sign up to a newsletter or buy something.

So for more standard sites without ecommerce Goodbarry reporting just becomes a less feature rich version of Google analytics. So if you are considering selling to a client on the value of the reporting Goodbarry offers think carefully about whether visitors will actually identify themselves – otherwise their dashboard will soon be gathering dust…

Hi Guys, I just came cross Nathan’s comment and felt I should respond.

Firstly Nathan, I’m terribly sorry that you’ve had a bad experience with our support. Generally we get fantastic feedback for our support, so it’s a real shame that you’ve had a bad experience. Just so you know, we have an 8 business hour SLA on support responses, which means you’ll usually get an on the next business day. This is published around our site and in email correspondences.

Naturally, urgent support requests are monitored and actioned appropriately though!

Now I’ll admit that as we are growing there are some things we can do better, and we’re addressing those – we’ve added more support options to the site, we’ve expanded our tutorials online, and we’ll soon be adding more video tutorials in the coming month. Additionally, we’re currently training a new support engineer and hiring another at the moment. We also offer live techincal Q&A webinars 3 times a week to our resellers and their customers, and will soon extend these to goodbarry customers also.

That said, at no point was our systems down for 24 hours. I’m not sure of the exact details of your case, but I have to say that our uptime record for january is 99.95% including scheduled maintainence.

Finally Nathan, I would have liked to follow up with you personally to apologize for this and try to better understand the circumstances but unfortunately you didn’t leave your web address on your comment.

Please feel free to drop us a line to support@goodbarry.com and ATTN to Brett – I’d love to try to see where this went wrong (like how on earth we missed your first support request) and how we could do better for next time!

Kind regards,
Brett

I’ve spent weeks researching cms services and “packages” like Barry. The nearest – and specifically because I was doing this research for a particular client in the non-profit sector – is a system called Wild Apricot.

Even though Apricot appears to be ideal for my non-profit client (and Apricot can work for just about any kind of business), the issues around customising a template, inserting script and specific css items, killed Apricot for me. It was a nightmare with the system itself rewriting my code so it couldn’t possibly work. Without having control over the file system or even having any idea where uploaded files are stored (no clues given either), it was impossible to control the links and layout, so a simple little java tab video streaming section was never, ever going to work. But of course, I thought it was me, and wasted three days working non-stop trying to get this to work while waiting for support to get back to me. Average was 24 hours. But of course by the time you get that answer, you have five more questions. And the eventual response to my desperate please for help were so bad, I was shocked. I was told the code I was inserting was meant for a specific site. Ya think? I was told I had the wrong link url addresses specified. Yep, I did. But I didn’t put them there!!! Important to this discussion is the fact that I am not a newbie neophite. I write. I research. I code. So I was pretty ticked off when the tech guy came back and said, oh well yes, the system can’t cope with that kind of customisation or level of functionality. The bottom line is that Apricot’s promo stuff oversold the product in a bad way for me.

Having said that, for someone who is not familiar with coding and not requiring customisation, this may in fact be a better option. It is a heck of a lot easier for the technically challenged who are not doing anything to change it, to use.

But in the meantime, I’m the one who has to evaluate it, work it out, customise it, train the client on it and support them on it. I chose Barry. I chose it for the ease of CMS complete with some very nifty modules; the combination of ecommerce and CRM; the integrated email marketing engine, together with the ability for secure forums et al. There isn’t another offering like it – yet.

These guys (the cms providers) are all growing very fast. Tech support issues will lose more clients than sales can ever gain.

It is an issue with Barry too. And if they don’t get on top of this, they will lose out to the next generation. In this day and age we expect instantaneous response and frankly, it is not a big ask. You can visit a dozen websites in any half-hour period researching this stuff and they will all have live chat available. Heck, even simple web hosting services have live chat sales staff to guide one through the sign-up process.

Why doesn’t anyone ever do live chat tech support? These guys don’t work my hours, that’s obvious, and it is a serious pain in the arse to be stuck on an issue at 1am, trying to get something done for an 8am meeting and it would be heaven to have someone online and accessible from within Barry, where I could request a live chat to help with urgent issue. If the tech knows what they are doing (another bitch is half of the techs on all the hosts/services/software I’ve ever used don’t), they can usually resolve it in 30 seconds.

Of all systems Barry could do this better than most because it has offices in Australia and USA. It is the perfect candidate for live 24 support. But it doesn’t offer it.

Another bitch is the absolutely banal offering in the email campaign templates in Barry, especially when there is a learning curve involved in customising the templates. Perhaps Barry is a hermit and doesn’t receive many email newsletters, because the stuff I receive make Barry’s email newsletters look like Web -1 rather than Web 2.0. Really ugly stuff and absolutely every template category has the same templates! Barry might be a nerd – but does he really wear the same brown shirts every day?

Barry has a bunch of affliates ready to customise stuff for me for several hundred dollars so I can get some sleep but I find specifiying customisation to take longer sometimes than doing it myself. I would prefer to see this go the way that WordPress went – a few smart and graphically talented designers to build some “premium” templates that I can buy for a few bucks a pop – again – from within Barry. If you are still with me you will know I am talking about the email marketing templates as a first instance example. That’s a business opportunity for someone. Even if not sold within Barry – set yourself up as selling templates for Barry – with modules already inserted within a full range of very different layouts. PLEASE?! And likewise for the website pages themselves.

Really Barry, for such an intelligent offering, your templates let you down.

Regardless, I’m in love with Barry. I’m not a reseller (yet). I have no association with or benefit from recommending it.

And I have a wishlist for what Barry could be doing that would deliver the market to them on a platter, but if they can’t respond to support requests in a timely fashion, I won’t bother asking.

I will keep using it until something better comes along and sign up as a reseller for that perhaps.

echoing the support comments above, it was the only reason we walked away from GoodBarry. it’s got all the features we need and some we didn’t even know we needed. granted, it’s not perfect and the interface takes some getting used to but feature-wise it’s all there. the hosting performance was rather slow when we were using it but they say that’s been fixed. the support is just downright awful though. factor in the drastic time zone difference and it becomes even more of an issue. we had simple support requests that would take 48 hours for us to get a less-than-useful one line response. then we’d have to reply, explaining that – no, that didn’t work, any other suggestions? then wait another 2 days for another one line response. we literally lost 10+ days off our launch due to these back and forth support problems. at one point the only way i was able to get help was to make a phone call to Barry himself, it’s a real person. he was helpful but i don’t think they envision the CEO taking help desk calls. leaves a bad taste in the mouth. we also had an issue with our online payments. turns out they left out a fairly important chunk of code for our merchant account (PayPal Pro). was pretty shocked to find out that they rolled out a major feature like that without ever testing it. it simply did not work in the state they were running it. kinda scary. i really, REALLY wanted to love it. and even to this day i am drawn to it but i don’t think i could ever deal with that again. offer live 24/7 support via phone, Skype, chat etc and i’d consider coming back forever. i just can’t recommend it to others based on that experience. my 2 cents worth, your mileage may vary.

HORRIBLE SUPPORT!!

BETA PRODUCT….here’s my story:

My creative team is an experienced crew of front-end web developers. We have been working with GoodBarry for the past 12 months…trying really hard to love it. Now we are whole-heartily walking away.

The system is close to being a dream integration of key web portal tools (website, blog, e-commerce, newsletters). However, we have been continually disappointed by lack of feature refinements. It seems that they are too busy adding features to make sure that they actually work.

This would be fine if GoodBarry had a support staff/system that would actually address bugs as they arose. As mentioned in other posts here, their support is an awful mix of slow replies and useless answers. There now seems to be 1 or 2 layers of lower level support that one has to fight through to get to someone who actually knows anything and has the power to envoke change…this results in a frustrating 10-day cycle of emails everytime an issue comes up.

I hope that GoodBarry can stick around long enough to grow. They have a good idea…just poorly executed so far.

I’ve been using the Business Catalyst business system for over a year and have deployed a number of different websites using its platform. To this day, my clients have been very satisfied with what they now have in their possession. I also use Business Catalyst on my own website because it’s what I’ve been looking for for years. I like the fact that all the features I need to run my online business in a successful manner is in one central location. It’s also a great system for someone like myself who is a designer and not necessarily privy to all the back-end support and programming aspects of web related design.

As far as their customer service. I’ve been very happy. Rarely do I need to contact them because of their Wiki support.

I realize that Business Catalyst/Goodbarry may not be the best solution for everyone but they appear to have built a great foundation that they can continue to build upon (growth potential) and they also give us (designers/programmers) the flexibility needed to support existing clients with great chances of winning new clients as well.

I have been looking at Business Catalyst (& GoodBarry) for about a year now and agree with most of the comments here. There are good and bad but in summary the negative comments about wait times for support and limitations on module customization do not outweigh the pros.

Mark’s comments above are my biggest fears with the system summarized. I have implemented one site using GoodBarry with a view to becoming a partner with BC – I was frustrated by elementary shortcomings in module customization.
For example, there are basic parts of the blog module you cannot edit like truncating posts for post summaries. Another is the gallery module as Mark described.
If you are reading Business Catalyst – please fix these basic things first before adding new features and you will have the dream system.

I’m a small business owner just planning to redesign, upgrade and relaunch my website and cart and would love to include goodbarry in the project. Yet, I hear everyone’s complaints about goodbarry and even from my own layman’s standpoint, I already ascertained there are problems there too. My question to all of you is this: Except for the goodbarry customer service problems, could some of those other technical problems and gliches you describe be averted/avoided and/or minimized on projects when you are doing a website and cart build from scratch, i.e. if you knew where these shortcomings were in advance and just worked around or circumvented those technical problem areas, do you know what I mean?

Small businesses with limited resources can’t afford to have their website and cart plagued by one-off technical problems and poor support.

By the way, if any of you are into Kevin Robert’s (of saatchi and saatchi) “lovemark” concepts, and carry those positioning principles (future beyond brands)into your work, shoot me a line. I’d like to do my website and cart with goodbarry if the prize can be worth the race.

Hmmm, this makes sad reading as I was just congratulating myself on thinking Goodbarry was the way to go with a ecommerce cart. Six months into my current Interspire one, the complete lack of support means I’m looking for another solution. Being a small business I simply can’t afford to make another mistake. Now where….?!

@sharman -
Sorry to hear your having trouble.

The BC system takes some getting used to, but I must say as a professional design firm that specializes in CMS, there’s nothing out there that can compare to the system.

That being said, they don’t support any design/development work, they only support questions directly related to their product. I would suggest you get some help from some BC pros like SimpleFlame.com – they’ve helped us get used to the system and also started moving our clients over.

We’ve been a BC/Partner for about 3 months and have nothing but good things to say. The support is excellent!

As a matter of fact, we changed our business model and now only offer a re-branded BC solution. Business has never been better!

Just signed up as a reseller, seems a fantastic system even will the current bugs. Thanks for sharing your experiences

It’s late, but as far as competitors to both goodbarry and business catalyst, take a look. It appears business catalyst still offers only minimal help, FP has real people to call.