Comments on: GoodBarry Review

By: 21 Collections of CMS & Resources | 1 step web design

21 Collections of CMS & Resources | 1 step web design — Sat, 01 Oct 2011 10:25:16 +0000

[...] GoodBarry Review – Design Shack covers the basics of GoodBarry in this review. [...]

By: 国外媒体评出的十一个主流CMS系统 | 锦亭二娃

国外媒体评出的十一个主流CMS系统 | 锦亭二娃 — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 06:37:40 +0000

[...] GoodBarry的资源网址：http://www.goodbarry.com/ GoodBarry ForumsGoodBarry的支持论坛网址：http://forums.onlinebusinesswiki.com/gb-support15 ReSeller Information从这里可以学到如何在客户网站上使用GoodBarry，以及如何用它来盈利网址：http://www.goodbarry.com/designer GoodBarry Videos视频教程网址：http://goodbarry.com/videos GoddBarry ReviewGoodBarry的简介网址：http://designshack.co.uk/articles/software/goodbarry-review [...]

By: Jon Cowan

Jon Cowan — Wed, 03 Nov 2010 16:36:23 +0000

GoodBarry is definitely the worst piece of software we have ever worked with and the worst support and development team we have ever had to tolerate. Even though we copy our newsletter template from one that was set up for us by Simple Flame, their inept preferred vendor, nothing works correctly. It is always changing formats and fonts when we save, or totally losing our recent work. We can’t do something as simple as tightening up spacing between lines. Most recently, we tried to send out newsletters to nine different lists. It sent out one and lost the rest. The support dodos took a day to respond, only to ask for more information that wasn’t necessary. After another day we still haven’t heard back. This is typical of their ridiculously poor customer service. Their system does go down frequently and they try to hide it. We are currently calling Adobe in the U.S. to get them to improve their useless stepchild.

By: Ross Harrington

Ross Harrington — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 23:10:08 +0000

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.

By: Adam Clark

Adam Clark — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 17:15:17 +0000

We use goodbarry and its the worst service we have ever used. Their servers are SLOW, for example we are currently trying to print out some invoices and it is taking us about 15 minutes per invoice.
Their support take about 12 hours to reply to any issue we have.
We are ditching goodbarry for magento on a better host!

By: 6site.co.uk

6site.co.uk — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 22:39:23 +0000

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

By: Jonathan

Jonathan — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 05:46:22 +0000

Oh, I forgot to mention…

I’ve seen all kinds of posts (not just about Business Catalyst) about software and/or service being “not up to par” these days. Personally, I think it’s because there’s alot of do-it-yourself “website designers” out there that are trying find a solution that will replace a pro design firm. – No offense, I’m just saying…

I would encourage anyone who wants to create an online business, eCommerce store, and/or Forum to Get A Pro! Don’t go cheap or you’ll be posting your woes on forums like this…

At the end of the day, there’s no perfect solution – There is also no substitute for experience.

@Joe – You asked a good question –
“Except for the goodbarry customer service problems,…”

Answer: Once we built the 3rd or 4th site, we were good. It just took a little getting used to, but it’s not as bad as the first time we fired up Dreamweaver. At the end of the day it’s a great system for website design firms looking for an all around cms for their clients.

By: Jonathan

Jonathan — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 05:22:02 +0000

@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!

By: Isaac

Isaac — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 02:33:12 +0000

Good news here :
Looks like Business Catalyst has been acquired by… Adobe! (that’s what we call “going with the big boys”)

I guess that now people having some issues with their Support will definitely be served.

Note that once the merge done, it will only be a business to business company. Which means people will only deal with BC, no more GoodBarry. More infos at :

http://www.businesscatalyst.com/announcements/info

By: sharman

sharman — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 03:41:02 +0000

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….?!

By: Luke

Luke — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 00:51:44 +0000

A couple of days ago I upgraded my trial to a Regular account and spent a few hours configuring a holding page.

I updated the DNS details for the domain to point to the holding page then tried to get back into my GB admin site to make some final changes.

For some reason my account is no longer active. Even resetting my PW from the Forgotten PW function doesn’t work.

I logged the issue 2 days ago and still waiting to hear back.

Not a great start, especially when I have deadlines to hit!!

I was hoping the issues raised in this post were untrue but it’s not looking promising. Their pre-sales support is amazing but when you hand over the cash you’re on your own by the looks of it.

By: Joe

Joe — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 12:46:10 +0000

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.

By: Montana Flynn

Montana Flynn — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 02:28:02 +0000

I just signed up to become a reseller, I hope it works good with large ecommerce sites.

Really the templates are that bad? Darn.

By: Jay

Jay — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 04:03:48 +0000

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.

By: Mark Shingleton

Mark Shingleton — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 10:39:25 +0000

We’ve been looking at using goodbarry/business catalyst for about 6 months now and unfortunately we’ve pretty much had the same experience as Josh (above).
One of the features that drew us to it was the ‘web app’. Basically they have a system which allows you to design a database table so you can make cool stuff.

Only thing is they have really glossed over the fundamentals … there is no conditional logic in the web app .. so for example if my web app has a space for my customer to upload two images .. but they just upload one .. I have no way of saying ‘If this image exists then show it’ .. the system just says ‘show image’ .. and if its not there it just breaks .. not very cool at all. Sure I could probably arse about with jquery and javascript and god knows what else .. but why should i have to do that??? Just fix the basics for god sake!

Other fundamentally simple things like support for thumbnail images is very poor and not implemented consistently across the platform. Eg you can have thumbs in the web app .. sort of .. but you cant have them at all in the blog posts.

Image management itself is very poor too … you cant set a default size for images .. your customer would have to adjust the size for every image they uploaded .. plus they would also have to select the destination folder as you cant setup a defulat for that either! Not so good people. Not good at all.

The support has been really inconsistent and I cant afford to wait days for the inevitable “We will add that to the wishlist” response.

I really love the concept … and I really really want to use it … but the lack of covering off the basics is so bloody frustrating that I’ve pretty much given up on it altogether.

GoodBarry is supposed to make your life simple … but it seems like they should STOP ADDING new features and get the basics sorted out first. GoodBarry / Business Catalyst .. if you are reading. PLEASE PLEASE stop adding new stuff and get your people focused on the basics … honestly .. we don’t care about new features .. get the basics fixed .. add in some conditional logic to those web apps … sort out your image management .. get the basics done.