Question & Answers with Frooition

126 Responses

1. Why does frooition never return phone calls & only answer if the option for “sales” is pressed?

   Could you please answer the final question again please + the one about breaking eBay’s rules for years?

   Why did the price for the upgrade change 3 times within a month?

2. Rackspace seems like a good company. I’m currently experimenting with their new cloud servers program.

3. I have a Frooition eBay shop and a Frooition ecommerce website.

   You say that we can still get support for free; does this mean you will remove the line “Although we can’t guarantee to respond to these tickets”? Also, yes you do have a forum but when I have submitted questions they have required approval but have never appeared in the forum or received a reply.

   Why is it taking so long for something to be done about the promo box pop-up blocker problem? Why do promotion boxes take so long to load and why are they sometimes blank? (No it is not my broadband connection). When is there going to be an alternative to the disappointing black Frooflow box for central promotional content?

   Why does feedback displayed on the shop front not update automatically to show recent comments?

   Why do you continue to claim product listing templates are not affected by the NSE, categories cannot be updated in pre-freedom listings, and also clicking category links open within the description frame of the new eBay view item page? Ending these to relaunch with a freedom template would lose months of GTC Best Match sales history.

   Why do shops and templates load increasingly slowly? (Again it is nothing to do with my connection) Potential customers will not wait.

   When will the long promised updates be made to the Frooition ecommerce website, it was meant to happen last summer? Introducing image thumb nails, related items etc.

4. Bloodbath / Gerald Ratner spring to mind.

5. “Why do you not template all shop pages when other designers do?
   We work really closely with eBay to ensure that our designs are compliant.
   eBay are retiring their old storefront on May 20th2009. Frooition customers
   who have upgraded to NSE are 100% safe and compliant.”

   Does that mean that companies who manage to template all the shop pages
   within the NSE are offering a non-compliant product & that their designers
   do not work closely with eBay?

6. Chris,

   stick to the day job and give up journalism – your questions were about as hard hitting as a wet flounder and you then let the flounder off the hook because Frooition failed to answer half of the questions, anyway. I forgot, Frooition did your shop for free.

   Frooition show no interest in fixing the long list of bugs in their NSE product and they show no interest in providing service to their customers. Marketing spin and no action.

   Here’s some proper questions for Froo:

   1. Why didn’t you communicate the reduced functionality of NSE (design not showing on custom / category pages, reduced design on homepage, e.g item backgrounds) BEFORE you took our money for the NSE (so-called) upgrade?
   2. Given the above, will you now refund customers who want to remove the Frooition NSE design from their shopfront?
   3. Why did you state categorically that listings would be unaffected by NSE, when the FACT is that pre-freedom listings have had categories re-ordered so that the list of categories now makes no sense to buyers and the ‘more items’ and ‘shop pages’ disappear altogether when you switch to ebay’s ‘new version of this page’?
   4.If your shopfronts were compliant before, why would they break? eBay didn’t change any of their rules – they merely enforced rules that already existed. If you have proof that eBay actually changed the rules – publish it here.
   5.The price for the upgrade changed 3 times – from £50 to £100 to £150 – but always the same amount of work to be done. Do you just make the numbers up when you’re in the pub?
   6. Talking of making the numbers up, you advertise pay for junior designers at £12 per hour. Yet you charge £99 / £199 per hour for support. Even to fix problems that are of your own making. The ‘free’ help tickets are ignored and then deleted – this is what happened to the help tickets I submitted about server outages, categories going haywire in listings, shop pages missing from listings etc etc. And why didn’t you communicate such a major change directly to your customers before it happened? Something to be ashamed of?
   7. You say that “Frooition continues to deliver great results for clients as well as the capacity to develop new exciting products and services for the future.” So, why can’t you invest some of that ‘capacity’ to fix the bugs in NSE or to actually deliver the website upgrade that was promised for last Summer? Doesn’t seem like you’ve got ANY capacity.
   8. Why are you only now communicating (through your paid blogger) about these issues? Hoping we’d all give up and go away?

   I saw Frooition compared to Ratner earlier – his problem was that he was brutally honest about his product. That’s one problem that Frooition don’t have.

7. I would like to know why after lots of calls and emails you still cant stop all my category levels from showing in my listings, i find your support non existent.

   You say the subscription is for hosting the store and listing graphics, For the past year I have hosted these on our own hosting so we could change the look of the shop, does this mean you will be refunding these costs???

   We have now gone to ESP for our shop design, our NSE upgrate looked poor we had to change that ourselves as it was sent back half finished.

   I dont see what frooition actually offer anymore.

8. @ Savvy Paul, Actually I simply lifted the questions that were asked most frequently on a TameBay forum thread and forwarded them en masse to Frooition.

   Next week they’ll be reading and responding so thanks for adding some more questions which I’ve no doubt they’ll be happy to address 😀

9. Fair play. I am pleased to see this issue on the front-page of Tamebay, so you do get top marks for that 😉

10. Congratulations Frooition you blew it. You lied to me by offering a “free upgrade” for postivie PR. Yeah we got the free upgrade alright, and all of a sudden they are hosting the images themselves instead of us hosting them and I’ve suddenly got the once a year subscription fee, which was never part of the deal (I was one of the very early customers on the one off payment). All that obfuscation about a “free upgrade” which just = more cash for Frooition. Their servers also blocked my emails (we’re both Rackspace, go figure)….

    THEN to add insult to injury, shortly after paying the yearly hosting and subscription I got hit with the “NSE upgrade” whammy….. Well go shove it….

    DrSteveW – Managing Director – Retrowarez.com

    PS you’re all really crap at answering the phone.
    PPS I am so so so glad they only did my shop and me pages and not my listing templates. If they’d screwed up my 4000+ listings I’d have gone ballistic.

11. This statement by Steve says a lot !

    “You lied to me by offering a “free upgrade” for postivie PR”.

12. Frooition also promised me a free NSE upgrade for positive PR – they removed the offer when I demanded a refund because they’d failed to update their website platform as promised last Summer. They kept me hanging on for 10 months – each month telling me that the web platform changes were just ‘a month or so’ away. When they finally agreed a refund they still took another payment a month later. The website platform ‘upgrade’ still has not been done.

    PS They’re really carp at answering emails, too

13. The comment “With over a million live listings at any one time and combined feedback of over 11 million” is also a bit rich. These are not your listings or feedback.

14. I applaud Tamebay for airing this issue. The questions are fine. The answers are sorely lacking – and in a couple of instances Frooition’s answer entirely ignored the actual question!

15. I have to say that the lack of a response to the outage question has left me with a feeling of mistrust. I too was an early adopter and no doubt Frooition/Creativebay has done us good in the past but I can’t afford outages over weekends. I think it is time to have my listings redesigned with a simpler quick loading solution. John

16. I get the impression that Frooition simply are not interested and think they know better than us. Well, perhaps a poll will better demonstrate how we all feel:

    https://www.micropoll.com/akira/mpview/590876-166151

17. Frooition designed our store and eBay listing template. After months of non response to questions, we decided to chuck the store template and have settled for using the eBay store default until we make a decision of where to go from here.

    We were still happy with our eBay listing template, however . . .until this weekend . . .when every single one of our listings with frooition templates broke???? What’s going on and what’s being done to fix this mess????

    -bobby

18. Frooition server playing up again this morning 😡

19. I want my OTHER ITEMS to show up- I believe it is a simple and fundamental request. Frooitition have been avoiding the issue for weeks. This is the latest reply from them, it seems to be contradicted by what I am reading here!!
    “Our customer support team personnel have replied to your support request #161037

    Hi,

    Thanks for your ticket.

    We’ve actually had a few clients over the last couple of weeks submit tickets specifically about the left and right content not pulling in for some items.

    It seems to be intermittent, and happens regardless of Frooition making any changes to our software.

    Our development team have looked into this for a handful of clients, and it seems some items list without the side panel content showing, and a few hours later it displays fine, and vice-verser.

    I’m told this is likely down to eBay, and could be caused by server overload due to eBay updating their servers for the New Store Experience.

    We have made a note of your ticket non-the-less, and will be checking the eBay Developer Forums often for resolution to this issue.

    Thanks,
    Support”

    Needless to say ebay are telling me that the fault is Frooition code!! I am surprised that ebay still approve this company.

20. Our ‘Other Items’ and ‘Shop Pages’ don’t show up when you ‘switch to the new version of this page’ – i.e. Ebay’s new view item page that has been available as a user selected option for several months. When I submitted help tickets about this (before they started charging £199 p.h for support), after a couple of denials they just deleted the help tickets.

    “Can I still get support without paying?”

    Absolutely not in my experience. I’ve had help tickets ignored or deleted on multiple occasions

    Do I have to pay if I find a bug/error?

    You just get ignored and the bugs do not get fixed. Here’s the current list of outstanding issues on NSE upgrade alone:

    Ill-looking, poorly functioning Promotion Boxes – half of the item title is missing, the text is amateurish and the boxes often fail to display at all.

    When clicking on Promotion Box items a pop-up is generated, which many buyers have set to ‘block’. Previously item listing opened in the same window.

    Missing ‘Shop Pages’ links in both Storefront and Listings

    Poor quality of FrooFlow box – badly pixelated images and incomplete item titles

    Failure to integrate eBay generated slideshows (which was always the case before NSE, and I’ve been told should still be achievable) – this would be useful because the ebay slideshows are ten times better than the F

    Incorrect reordering of categories in pre-Freedom generated listings (which the Frooition support team have told me is irreversible despite Frooition repeatedly stating that listings would be unaffected)

    Poor quality work when embedding header into eBay standard pages – the Flash is missing, leaving many shop headers with a gaping hole where the flash should be

    Freedom generated listings do not show correctly in eBay’s new version of the listing page – ‘other items’ do not show at all, none of the ‘shop pages’ links show

    Feedback displayed in storefront fails to update

    Frooition – your software is not ‘strong and robust’ – it’s bloody broken!

21. What’s the odds on frooition making any response before late afternoon Friday? Two fingers to the customer me thinks.

    I see that frooition are still using Tamebay’s Sue to tout for business even though the “all you bead” shop has dropped frooition.

22. This must be the worst PR job ever, if my business was being trashed by the public on a popular ecommerce blog like this I would be doing my upmost to limit the damage.

23. I went with the Frooition shop around Christmas time. While I have had some outages and down time i do expect it from time to time and its not really something that would concern me to be honest, i do expect such things from hosting companies. Its a fact of life. And i think the listing template the listings use when a server is down is ok looking.

    I remember supanames pulled my hosting one time because i was using the pics i was hosting on ebay.

    The only things im peeved about would be ebays change to the NSE. The Frooition store looks pants in it but im sure over the next while things will change and hopefully Frootion will get the hang of the NSE and bring in some better looking changes.

    Any questions ive asked have been answered within a day or two and the only realy change ive requested, changing a background on the item picture in my ebay store was done within the hour of me asking.

    One thing thats really doing my head in though is the font frooition are using in the store homepage for displaying the right and left columns and the star item fonts.

    I must get chase Frooition up about this. Wish me luck after reading all the comments on here lol

24. @Patty

    I went with the Frooition shop around Christmas time

    At which time Frooition already knew for sure that their stores would break in NSE and that they would not be able to apply your design to category and custom pages once NSE went live. Out of curiosity, did they tell you this before they took your money?

    While I have had some outages and down time i do expect it from time to time and its not really something that would concern me to be honest, i do expect such things from hosting companies.

    If that cost you 25% of your revenue in lost sales and underperforming auctions over the course of a weekend or even a month you might be more concerned, don’t you reckon?

    Good luck chasing up Frooition? £199 per hour is all the luck you’ll need.

25. what is NSE??

26. @Simon

    NSE is the New Shops Experience that eBay recently introduced. It was designed to give eBay’s standard shops a facelift. At the same time eBay said they would no longer tolerate ‘customisations that conflict with our Site Interference Policy’. These mainly related to extensive use of Javascript & CSS – Frooition templates were full of both.

    If left unaltered, all of the pre NSE Frooition shops would have broken once NSE was implemented. The specific gripe that Frooition customers are airing here is that Frooition charged us £50-£150 (on top of the £800 we already paid) to change our shops to work with NSE even though the rule that outlawed the code Frooition were using had been introduced in 2004. In other words, Frooition carried on for 4 years building shop designs that they knew were non-compliant with ebay’s Site Interference Policy – then charged us for the ‘privelige’ of fixing it.

    The ebay New Shops page has more details:

    https://pages.ebay.co.uk/stores/newstore.html

    Hope that all makes sense! 🙂

27. With the exception of Chris, everyone who has posted here seems to think Frooition are terrible.

    So, without trying to sound too ignorant, why are you all still using them?

28. We are in the process of leaving Frooition 😎

29. Lino in a post you made on a forum thread (which for some reason has been locked!) https://www.tamebaynew.wpengine.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=18&t=2565, you mentioned that you had 4000 live listings. If you had been with frooition & became dissatisfied it would mean redoing 4000 listings, forfeiting your best match placement etc. In your case you also would have made an initial investment of perhaps £2000 + possibly upgrade fees/subscription etc.

    I personally didn’t bother getting the NSE update but had planned to go on using the templates. Now I have stopped using the templates for new listings & will remove the template from active listings over time. 🙂

30. What would we have got for the £2000+? Prettier eBay listings? Again, if I’m being ignorant, I apologise. But how would this really help us?

31. Lino you would get a frooition make over for your 3 shops (a custom designed landing page + template).

    Here is an article from Tamebay last year https://www.tamebaynew.wpengine.com/2008/03/does-a-frooition-shop-design-increase-sales.html. As far as I am aware Sue never implemented the listing template & has now dropped the frooition shop front. Draw your own conclusions.

32. Thanks for the link Jimbo. Have to admit, I’m a bit of a sceptic. Especially since it could cost £2,000+

    One of our stores has very very simple eBay listings, and it’s performing very well. Part of me believes that buyers are put off by flashy listings that are looking less and less like eBay.

33. @ Chris Dawson

    At the end of your original article you mentioned that Frooition would be pleased to answer any additional questions. Well, it’s a week this evening since your post and nothing from Froo. Have they let you down or are you still trying to negotiate an affordable hourly rate for their ‘support’? 😉

    They don’t seem to be concerned that every post here is slamming them. There are some serious allegations here about them and yet they are conspicuous by their absence. The only sort of company that adopts that attitude is one that knows the game is up.

34. #32 Lino – This has been bothering me for a long time.
    When I look at competitors who are doing well, (judging by the amount of feedback left) they’re all using ‘standard’ Ebay shop set-ups. Doesn’t seem to matter if they have grammatical errors all over the place and are possibly colour blind to boot, they’re taking orders. More than me, often.

    There’s a school of thought that says too much info/too many distractions on a page are a bad thing. Others say the extra promotion definitely leads to add-on sales. Me, I believe punters actually find you through search, not your homepage. So, I’m thinking… should I just change it to a standard store with a nice header graphic and see what happens? Can I test it by temporarily removing my advanced template and reverting back to it (and the upgrade) if I decide to? Anyone recently done this?

35. #34 Possibly having a ‘fancy’ ebay store can help in generating more multi item orders, but I am sceptical as to whether it brings in more unique buyers.

    I very rarely use eBay to buy anything, but when I do, I find I’m more likely to buy from a seller who has an eBay generic store layout.

    Why don’t you set up another id and sell your items with the simplest template possible? See how you get on.

36. The problem I mentioned with my template showing all catagory levels further up this post seems to be fixed now, wonder if frooition are keeping an eye on this discussion.

    Frooition have been terrible in my experience and i have now left them, My nice new eseller pro shop and templates will be live next week and it looks and works so much better than our frooition one, and it even carries the design throughout all shop pages, something frooition forgot to mention when they wanted my upgrade money.

    Im not sure why tamebay still associate themselves with frooition, by having adverts on the homepage they are promoting a poor company.

37. Affiliate marketing?

38. @36

    Have you got a link for some examples of esellerpro ebay templates?

    What sort of cost was that?

    We were considering implementing a ecommerce platform before christmas and we are weighing up the options of going with Frooition who we use for Ebay or to go for someone else.

39. Yes my categories on pre-freedom listings seem ok now, let’s hope the pop-up blocker will be addressed next.

    Hopefully Frooition will respond to the questions in the comments before this Q&A post disappears off the front page.

40. Bump.

41. @38 Patsy if you are considering Frooition’s ecommerce offering ask them when the upgrade will materialise, it was promised for last summer. In the marketing for the website it lists as one of the benefits – “Ongoing updates and additional functionality.” Some of the areas which I hope will be upgraded are:

    Currently you have numbers rather than thumbnail images for additional product images which most customers will not understand.

    You can’t offer additional shipping options such as upgrades to next day delivery.

    There is no cross selling / related product display on product pages.

    There is no up-sell at checkout.

    Notes from buyers can only be seen if you open each order individually.

    Hosted images cannot be organised into folders as there is separate logins for shop and website.

    Google analytics can’t be used and is not the most search engine friendly.

42. “Patsy if you are considering Frooition’s ecommerce offering ask them when the upgrade will materialise”

    And take their answer with a pinch of salt – for 8 months last year they continued to tell me that the website upgrade was a matter of weeks away.

    As it stands, without the upgrade, the existing Frooition web platform has less functionality than free or very low cost all-in-one solutions like EKM, e-pages, Vendio, Mr Site, etc.

    You may also want to consider that the Frooition NSE ‘upgrade’ has had a pretty disastrous implementation.

    Still, if you do go for the Frooition website, they are giving some pretty hefty discounts. Looks like they’re pretty desperate to raise cash – this is a copy of an email claimed to be from Frooition and posted on an ebay Powerseller’s discussion board thread yesterday.

    Our new MD will be raising the prices on these services as of next week, which means i will not be able to offer discounts like I have been able to offer, and reduced ‘free subscription’ too

    So on one last final fling, I will offer you a very low price just in case you are tempted to move now and save yourself some Money

    « Frooition Pro – Standard eBay Design service for £650 and 3 months free (subs usually £15 / month)

    « Frooition Pro Ebay and Website design Combo for £1600 3 months free (with subs usually £35 / month)

    I do however require upfront payment to secure this price and you need to move quickly

    If this is of interest please click reply, or call

    BUT ACT QUICK

    Look forward to working together

    Kind Regards,

    https://forums.ebay.co.uk/thread.jspa?messageID=1106184916&forumID=15#1106184916

43. I note that the question about Rackspace being down over the weekend of 25/26 amongst others wasn’t actually answered so why did you publish the responses as answers Chris?

    The Rackspace question for example wasn’t ‘what equipment do you have and are you investing in more capacity’ as seems the case when you read the answer. So Frooition when you’re replying in your ‘delighted to be able to respond way’ (which could be 2010 by the look of it) could you actually explain what you’ve done to prevent this happening again because in your own words claim to have 11 million listings live which were all presumably unavailable that weekend?

    For others’ information this has happened with Rackspace before – in 2007. Have a look at https://gawker.com/tech/confirmed/how-rackspace-really-went-down-322828.php for how it could all go pear shaped for you as well if you went with Frooition. 🙂

    And I disagree completely that a server would be down every now and then anyway. If you have the right company and the right equipment you should have 100% uptime. Most decent dedicated server hosts guarantee it.

    Lastly, is there a happy Frooition customer anywhere?
    (except for you of course Chris) 😉

44. #43 I’m a happy Frooition customer…

    …Happy that I now have an in house web designer that is working on our website as we speak, ready to go live just as the subscriptions are due for renewal!

    🙂

45. @ # 43

    If you have the right company and the right equipment you should have 100% uptime. Most decent dedicated server hosts guarantee it.

    Guarantee or not it is simply not possible to have 100% uptime. The goal should be to get as close to 100% as economically possible.

46. dont get a frooition website, I had one for a year and was promised updates but they never happened, Cost me £1500 and all i got was a haf finished platform, Would not update google base and we had lots of problems, Our new website npautoparts.co.uk is with eseller and only cost £500. We have already had more website sales in a month than in a year with our frooition one.

    We dont have examples of our ebay store yet but eseller currently do xs-stock and big dug

47. Tamebay can we have an update on what’s happening with this topic. Why are frooition not responding? You had stated that “happy to answer any additional questions”.
    Judging from the response that posts/threads relating to frooition generate this is a subject of great interest to tamebay’s readership.

48. @Chris

    “Next week they’ll be reading and responding so thanks for adding some more questions which I’ve no doubt they’ll be happy to address”

    Frooition seem more than happy to ignore our questions. Why are Tamebay still taking advertising money from a company that treats it’s customers with contempt?

49. #48 Well in Frooitions terms it does say that “we cannot guarantee a response”…

    …Maybe if we send them a few hundred pounds they might answer?

50. @Sue,

    I do appreciate that you can’t get blood from a stone and I think Tamebay did a good thing in putting this on the front page. But, given Frooition’s lack of response in the face of significant anger from it’s customers, tell me why does Tamebay continue to accept money for advertising from a company that treats us all with contempt?

51. Surely frooition had agreed to respond to the points raised before tamebay published the above article? If frooition never intended to respond was the article just another attempt by frooition use tamebay to manage their PR?

52. This just sums up frooition really, I hope anyone thinking of using them reads this first. And i hope tamebay now see what they are like and stop defending them.

53. Wow! What a read! Was about to go ahead with a shop last week and it was definately going ahead week coming up but after reading this i am so glad i am not!!!

    Thanks guys, you saved me a packet.

    Ps. Andrew at Frooition, stop wasting your time talking to potential customers like me and sort out problems for these poor folk. If you don’t you will never get any new customers! Good luck guys. You saved me a lot of time, money and hassle i am sure!

54. First of all, on behalf of Frooition, I’d like to apologise for our delays in responding to some of the comments here. Contrary to some strong opinions posted, we do care about customer service and satisfaction and i’d like to address some of the concerns and issues raised here.

    So here goes …

    I think the main points we need to address (perhaps rather than specific responses to specific questions) are to deal with the truth or myth aspects of:

    1. Compliancy – the implications are that we only had problems and then charged our clients for upgrades because we were never compliant.

    The first point to make is that eBay will be retiring their old store format (2 column) on May 20th. Anyone, not redesigned to NSE (3 column layout) will have a problem. More information is available at frooition.com

    eBay have always had site interference rules and have always told us (in the UK) that we are compliant. When they gave notice about the NSE changes, it meant some of our highly advanced designs had to be changed because some of the graphics and backgrounds fell outside the new framework. In no way has that ever been a “compliance” issue.
    It’s a shame that we have had to change the original look and feel that we created with some of our customers. Although we see this as a shared problem for both us and for the customer since there is only so much we can do within eBay’s framework.

    Whilst we accept that some people are very frustrated with the changes that NSE has meant there is little that can be done about that. The vast majority of our customers are happy with the new look and feel and stopped worrying about NSE back in January. There are still many sales enhancing features at our disposal so we must focus our energy on that.
    What we can say is that going forward stores that don’t comply, risk sanctions by eBay so we’ve worked with them to make sure Frooition’s customers fit the design specifications laid down by eBay and are 100% compliant under current rules. I would also add that to the best of our knowledge, not one of our customers has had listings suspended or had their eBay account frozen due to any compliance issues related to their Frooition design.

    Frooition provides high-end design and advanced functionality on the eBay platform. NSE has meant massive structural change to the storefront page, which has limited what we have been capable of delivering. We provide so much more than just a pretty splash page (unlike many of our competitors) and continue to provide the additional sales-generating functionality that we brought to the eBay market (e.g. Top 10 items, Star Item), We have successfully migrated over 1,000 live clients onto this new framework to give them the consistent branding and advanced functionality that they have always enjoyed with us.

    We created a large micro-site of information dedicated to NSE on our web-site and within our client software. We campaigned hard over the past 5 months to drive awareness and sent numerous emails to all of our clients containing links to both our site and to eBay’s NSE information pages. This is also why we were offering “early-bird” incentives to the early adopters.

    At the same time we were (and currently are) also under a non-disclosure agreement with eBay, we have communicated as much as we could as soon as we could. eBay see everything we send out to customers before we do it so are more than aware of what’s happening in our business.

    We have fixed the category issue which is one change that eBay hadn’t shared with us in time for us to deliver it with the NSE install. The good news is that this fix to eBay’s change has been delivered to every account at no additional charge.

    2. Support – we don’t answer the phone or return calls, we close or ignore tickets and we charge astronomical fees for support

    The new charges we recently introduced for telephone support are for telephone support only. Under our subscription model and support policy all customers get included support through our ticketing system. Any faults or bugs reported will be dealt with at no additional charge. For clients that require instant telephone support, we have introduced a new system that will allow them that quicker access on a premium rate as advertised. This is for things like client specific changes and modifications. General support is still free although through a more structured ticket process for non urgent work which is fair for everyone.

    3. Outages – do we really have the strength to deliver what we say we can?

    In order to significantly bolster system capacity and performance, on April 23rd, we implemented a new high-end database cluster and seamlessly brought it online with no disruption to any of our clients.
    Very late on the evening of Sunday, April 26th, one of our web servers crashed with a hardware fault, which affected a small proportion of our customers, and was down for approximately 70 minutes. This prevented some of our clients from logging into their Frooition account, but not from displaying their stores and listings, which are distributed via a Content Delivery Network independent of our own highly-available infrastructure.

    This outage was the first we have unfortunately experienced in over 12 months and the first on that particular web server since it was commissioned over 2 years ago. The incident was resolved very quickly and all services restored within 90 minutes of failure.

    Our server farm is a highly resilient and redundant facility constructed with the best hardware and software components available anywhere today.

    Poor perceived performance or slow page loads are often caused by one of a number of providers – for each listing, there may be calls to a wide variety of sites for counters, photo galleries, picture hosting, analytics etc., and any single one of these not performing well will usually slow the whole page, so if you see a slow page load, check the component that’s causing it to hang (normally shown on the bottom left of your browser screen).

    4. Customer Care – we don’t care about our clients once we’ve taken their money

    Yes we do care (honestly), reputation is everything, and a majority of our business is based on good recommendations. Some of the recent changes we have made are to help us better respond to customers. The NSE changes and our upgraded framework to ensure continuity of advanced functionality have been significant and this has generated a large number of support calls as we migrate our clients to our NSE-ready offering, and in some cases over the last couple of months, our ability to timely respond and deal with all those support needs has been below the level we’d expect and are happy with. However, with the bulk of this challenge now behind us, and with improvements in our support infrastructure and processes, we are now better placed to deal with customer support going forward and we are working hard to reclaim our reputation for customer support excellence.
    Frooition only communicate through credible sources or on our own website. Anything else is pure hear-say and much of it hot air from competitors. Any information that will affect our customers will be, and always has been, emailed to clients, placed within the new section within the Frooition software and any links added to the Frooition homepage.

    5. Frooition purpose – what is the point of Frooition now?

    Store-front and listing templates are more important now than ever. Buyers are a savvy bunch – how will you stand out from the crowd when a buyer has 5 browsers open? The vast majority of our clients tell us that they see their sales rise significantly after taking Frooition services, and ultimately, this is what we are striving to achieve for our customers. Look great, sell more.

    Since we started delivering professional design services back in 2005, we have strived to push the boundaries of what can be done with an eBay store and listing, and have developed unique functionality to help our customers sell more. It’s not just about branding and looking great, it’s about competitive-edge features that help you sell more. Our job is to work closely with our industry partners (eBay, PayPal, ChannelAdvisor etc) and to be ahead of the game and continue to look for new opportunities to give our customers further competitive edge. NSE has brought a lot of change, and with change comes new challenges and opportunities – we have continued to deliver the advanced features that help you sell more, and are constantly adding further features that will roll out over the coming months to customers under subscription that will provide further sales enhancements.

    You invested in our services because you hoped it would help your business grow, and new customers come to us every day for the same reasons. We continue to invest in R&D to expand our offerings further and to continue to provider new and exciting features that will give you a competitive edge.

    To reiterate, the NSE changes and the upgrade fee we applied, was NOT to get our sites compliant, but to ensure the advanced functionality and custom extras our customers have enjoyed previously, would continue to be available in the NSE.

    Finally, we are a little surprised to see comments on here from customers who are in regular contact with our team and who also have a direct line (mobile and email) to the CEO. We would ask any customer to contact us direct if they have any individual or outstanding issues so that we can understand and respond to your specific circumstances.

    Thanks you for reading

55. With regard to the outage on the April 26th my listings would not load many other frooition customers reported the same . Either you are not fully awear of the issue or …….. – either way it does not reflect well on frooition.

    Why did you change the price for the NSE 3 times within a month (sharp practices)?

    I’m not frustrated by “new eBay Shops Experience” I’m frustrated by frooitions complete lack of profesionalism (can’t even return a phone call).

    Where are the happy customers (not including Chris 🙂 )?

56. @Froo…thanks for eventually coming to the party. Was your reputation not more of a priority? 😕

    I’m sure those of us with first-hand experience of your ‘customer service’ can make our own minds up about what you’ve written. In the meantime, here are some questions you ‘forgot’ to answer (and have refused to answer previously when I contacted you directly, including when speaking to FROO managers / directors.):

    Why didn’t you communicate the reduced functionality of NSE (design not showing on custom / category pages, reduced design on homepage, e.g item backgrounds) BEFORE you took our money for the NSE (so-called) upgrade?

    Given the above, will you now refund customers who want to remove the Frooition NSE design from their shopfront?

    When will all the remaining NSE bugs be fixed?

    Why did you deny for so long that pre-Freedom listings (re-ordering of categories) would be unaffected – even when your customers demonstrated otherwise. Why are you only admitting it now? (I have written correspondence from you, firstly stating that no such problem existed, then stating that nothing could be done about it).

    Why have you been promising a website platform upgrade for the last 9 months without delivering anything?

    Why did help tickets get deleted on multiple occasions?

    eBay have had rules about use of Javascript & CSS since 2004. Why did you continue to build and take money for shops that broke those rules?

    “Any information that will affect our customers will be, and always has been, emailed to clients”. Not true – you certainly did not communicate the £199 support chrges to your customers. Something to be ashamed of?

57. @jimbo – We are sorry for the outage on April 26th, and can assure you this only affected a small proportion of our customers for a 90 minute period – this was the first outage in over 12 months and was contained and fixed as quickly as possible.

    The pricing for the NSE upgrade was offered at a preferential rate for early adopters and we communicated this offer to all our customer base; this was to help us migrate approximately 1,200 live clients over a manageable period of time and to give our customers the options to be one of the first or last to migrate, or somewhere in between. We like to give our customers choice, and we believe this is what we did.

    eBay’s recent changes have presented us with many challenges that has somewhat stretched our support capability for a period, and I am very sorry that you say you have experienced a lack of professionalism from us, we do strive hard to exceed customer expectations and sorry we seem to have failed you on this occasion.

    If you (or any other frooition customer reading this) have any outstanding issues, please get in touch with us and we will endeavour to respond as quickly as possible.

58. @Froo

    If you (or any other frooition customer reading this) have any outstanding issues, please get in touch with us and we will endeavour to respond as quickly as possible.

    When I reported the server outage you didn’t even respond. When I reported the wrongly ordered categories you deleted the help ticket. When I phone, you don’t answer – then you introduce a £199 per hour charge for telephone support.

    Tell me, what is the new magical way of contacting Frooition that will ensure you “will endeavour to respond as quickly as possible”?

59. @ savvy’s “unanswered” questions:

    NSE changes – we put together a very detailed micro-site focused on the NSE changes and the features and benefits that our upgrade bring – see https://www.frooition.com/new_store_experience/. We have worked hard to maintain, and in some cases, improve, the features and functionality our customers previously enjoyed into the NSE. Any limitations (or reduced functionality) that exist are purely down to changes and restrictions that eBay have made and that we have had to operate within. We will continue to work with eBay and enhance such features as and when we can, and as and when eBay make further enhancements.

    I’m a little unsure of what it is you are asking to be refunded – when you take up our services, the bulk of the one-off fees is to provide a custom design and branding for you; once we have agreed the design brief and delivered your design, you then own that and can do whatever you like with it with whoever you like, we don’t own it, you do. The ongoing subscription and hosting fees then cover your ongoing use of your design through our infrastructure. If you choose to not use our services, simply cancel your subscription at any time.

    For the NSE upgrade fee, that work has been completed, and as I can see on your site, is working and looks great! If you want us to remove the NSE upgrade, your site will no longer work after eBay’s opt-out expires this week, and you will revert to a plain unbranded store.

    I understand from our development team that all outstanding NSE bugs have now been resolved, if anyone is experiencing any issues, please open a support ticket and we will investigate.

    I believe the categories issue has already been addressed in the first post at the top of this page.

    Our website (off-ebay) offering has been around for at least two years and continues to evolve. I understand that we were not able to address some of the features that you required at the time and a refund was offered which you duly accepted.

    I understand from our support team that the only time support tickets are deleted is if they contain rude or abusive content; I’m not suggesting that that is the case here as I’ve not yet reviewed all 29 of your tickets submitted in March and April, but if you have genuine outstanding issues, please raise a support ticket.

    As before, on the compliance question, we have not experienced any issues with customers eBay activities being frozen due to compliance issues with their designs. We work very closely with eBay and are 100% compliant. The NSE upgrade was not a question of compliance but of ensuring the advanced functionality continued to work on the greatly enhanced 3-column NSE store front.

    The new on-demand telephone support service was communicated to our clients through the online portal. The two new services are NOT a replacement for the ticketing system but a complementary new service to those customers requiring on-demand telephone support that starts at £99 per hour.

    In summary, there is a lot of noise about NSE and compliancy and this is a non-issue that has not affected any of our customers. What does affect our customers is powerful branding, continuity of service across eBay changes and the continued enjoyment of the advanced services we provide that give you, the seller, more revenue and margin.

    We continue to work hard to improve and enhance our services and are striving to improve our customer service experience and rebuild our reputation, and look forward to contributing to our customers’ continuing success stories.

    We are happy to address any general points here; for any specific outstanding issues that clients may have, please can I request that you contact us through our formal channels where we will be happy to assist.

60. @Froo

    NSE changes – I’ll be more clear. The first you communicated about not being able to apply the design to category / custom pages in NSE was after you had taken payment from myself and many other customers for the ‘upgrade’. I have copies (screenshots) of your NSE advertising – there was no mention of this issue. The first mention came when you later issued an FAQ. Again, I have correspondence to back this up. I am asking for the NSE upgrade fee to be refunded to customers who, now having the knowledge that the design cannot be applied to all pages, choose to remove the Frooition NSE design from their shopfront.

    NSE bugs – you have fixed the categories in listings issue – so why did you insist, for the last 2 months, that this issue didn’t exist? Still outstanding are: missing (and ill-looking) text on item titles in Frooition promotion boxes, shop pages missing from left column of listings, ‘about the seller’ link missing from left column of shop, highly pixelated images and missing item title text in Frooflow box. IMHO Froo shops are now a pale imitation design-wise of what they were.

    Website offering – in August of 2008 you told me that you were 6-8 weeks away from implementing a new platform that would add much needed features. You still have not implemented those changes. Google ‘frooition website’ or look at the UK powersellers discussion board and you will find plenty of others with the same complaint.

    Deleting of support tickets – exasperated, disappointed, ‘froostrated’? Yes. Rude? Only as a last resort. Does ‘when will you give a straight f******* answer count as rude? I can give evidence of several tickets being deleted and lots of tickets being closed without reply – then closed again without reply when I reopened them! My help ticket re server outage was simply ignored.

    Support – if the £99 / £199 services are not a replacement for the ticketing system, why do you say that you can’t guarantee to respond to help tickets?

    You say that We continue to work hard to improve and enhance our services and are striving to improve our customer service experience and rebuild our reputation”. Why did you let it slip so badly in the first place?

61. The compliancy issue has affected your customers – I have dropped the frooition store front as it does not work with “new eBay Shops Experience”. As I understand it eBay’s rules to CSS/Javascript have not changed.

    With reference to the outage in post #55 Froo wrote “This prevented some of our clients from logging into their Frooition account, but not from displaying their stores and listings”. Sorry but the outage did stop listings from diaplaying.

62. @ Froo, I don’t think there is much benefit to be gained in continuing going over old ground and it is good to read your commitment that “General support is still free although through a more structured ticket process” and you “are working hard to reclaim our reputation for customer support excellence.”

    I think the main outstanding NSE issue to be resolved is the pop-up blocker problem with star item / top 5 etc. Once that is addressed and an alternative to the frooflow box provided, I think there will again be “a point” in having a Frooition storefront.

63. @ 46 Neil

    I really like the look and layout of your site with ESellerpro. Looks awesome!

    Are there subscription charges on top of your initial fee? Also do you get to host the site yourself or do you have to use their servers?

64. @savvy

    I don’t really see the point of going round and round over old ground other than to say we genuinely are striving to provide the best solution possible and provide the best customer support possible; this whole NSE project has challenged and stretched us and I do apologise to any customer who has received less than satisfactory support from us during this time. Whilst we have a close relationship with eBay and under non-disclosure were made aware of many of the changes, we did have one or two surprises that we have endeavoured to work with. Any outstanding NSE related bugs ARE being worked on and resolutions will be available very soon to all migrated customers on subscription.

    I understand that due to issues with (the now refunded) website that we could not deliver for you satisfactorily, we offered you a free NSE upgrade which you accepted. As far as I can see, that is in place, is being used, (and at least in my opinion), looks very good, and surely has helped your eBay business succeed.

    As your NSE upgrade was provided to you for free, and that we are committed to resolve any outstanding NSE bugs, you are familiar with the ticketing process and have direct email and mobile access to our CEO for escalation, I am a little at a loss to understand what more we can do for you. You are clearly frustrated and are exercising your right to vent anger, but we are trying to help and I believe have provided a number of channels to assist you.

    If you would like us to take steps to de-install your design and cancel your (free) subscription, please let us know and we will take the necessary action.

65. @jimbo (62)

    I’m sorry that you have lost confidence in our ability to support your NSE store. We have to date migrated over 1,000 clients to this new environment so I am puzzled as to why you believe there is a problem. As you have already paid for your design, the minimal ongoing cost to maintain that through our platform seems a shame. We would of course be happy to understand what issues you believe are outstanding if you submit a support ticket.

    With regards to the outage on April 26th, our Content Delivery Network continued to function without any outage despite one of our webservers failing for the 90 minute period previously reported. As I was personally working on resolving that issue and online throughout, I was able to monitor the CDN network throughout and can assure that whilst some of our users were not able to access their Frooition portal, live eBay listings were not disrupted.

66. @dominic

    We are aware of the pop-up blocker issue that affects some clients, and we are actively working on a fix for that at the moment – as soon as we have an update, we will communicate this with all clients.

67. I too had the frooition website which was a complete waste of money, I too was promised updates and an upgrade to the new platfrom but it never happened, from reading this it seems other customers were offered a refund on this and free NSE upgrade, why was i not offered this?????

    From my experience frooition promise a lot and deliver very little, We had the category problem in the listings and after 4 separate support tickets and 4 identical copy and pasted answers i was told there was no problem, I then called and was told it was a known fault and would be fixed later that day, even got an email from support saying it was now fixed but it wasn’t. Why are you lying to your paying customers????

    We have now gone elsewhere for our websites, and ebay design, money which could have gone to frooition if you have handled things better. I feel a lot better now i have done this with no worry of our listings breaking when frooition mess up again or go altogether.

68. Frooition sorry but you are wrong eBay listings were disrupted on the 26th (as noted on the power seller boards, in earlier posts on this thread (eg #15)& in the tamebay forum https://www.tamebaynew.wpengine.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=18&t=2440.

    With regard to the pop up blocker please could you give an example were a client is not effected?

    PS to quote from Frooition post #60 “I understand from our development team that all outstanding NSE bugs have now been resolved” ahem!

69. @Neil

    I am sorry that you have not had a satisfactory experience with our services; as per earlier comments, our support department struggled during the peak of the NSE release with the sheer volume of sites affected with the eBay changes, but we did our best to ensure continuity of service to all our customers.

    Obviously our management have the discretion to offer refunds and/or incentives on a case-by-case basis, but our primary concern and focus has been to continue to provide the continuity of service during this migration period.

    We certainly don’t lie to customers, paying or otherwise but are endeavouring to do our best.

    Obviously it is your choice to take your business elsewhere, if you have paid us to do your original design brief, you are free to do whatever you like with that as you own it. I do note however you are currently still using our services for store and listing, and they look extremely good, and I hope you reconsider and continue to work with us. The eBay NSE project has brought many changes and challenges to us but we believe we have now got through the majority of the issues and can improve our service levels very quickly.

70. @jimbo

    For all our listings we use static data for images, descriptions etc., and these are all hosted on our CDN network which remained operational during that period. There will have been some disruptions in “More Items” and other promotion boxes to some viewers during this time. To see the exact picture, this https://www.frooition.com/bandwidth.png is a graph showing bandwidth for the few days before, during and after.

    The pop-up blocker is, I believe, not an issue for users that do not automatically block pop-ups, and as you quite correctly pointed out (ahem indeed), this is one outstanding issue that is being actively resolved.

71. @ Froo

    We are still using the frooition template but only for a few days, All the design work you see was not done by frooition, They are all our graphics we supplied you to overwrite the original frooition ones.

72. @Froo

    we offered you a free NSE upgrade which you accepted. As far as I can see, that is in place, is being used, (and at least in my opinion), looks very good, and surely has helped your eBay business succeed.

    When I was offered the free NSE ‘upgrade’ it was on condition of offering a ‘positive testimonial’ about Frooition’s services. When I insisted on a refund for the website, the offer of a free NSE upgrade was withdrawn. I can produce the correspondence on this thread, if you wish.

    Since the NSE ‘upgrade’ was installed our eBay sales have fallen by 20%. Our website and walk-up sales have grown.

    our support department struggled during the peak of the NSE release with the sheer volume of sites affected with the eBay changes

    Fair enough, but why only say so now? Was introducing a £199 per hour support charge the way you intended to ‘rebuild your reputation’? You still haven’t explained why your website states that you cannot guarantee to answer help ticktes.

    Re server outage 26 April – listings did NOT display. I asked 3 friends to view my items. None of them could view the items properly – they all got the ‘site under maintenance’ message.

    This is not ‘old ground’ – these issues are unresolved.

73. Hi I am ebay developer I have nothing to do with froo but I dont have some info that may be of interest with regard to the pop up blocking.

    Froos ebay star item (left & right panels) is a flash driven widget developed using the ebay api, as far as ebay rules with regard to flash driven widgets you can NOT use action script 3 to redirect the main browser window with a link its a sandbox rule breaker, there for a pop up window must be open.

    An browsers dont like pop ups, I’ll be suprised if they resolve this problem.

    Oh and froo flow image pixalation problem is caused by the ebay api again, the images pulled in by the api are low res images and can only be altered by ebay, froo have no control over the image quality.

74. @savvy

    We endeavour to deal with all support tickets and respond timely; in the event that issues are being raised that are out of our control then clearly we cannot guarantee a resolution, but we will assist as best we can.

    With regards to your NSE upgrade, for clarity, please explain what you would like us to do for you.

75. @Froo

    With regards to your NSE upgrade, for clarity, please explain what you would like us to do for you.

    I will remove the design from my shopfront, on the basis that you send files containing all artwork to me, and you refund the £99 + vat that I paid, to my credit card – and you should also confirm you’ll do the same for other Frooition customers who request this. If the vast majority of your customers are happy with the NSE ‘upgrade’ then you shouldn’t have anything to lose and you’ll be demonstrating confidence in your product.

    Personally, I would not have paid the upgrade fee if I’d been informed that the design would be missing from custom / category pages. The overall design is a pale imitation of what it was previously and I’m also very disappointed with the look and functionality of the promotion boxes and the Frooflow box.

    I will keep my Frooition template listings running until I have a new design in place.

    On the issue of support tickets, it looks like we’re never going to agree – I’ve had too many bad experiences with tickets being ignored, deleted or responded with the same cut & paste irrelevant answers times over. If you continue to insist that this wasn’t the case then I don’t see how I could ever trust your word in the future.

76. These links may also be of interest to existing / potential Frooition customers

    https://kidsontalks.com/2009/03/04/frooition-ebay-store-upgrade-to-cost-99-vat-so-not-fifty-quid-then/

    https://kidsontalks.com/2009/04/30/what-should-you-charge-for-support/

    https://www.ukbusinessforums.co.uk/forums/showthread.php?t=80292

77. @ Lee – that’s interesting. I might have to have a look at this in my eBay development. I am going to try to get rid of the pop up issue with some of my clients still with Frooition shops (now dwinding, soon only one – which has driven me to step up any eBay developments plans I had, as I am having to re-design the templates at LEAST as they are the money spinners and the ones that break all the time)

    @ Froo – for my clients outages have been confined suspiciously to evenings and weekends UK time. Do you switch off when you go home? I have also picked up these trends on the eBay forums.

78. @liz

    good luck im not sure if there is a supported action script work around ie. “_self” that ebay allows.

    froo i fear is done for! this is what happens when you ask for £1000 a store and dont even give free updates.

79. #75 With respect, Paul, blog comments aren’t appropriate places to be negotiating or renegotiating business contracts, especially not on behalf of other companies who may have different requirements to you. Perhaps the time has come for you to contact Frooition again directly, rather than continuing to post on this thread.

80. @Chris,

    You might be right that this is not the place to negotiate business contracts. I contacted Frooition directly several weeks ago on this. It’s not until this article and subsequent thread that Frooition have shown any interest in responding positively.

    Frooition obviously know who I am and they have my contact details.

    I’d imagine that any FROO customer who was disappointed by the gap in what FROO promised for their NSE Upgrade and what was actually delivered would be interested in redress.

81. @lee

    It might be that it goes completely and I find something similar but maybe not as dynamic to fit in its place. I must admit action script is not something I know a whole deal about and would probably fudge it.

    If I find a fix I will blog it anyway, even the less dynamic alternative. Hopefully Froo will fix it or create an alternative before I do as that would just be embarrassing.

82. createyourtemplate ( https://stores.ebay.de/sportsprofi ), justtemplateit ( https://stores.shop.ebay.co.uk/paragondarts_Accessories )
    and esellerpro ( https://stores.shop.ebay.co.uk/XS-Stock-Online ) all seem to be offering products were the shop make over is carried over to all pages, is frooition planing on offering something similar in the near future?

83. @savvy

    Paul, you have the direct line and email for the CEO – you have placed 19 tickets in the last 2 months and had 29 responses from us inside 2 months, we have been genuinely trying to assist you yet you continue to post very negative and unfairly. We’re not prepared to continue discussing this in an open forum. We will be in contact with you (again) today to discuss and attempt to resolve your outstanding issues.

    @liz

    The only server downtime we have experienced over the last 12 months was 90 minutes on the evening of Sunday, April 26th as previously reported here.

    @lee

    For clarity, we don’t charge £1,000 for a store, we charge a fixed one-off fee (less than £1,000) for providing design work and a monthly subscription fee for using our platform and infrastructure. Over the last 4 years, MANY enhancements and additional features have been added into our services that customers have enjoyed as part of their subscriptions.

84. Tamebay one of my posts seems to have been eaten by a spam trap. Any chance that it could be regurgitated? 🙂

85. @ Froo

    You no longer answer all emails, and you frustrate me with your lack of urgency to get our store upgraded.

    Could you look into the fact that the wheelbase eBay shop has not been upgraded to NSE yet.

    We expressed interest 3 months ago and We paid over 1 month ago, because the delay caused in getting a quote from yourselfs.

    We don’t want to be left with no NSE when eBay forces all stores onto NSE. This happens tomorrow and I will be extremely disappointed if our shop is not upgraded in time.

    Let me know directly or through this post if this will be completed in time.

86. I too have noticed a very large drop in speed/load times of Frooition websites etc on evenings/weekends. We have the fastest cable connection so I know it isn’t our end.

    Friday evenings seem to be the worst, when access can drop completely for an hour or so. I double checked this via:

    https://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/

    Frooition, I have a couple of questions regarding your website platform:

    When will we be able to offer additional shipping options such as next day delivery etc? This is a very basic option to implement, with access to the source I could have it done in around 20 minutes.

    Also, is there going to be an update to the platform as a whole? and do you have a road map document?

87. @wheelbase
    The link to schedule NSE upgrades is here – https://www.frooition.com/new_store_experience/quote.php – we will check your status and have someone contact you first thing in the morning.

    @pete
    The monitoring site you have linked is not very accurate – I just tried it and it told me our site was down when it isn’t. For a more accurate picture, try using
    https://www.websitepulse.com/help/testtools.website-test.html which will give you a timed response from one particular site.

    Evenings and weekends are certainly our (and eBay’s) busiest times, but I reiterate, since our site upgrade at the end of April, our servers are now running at less than 10% capacity during those busy times.

    I will update further on your technical questions on the website features tomorrow.

88. Pop-up blocker issue UPDATE

    The development team are informing me that we have a resolution for this issue and will be uploading details into the portal tomorrow.

    Savvy, we have taken the liberty of installing the fit on your store already, at no extra cost I might add 🙂

89. Good news about the pop-up blocker.

    I think the tone of Froo’s replies in the comments this week is much better acknowledging some of the failings in recent months. This is far better than the spin and marketing bull that surrounded Froo’s launch of the NSE. I think if we had heard this much earlier there would have been less anger and frustration directed towards them.

    May I suggest the addition of a service status / know issues section in the froo software. If we know that an issue is being addressed and there is a time scale there should be no need to submit a ticket.

    Hopefully now you can turn your attention to updates to the ecommerce website

90. createyourtemplate, justtemplateit. and esellerpro all seem to be offering eBay shop design were the shop make over is carried over to all pages, is frooition planing on offering something similar in the near future?

91. @ Froo

    It’s 12:50 and no NSE or phone call.

    I can’t get through on your lines.

92. @wheelbase

    Upgrading your store has taken longer than usual due to the amount of highly custom work you have but is now almost complete and you will be hearing from us very shortly.

93. @Froo

    You might have only had downtime on that one occasion specifically but your servers can not take the load, even if you say you only use 10% of your capacity at peak times. So some templates intermittently do not load at all and clients have unusual dips in sales at peak times.

    I even checked all those other ‘elements’ that you blame for templates not loading, and all were fine. Maybe its time to internalise template CSS too, if this is already available let me know as you might even save a client.

    My clients are voting with their feet, and one who uses £5.95 a month web hosting for his eBay templates has never had issues, regardless of the fact he has over 1000 listings.

    Anyway, my last post on the issue!

94. @ Froo
    Interesting to see the upgraded wheelbase-direct shop has a styled left navigation column and flash header on category pages. Does this now mean Froo can now do more with category and search pages and still be compliant? Will we see this rolled out?

95. @liz

    As previously discussed on this thread, a listing or store load can pull data from a wide range of sources depending on what other third party tools are being used (e.g. picture hosting, counters, gallery viewers), and it only takes one of these elements or sources to be slow to degrade the entire page load – you can use tools from companies like Gomez to provide element/source specific timings. If you are concerned about a specific site, subscribe to Gomez (or similar) and monitor a page hourly for a few days to identify the slow source. Gomez in particular can be used to time each and every element for each page load.

    Our servers can (and do) absolutely take the load – our capacity grew massively from the end of April and we monitor this constantly.

    @Dominic

    Wheelbase have some highly customised (yet compliant) features that are available to all Frooition customers – anyone interested should contact us for pricing and availability.

96. Hi Froo,

    Any news on:

    “When will we be able to offer additional shipping options such as next day delivery etc? This is a very basic option to implement, with access to the source I could have it done in around 20 minutes.

    Also, is there going to be an update to the platform as a whole? and do you have a road map document?”

    Thanks
    Pete

97. @ Froo

    Very happy with the changes so far, looks a lot better than I imagined.

    I think Froo went down the wrong road calling this an upgrade, because it not. It’s really a downgrade in terms of category pages and not being able to host custom code on the main body.

    If people are unhappy about having to pay to amend the coding for their shop they should direct their frustration at eBay dev team. Frooition have been proactive and in my opinion charged a reasonable amount to address the situation.

    I like the new layout because it fits all size screens. I have a wide screen monitor and the shop looks great in wide screen, this was not possible with old Frooition stores.

    At the end of the day, for Frooition to keep going and improving they need to make money. We want them to be able to afford the best servers.

    I think that Froo still offer great Value to medium and large powersellers on eBay, I’m not so sure about the small seller anymore though.

98. Wheelbase “Top 5 deals” still set off the pop up blocker in ie7 (default settings) see frooition post #90.

    In post #88 frooition said “we will check your status and have someone contact you first thing in the morning.”, they didn’t (post #92).

    In post #66 frooition said “live eBay listings were not disrupted.” and then in post #71 frooition said “There will have been some disruptions in “More Items” and other promotion boxes to some viewers during this time”

    Frooition quoted 3 different prices for the NSE in less than a month.

    Not the best of partners.

99. #98 I have to say that you seem to have turned a full 360…any reason for that?

100. #100 – 360 degrees leaves you facing the same way.

101. 🙂

102. @ 99 + 100

     Find another company as talented as Frooition?

     Our store is heavily customised and it was upgraded before eBay forced us onto NSE, so I am very happy.

     @ 101

     Very funny.

103. With Wheelbase Froo have done a much better job on the category / search pages when compared to the bog standard eBay layout the rest of us got, especially when they told us nothing could be done with those pages due to eBay rules. So I can see why they are happy.

104. wheelbase have a look at the shops in post #83. Frooition’s PR Dept is certainly not that clever. Why did you choose to communicate with frooition through blog posts rather than say the telephone or email?

105. @ 105

     I still prefer our shop. I spent a lot of time effort and money with Frooition getting that shop how we want it, we don’t have a standard Frooition shop.

     I posted on here to give them a nudge in the right direction. I didn’t want to be left with a broken store.

106. @ 104. Cheers
     🙂

107. I have had a shop built be frooition and am having a website built, but after reading comments and some of the issues i have had so far with the ebay shop, i wish i wouldn’t have gone ahead with the website. I listed items today at 9.30am and they didn’t show in the shop until 6.30pm why does is take so long to show, when we first have the software a few weeks ago the listing showed very quickly, not any more. My concerns are we want to grow our business and the slow load along with a lot of the issues mentioned above means maybe going back to std ebay, which for me is a waste of time and money, thats way I’m frightened to go with the website, ever though it is now nearly complete. no confidence now in Frooition software.

108. #108 Frooitions customer service and performance is not something that is a constant. A lot of their customers are very happy and have not experienced the lack or response or performance.

     The only thing that would currently put me off getting a Froo website now would be the lack of basic features such as shipping options, additional product images and lack of contact us forms built in.

     I have customised many carts in the past, these are features that at most are a days work to implement so why Frooition haven’t done so up to now is a mystery.

109. Also Froo announced in #89 that they had solved the pop-up blocker issue preventing star item / top 5 etc opening but this does not seem to be the case.

110. I have a fix for the popup blocker in EI7 EI8 Firefox and safari, let me know if you wana buy the info froo I can show you a working example using api.

111. As per earlier post, we have fixed the pop-up blocker but users will have to refresh their promotion boxes through the Froo software for this to take affect. Instructions for this have been added into the Froo portal.

112. eBay’s “Site Interference” says “In no case may a member block, obscure, overwrite or modify any eBay-generated content or pages. All other site locations or components of eBay pages are strictly for eBay use.” but now frooition (and others) are offering shops with styled category menus (through out the shop). Is this allowed?

113. @ Froo, well at 16:50 there in nothing in my Frooition Software ‘portal’ or ‘Latest Frooition Software News’ of how to solve the pop-up blocker issue. Also resaving the promo boxes and refreshing storefront makes no difference.

114. Frooition emailed me today to say my website is finished, but I have been unable to login all day to the frooition site??? Not a good start again. the software is rubbish.

115. @froo

     My solution for the pop up blocker actualy redirects the main window, so no pop up is created.

116. @Tamebay Chris, I see that your eBay shop still has the problem with the pop up blocker. Have you tried to implement frooition’s solution?

117. @dominic

     If you are still having problems with the pop-up blocker, please open a ticket and we’ll deal with it.

118. #112 “Instructions for this have been added into the Froo portal.” No they have not!

119. @mitchkoi

     I believe my support colleagues are already in touch with you regarding your problems logging in and hopefully that will be resolved for you very soon.

120. @froo in post 89 you said you had “Savvy, we have taken the liberty of installing the fit on your store already” but the pop up problem is still there on savvy paul’s shop! Why did you imply that the problem had been fixed for “savvy paul’s” shop when in fact it hasn’t?

     Can you please confirm that styling of shop menus within category pages does not conflict with eBay’s published “Site Interference” policy?

121. @dominic #119

     The instructions are on the front page of the portal and you should be seeing this IF you have upgraded to NSE. Either way, if you are having problems, please submit a support ticket and we will resolve this.

122. Still unable to login in to frooition 2nd day today, business is hard without this what is happening regarding it, “frooiton says we are working on it, not go enough”.

123. @jimbo #121

     The pop-up blocker has been fixed for IE6, IE7, FF2 and FF3 – which browser are you using?

     We don’t style categories on search pages, if you are referring specifically to Wheelbase, their styling is within promo boxes – Wheelbase don’t use category pages, we have implemented custom search strings within promo boxes. For the avoidance of doubt, this does not break any eBay interference policies.

124. @froo I’m using IE7 with no additional pop up blocker, default settings.

     Yes I was referring to wheelbase, that is interesting. I had noticed that the URL’s were different to standard shop URL’s but categories were still showing on the breadcrumb trail. I guess that must be a search term rather than a category showing.

125. Ive given up asking Fooition for help – paying for it or not.
     I just regret 1,000s off listings with their templates