I am quite annoyed with Frooition. After speaking with them I was told around £50, but all of my clients have had the email below:
Dear Frooition Customer,
As you may be aware there are some very important changes coming to eBay Stores.
These changes will affect your store and as of April these changes
will be mandatory across eBay.
See eBay’s New Stores Experience FAQ.These changes will mean that your eBay Store Design will need to be
upgraded so that it will continue to work in April.We are scheduling upgrades now that will ensure that the New Store
layout will continue working after April, this also includes many new
features such as:New Flash Custom Box Editor
New Central Animated Product Viewer
New Custom Page CreatorAs you can imagine we have a lot of customers (over 1600) that will
want to update their store design platform before the New Store
Experience becomes compulsory.To ensure that your store is upgraded before the eBay change you must act now.
To be guaranteed an upgrade before April, we must have received your
upgrade order before the 16th of March 09.If you order before the 16th of March your store upgrade will cost
£99+VAT/ $149 and will be completed before the eBay switch over.After the 16th of March this will cost considerably more *(edited to add: A threat? How much more? And why? The work will be exactly the same after the deadline?) and may not be completed in time for the switch over.
Frooicide in email form.
I have yet to see the new Frooition stores work on other eBay sites apart from UK and US. Ones I have seen on ebay.au and ebay.fr have not displayed correctly.
I dread to think what the cost would be if eBay tighten the javascript policy and my clients need a *new* upgrade for this.
Read what you will into this email, but I read ‘the robots are coming, we need to bleed them dry and run, run for the hills!’
On a lighter note : http://stores.shop.ebay.it/TM-bazar who used my CSS guides has upgraded and working with the new stores experience. An update to the methods will be done shortly, and I promise 100% eBay compliance this time!
Edited to add: Just paid Froo £57.70 (£50+VAT) for one of my clients upgrades, they have honoured the previous quote.
If you want to remove your Frooition design please see the post: How To Uninstall a Custom eBay Store
23 responses so far ↓
1 anonymous // Mar 4, 2009 at 7:36 pm
I read it as, “We had a management shake-up in December, we’ve burned through our investor money, and this is management’s idea on how to get revenue.”
I still can’t believe that 1600 eBay stores will break because of how they chose to code them.
People flushed hundreds and thousands away, don’t own their design or the code, and are now told to spend more, and for what? A custom store home page that’s busy and distracting?
Edited to add: Would love a link to your eBay shop etc, but I respect your anonymity!
2 Lydia // Mar 6, 2009 at 9:45 am
I read it as ‘This is a stick up, open the safe!’
They really need to hire a PR company to handle these things.
3 Liz // Mar 6, 2009 at 12:20 pm
This is an upgraded Froo store:
http://stores.shop.ebay.co.uk/reevawheels
It is just a landing page then if you click onto a category, its just a normal eBay shop.
Disappointing for the money that has been spent.
4 Liz // Mar 6, 2009 at 4:28 pm
And as a comparison a work in progress a CYT (http://www.createyourtemplate.com) store on the new URL for the New Stores Experience:
http://stores.shop.ebay.at/schmuckstore24
Once it is finished I will feature it on my blog and detail the funky things that happen with CYT stores…
5 Anon // Mar 13, 2009 at 11:16 pm
Were you sacked from Frooition Liz?
6 Anon // Mar 13, 2009 at 11:17 pm
Or made just pushed out because you did not fit in?
7 Dom // Mar 14, 2009 at 9:59 am
Interesting link to schmuckstore24 and especially as the design applies to all shop pages which contradicts what Frooition told me that, “Due to eBay’s new policies the design will not apply to the Categories or search result pages, this is due to an eBay change and will be the same for all eBay designs.”
8 Liz // Mar 14, 2009 at 10:47 am
Sacked? Sacked? Me? No, made redundant with about 5 others due to, well all the reasons why companies have to make people redundant.
I am glad they did, it was not like it was a happy place to work
especially now I would not be able to stomach their splash page design. I worked in managed service on the Channeladvisor side when there was one. Teaching peeps eBay and Ca, so I decided to continue and now 100% self employed and lovin’ it.
9 Liz // Mar 14, 2009 at 10:50 am
CYT is 100% eBay compliant (ebay.de are WAY more strict), they always have been compliant and always will be.
10 Liz // Mar 14, 2009 at 10:53 am
How are the Froo e-commerce sites doing these days? Yours is set up nicely, loving the pink. I see they are still built on oscommerce which I would have thought they would have moved away from by now, or at least the URLs!
11 Dom // Mar 14, 2009 at 11:26 am
My Froo e-commerce site does what I need and I have had few issues. I would like to be able to customise the homepage more. Also I would prefer thumb nail images on product pages rather than numbers to click which customers don’t understand and there is no cross selling option. We now have seperate log ins for the website software and shop software. All Frooitions focus is on eBay shops and the promised ecommerce upgrade of last summer has never materialised.
While CYT shops are far superior am I right they cost around 3000 euros?
I think the fact the NSE Frooition design only applies to a custom landing page has not yet been realised by most. It is something they need to sort out as linking to categories from the listing template, once the shop is upgraded, means potential customers never see the shop design as they will not visit the shop home page but go straight to a category page with a bog standard eBay shop design.
I just hope when they do manage to apply the design to all shop pages it will not be another charged for upgrade.
12 Liz // Mar 14, 2009 at 12:56 pm
It is true, CYT are around 3000E on both the eBay design and e-commerce stores. But in all fairness my one client has spent over £3000 with Frooition for an eBay design that he is desperate to change, a Channeladvisor store design and e-commerce website that is so poor he can’t use.
One of the staff won’t ring Frooition up with a problem as they are rude and short with him, however they are not rude and short with me.
*correction pure e-commerce is around 6500E dependant on shopping cart.
13 Dom // Mar 14, 2009 at 2:09 pm
3000 euros for each element or for a package including both eBay design and ecommerce?
14 Liz // Mar 15, 2009 at 7:00 pm
Yup, around that. They are the best and that’s why I work with them.
It is a design for life, not just for Christmas!
15 Mathias // Mar 16, 2009 at 12:04 pm
hi, just to correct the prices, our basic ebay bundle is 3000 euro (template, storefront, custom design, custom features) and ecommerce websites start from 6500 Euro, depending on the shopping cart system and the features. feel free to contact me for further information.
regards from berlin
mathias
16 Liz // Mar 16, 2009 at 1:12 pm
Hey Mati,
Thanks for the correction, I was thinking CA Stores design.
17 Paul // Mar 24, 2009 at 9:33 am
Prior to the NSE ‘upgrade’, we were very pleased with our Frooition designed shop. Since the NSE upgrade it’s been a massive disappointment. Much of the design work we paid for has simply disappeared, and the promised new features look amateurish and are ill-functioning.
Their communication has been misleading – loads of marketing bull (their website is still full of it) to get our money up front for the upgrade then deliver a sub-standard product. They’re only just starting to admit to some of the problems now but their customer service has been abysmal. If you send a question that they can’t answer, they just delete the help ticket!
We’ll give them another few weeks to sort their act out, but it doesn’t look promising. If they can’t do better than this then I think they’ll soon be in trouble as a business.
Paul
PS. From personal experience, I can also confirm that the Frooition website product is way, way off the pace (and very expensive).
18 Paul Vetere // Mar 24, 2009 at 11:52 pm
I contacted them in November last year to do our Ebay shop what a waste of time and £1000 !
It the design we is not a design more of a template they tweak with your photos, they say they will implement the design to the Ebay shop and all the listings. Beware you have to cut and past code into your listing 1 by 1, so if you have 400+ listings active it will take you a long time to change them.
I was told turbo lister would work only to find it does not!
There is no support nil non nada ! sure there is a ticketing system but they take 7-10 days to reply ! and delete the ticket if they cannot answer the question. There is no phone support at all.
The listings i have tired take an age to load and there in no way to change from the layout frooition uses in every ones shop IE photo above the text instead of the photo among the text.
To sum up, it has been a sham from the start and i would not recommend them to anyone.
19 Liz // Mar 25, 2009 at 12:45 pm
Support in any business is a thankless task, you are at the mercy of whatever the sales person sold, and in my time at Froo, this was very much the case. I am still puzzled why you can’t revise an Froo listing in firefox only I.E, a bug that has been going since before I left. It is a shame, but Froosville seems to be burning down from the inside.
20 Ian // Mar 26, 2009 at 10:27 am
I had my Frooition store upgraded yesterday and was fairly excited as the ‘marketing bull’ sounded like there would be good changes.
After upgrading I was browsing through the shop categories and was puzzled why the subpages looked liked a bog standard ebay store!….After cutting corners and eventually managing to get a human on the phone at Frooition I had a good rant at them they and they basically agreed it wasn’t good and that they could understand why I’m annoyed!
Its shocking that they kept this ‘big’ change in functionality quiet – all that was mentioned is a one line sentence in the FAQ – I can understand why they kept it quiet as they wanted us customers to cough up £99 for what is effectively a big ‘downgrade’ with some pointless flashy promotion box.
Anyhow I’ve asked for a 50% refund as £99 is a joke and they’ve basically mis-sold the product as an upgrade – and failed to mention in their promotions that the seamless branding is ‘no more’.
I am furious with them….If I don’t get a good response from them I am reporting them to trading standards.
Meanwhile…I’ll be checking those CYT stores, they look good…
21 Liz // Mar 26, 2009 at 10:44 am
If you come to ChannelAdvisor Catalyst I will be there with CYT! Free Jelly Bellies for all!
22 Ian // Mar 27, 2009 at 2:19 pm
Liz – Wish I could go but really busy just now to fly down to london, but the jelly belly offer is enticing!
Are CYT stores compliant with ebay policy on subpages? Frooition told me styling on subpages was against new rules on NSE and and subpages found with styling would be removed…though you can still style the pages at your peril. Frooition said they removed subpages styling to comply with ebay rules.
Does CYT use different coding which is legal?
Could you drop me an email to discuss in more detail as I’d like to find out more about CYT
Thanks
Ian
23 Liz // Mar 27, 2009 at 4:00 pm
I have ask my good CYT pal Mathias to drop you an email. This is a UK Store 100% compliant : http://stores.shop.ebay.co.uk/DesignerForLessUK
I freelance for these guys because they are just so good. eBay design to be proud of!