Comments on: Build A Niche Store (BANS) – Unsatisfied Programmer

By: Suzanne of New Affiliate Discoveries

Suzanne of New Affiliate Discoveries — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Hi, I feel bad that you are so frustrated with BANS. I do some programming, but the amount of time buying BANS saved me from writing my own code is enormous. How much is your time worth?

So you spent some time and made modifications to the code…is your current product worth the $97 plus the few hours of your programming time?

Say you’re a $50 / hour programmer…did the BANS software save you 2 hours of programming?

Your answer may be not to all these questions. Maybe you can create a better and more valid code, and sell your own product at the same price point!

But I’m surprised that you are so offended by the customer service. I have had nothing but outstanding assistance with modifying code, trouble shooting problems, integrating with word press templates, etc.

It’s not open source code so I wouldn’t expect them to refund the money AND let you continue using your code. You could have been unscrupulous and kept the code telling them you didn’t so I admire you for that.

I guess your skill with PHP is actually backfiring a bit for you now, but I personally feel that the BANS is really great software that has saved me not only hours of programming, but months.

By: admin

admin — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Hello Suzanne

You’ve brought up some very good points.. and I’ll try to answer them.

So far I spent 2 half days working on the code.. approximately 8 hours over the two days, not to mention my frustrating correspondences to BANS. I’m a programmer by profession, and my rate is $75/hour, is $97 worth $600 of my time? No.

I do roll my own eBay store front scripts which I’ve been using for quite some time. The original direction was to purchase BANS so my wife could quickly roll out store fronts, since my store fronts did not have administrative control panels, and any edits to settings would need to be handled via phpMyAdmin, which obviously was not ideal for my wife. Did it save me ‘x’ hours of programming?. no, especially since I had a working solution already, but figured the BANS solution would be quicker to implement than making a control panel for my existing solution.

My thought process of purchasing a turn key eBay store backfired on me. In the end I don’t use BANS (I wanted to roll out at least one store to see my ‘investment’ in action, but was so irritated, I didn’t), in the end I spent three hours making a administrative control panel for my eBay stores for my wife… which I should followed that route from the beginning.

As I’ve stated, BANS isn’t for me.. but I know that many many people are happy working with it, and are very satisfied. I definitely don’t hold that against anyone. BANS after all is just a RSS parser of eBay content. It’s not a magic program that no one has thought of. This blog discusses all the things that BANS can do.. and many people are rolling out their own eBay store scripts for free or selling it for much below the $97 cost. I think I just got caught up in the hype thinking it was the ‘perfect’ solution to save me time… but that’s just my position.

Suzanne, I appreciate your comment, and hope they keep coming.
Thanks!
hanji

By: Sherry

Sherry — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Hello,
I had the same problems. I could never download the total product. The “support” that I got made me feel like a 3rd grader. I learned some by using the manual. About the only item that downloaded completely.

By: admin

admin — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Hello

Thanks for posting. My advice for everyone… if you don’t know anything about PHP.. then BANS is great. If you know a thing or two about programming.. spend the time and energy writing your own. To me BANS is worth $5… if that.

hanji

By: Sonjay

Sonjay — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I too run a strict environment on my server, so immediately upon my first installation of BANS I started running into issues where the programmers had used short-open-tags and undeclared variables. The problems that annnoyed me the most were the many failures to escape data prior to inserting it into the database. People can’t write any content that uses an apostrophe, for example, and can’t use quotation marks for their custom search queries.

But the script works so nicely for building and populating sites quickly, I went ahead and made my own fixes, and I’ve been using my “fixed” script quite happily. I decided that fixing the script for my own use was quicker than writing my own BANS script from scratch.

By: admin

admin — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Thanks for posting! I’m glad you made it work. As for me, I still went with a custom script. I might give 3.0 a shot, not sure if they improved anything.

Undeclared variables was because they globalized those variables.. which is crazy talk.

hanji

By: Shane

Shane — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Thank you for saving me the time and hassle of using BANS.

I’m looking at setting up a few minisites with content and was considering BANS as a part of it. I will give them the benefit of the doubt and allow that there were some improvements since your initial post. Even so, I believe your experience is an indicator of what I’d be dealing with if I were to purchase the software. This would not be much different than several other pay to use PHP applications.

In the past I have experienced basically the same thing on other ‘commercial’ PHP scripts. I’ve come to the conclusion in general you’re better off to fix/rewrite a free open source app or build from scratch. I’m currently doing the fix/rewrite thing with a free open source arcade script.

Thanks again. I’ll stop wasting time looking for something that I should just do myself.