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Their sales people promised 100% customizability and said anything was possible. In the weeks and weeks of attempting to work with Flashecom we found that to be the least bit true. They attempted to make a template for our FrontPage, but we got a very basic beginner design. My team and I made multiple attempts at revisions and helping Flashecom through the design - only to get something worse. I would give a basic example of what we wanted only for them to copy paste it right into the template then email me back. I specifically stated we wanted something ‘like' this. A great example was an IStock photo. I sent a link to the istock page which had a girl in headphones. Flashecom literally print screened the girl with the istock water mark then pasted it on our page. I finally gave up and had my inside design team come up with a design in a couple hours. That design was leaps and bounds better then Flashecom's novice attempts. Then we got deeper into the design such as the check out page, my account page, etc. Our first ‘Account Rep' told us nothing at all was changeable - not even the generic cheap template images. I have never seen a website nor E-Commerce store that could not change images or font colors. We were scratching our heads thinking what in the world is wrong with this company. Cue ‘Account Rep 2', which was a little more helpful. He showed us how to change basic text colors which were claimed to be unchangeable. My design team had limited access, but made the pages look semi better. There is no way we could reach the desired look. After that attempt we moved onto the Product/Category page. Flashecom gave us the SAME run around - not changeable, etc. My team finally figured out on their own how to change the limited options on our own. Again - these were the options that we were told by Flashecom would be non-changeable. This is just a short window/summary into the calls and emails about the design. My team and I literally spent weeks trying to get something half way acceptable - only to get something very lackluster.

The next thing I would like to bring up is completion. Flashecom has literally been unable to complete any of the tasks we required at the start of this ‘partnership.' We had limited simple requests that in our minds should have been built into the software to start. Some of these basic features includes - shipping integration with USPS, shipping labels/printout, tax by county, imports, etc. On our contract it says if we follow the correct steps we could have a website up and running within 3-6 weeks. I stopped counting at week 12 or so, but it's still not done. USPS will probably never be done as far as we can tell. Imports were okay from the import side, but we had to have them correct it twice only to still have some flaws with ‘Optional SKU' and some random numbers. I still to this day am not sure what the numbers or optional skus were based off of. Flashecom's team was responsible for combining items, placing items, etc. They pretty much dragged their feet until we took over. Combining items doesn't even work because of bugs/inventory issues. My team had to REDO their combined items and placement.

After all these problems we began to have communication issues towards the middle of this project. Our 24x7 account rep was unavailable on the day we were supposed to go live with the store. There was obviously no chance of going live due to the fact nothing was even working (which it is still not). I would write multiple emails each day - only to get one or two responded to. Generally the responses were from the easy simple questions. The unanswered emails would sit until I forwarded them 5+ times with multiple voicemails left. Finally I would get a response with ‘sorry we just overlooked your emails.' I'm baffled at missing 6+ emails within a 5 hour period. Getting back to calling/voicemails - tech support was supposed to be always available. I found only their voicemail is available at any hour. You could call anytime from 8am-5pm EST (their working hours) only to get directly to voicemail. Their techs have no direct lines, but as far as I can tell there are only two working with Flashecom to begin with. The biggest issue with communication was in the middle of this product -- our dedicated rep just left the project! I don't know if she finally ran out of excuses or got tired of telling us no, but we got a new guy. Sadly we had to bring him up to speed. I believe their internal office communications is about the same or worse than their communication skills with the customer.

The above paragraphs again are just a short summary of what we spent weeks wasting time on. I could spend an entire day writing about their lacking and inability. We have spent 100's of man hours attempting to correct and work with Flashecom only to be left with an unfinished and unworkable product. In writing this I hope it can save others time and money on their E-Commerce stores. It has surely been a failed attempt for us. We are moving on, but still in search of a quality software/host.