It’s no secret that we don’t like many of the ecommerce platform review sites out there. Most are scams. The review sites simply award the best spots to the company that pays them the largest lump sum, or the highest affiliate fees. Example: “Zippy Cart” – one of the largest ecommerce review sites in the world is simply a “pay-to-play” site where whichever shopping cart pays the most gets the better rating. Their rankings are absurd. Pinnacle Cart #1, Shopping Cart Elite #4, and NO mention of Shopify or Big Cartel? It’s ridiculous. I suspect sites like that semi-blackmail companies… ‘sponsor a review’ or ‘pay for editorial time’ otherwise we won’t review your platform. I hate that crap.
Anyways, I say all this mostly because I feel like ranting. It’s my blog and I’m allowed to rant every now and then. But also because I’m sick of people thinking that’s how this site works. We do not accept lump sums of money to increase a carts ranking. We get emails almost every day from marketing and affiliate departments, even some pretty well known CEOs offering us very good money to either rank their cart, or move them from #6 to #2 or whatever. We refuse every time.
The whole point of this site is we are an UNBIASED review site. This isn’t a full-time job for us, we review and post articles in our spare time. We do this for fun, and we do it to warn people of the bad online store builders (OS Commerce!) and tell people about the good ones (Shopify, Bigcommerce, Corecommerce, etc.)
Now having said that we do have affiliate links in our articles for some of our carts. So yes, this site does generate a bit of revenue for us. But money does not play any role in our reviews or rankings. For example, Volusion has a very generous affiliate program where they pay lots of money if we bring them a customer. That didn’t stop us from demoting them (significantly) when we felt they didn’t deserve their ranking anymore. Some of the carts we recommend to people we’re not even members of their affiliate program so we don’t get any kickback at all.
Anyways, I just wanted to get that off my chest. To repeat, for all those affiliate managers and ecommerce platform executives that are reading: no you cannot pay to have your cart reviewed. No you cannot pay to have us bump your ranking up.
Thanks to all our loyal readers. We really appreciate your support. As always, feel free to comment, ask questions, debate, argue, and of course add me to Twitter.