Since the beginning of the year, visitors of Texas Sutler may have noticed browsing the site had been rather troublesome. Weird errors, slow load times, odd checkout problems. If it wasn't one thing, it was another. But why all the trouble?

(Warning: We're about to get very geeky here.)<!--more-->

Since 2006, Texas Sutler was built on top of osCommerce, considered one of the best open-source e-commerce web applications. As were are a small business, we needed software that was inexpensive (read: free) that also allowed us to accomplished what we needed. When we first moved to osCommerce, it did just that. But as we moved on through the years, we wanted to add additional features to the site that osCommerce could not perform out of the box.

That was one of osCommerce's major flaws: everything had to be coded by hand if you wanted to make any changes to the site, such as the look or adding extra features. osCommerce is definitely a great package, but it can be very time consuming to add the features we wanted our customers to have access to.

Even after adding in the additional features we wanted, we still had issues with osCommerce. On the site, we wanted to provide our customers with the most popular payment options available, which included PayPal. After extensive testing, we began to discover (the hard way) that customers could not use PayPal. When customers attempted to do so, they would sometimes receive a message saying the item they were trying to purchase was out of stock or other weird errors. To make matters worse, osCommerce would automatically create orders in our shop once customers were sent to PayPal, making us question if we did in fact had an actual order or not.

Unfortunately, osCommerce has been slow to develop updates to its software and the chance of an easier to use version of it was still very far off. It was decided that Texas Sutler needs to move on to a new platform to ease our headaches. Little did we know that we were about to make our headache a lot worse.

At the end of 2009, we began testing a new e-commerce web application called Magento. A lot of the features we wanted to do with our previous store was already built into this app. After a lot of internal testing, we flipped the switch in early 2010. Not even a month into using the new software, we ran into trouble.

Magento was a powerful piece of software. Possibly too powerful, especially for our web host. Our customers experienced issues with the site being slow. Very, very slow. The site would work great sometimes, but most of the time it caused a lot of errors. Customers would run into a blank screen or a weird jumbled mess of code that was Greek to them. We struggled to get the site to speed up, which worked sometimes, but it would revert back to its ways of giving error after error. We had enough.

Being a small business, we just didn't have time to deal with all these programming errors. We wanted to be able to sell our products and serve our customers. We couldn't do that as most of our time was spent trying to figure out what was wrong. This most likely lead to us losing some sales as well, which is very unfortunate.

At this time, we no longer deal with the actual programming of Texas Sutler anymore. We have moved to the hosted e-commerce web application Shopify. Shopify deals with all the programming needed to sell our products to our customers. All we do is manage the products and fulfill the orders. This will save us a lot of time and frustration and, more importantly, give us the time to service our customers properly.

This is not to say Texas Sutler will be 100% error free. We may run into a bug here and there, but it's good to know that we won't be the ones that have to fix it anymore. If you do run into trouble, definitely let us know. We want to be sure our customers' shopping experience is as simple as possible.

Over the next few days, we will be posting about features of our site, the checkout process, and anything else we feel is important to share with you. We also want to be able to converse with our customers about our products, reenacting, or anything else you want to talk about. You can find us on Twitter and Facebook. We'd love to hear from our customers!

We do hope you enjoy our site more now that it should work like it should. We look forward to providing our customers quality goods for all their reenacting needs.

Travis Tubbs
Site Administrator, Texas Sutler