eCommerce News & Resources by oscommerceuniversity.com

In an unpublished article I started on October 15, I stated "Kerry Watson's new article was posted today on ecommerceguide.com. You can find it at: http://www.ecommerce-guide.com/news/news/article.php/3777841 . It is entitled, "Can Iozzia Get the CRE Loaded Love Back?". The short answer is no."

While I still think I blew off a bit more steam than I want to publicize so quickly after Chain Reaction's devastating implosion (or indeed - at all), events since then have made me reconsider addressing the issue in this venue though not the conclusion of my initial paragraph.  First off was the management of the all too expected eruption of steam following Sal's "grand return" and the unbanning of a number of long time community members who were neither happy at being banned, or impressed with claims of change.  One of the most vociferous was Michael DesMarais of Supreme Center Hosting .

Mr. DesMarais's persistence in holding a grudge does credit to his French ancestors.  His comments more than met the definition of "sharp", but were truthful within the limits of my knowledge.  Which did not make them especially welcome to the Chain Reaction Ecommerce (tm) crew.  What followed was a classic flamefest - which Michael details in a blog entry entitled "CRE tells communtiy to get F**ked" .

While I don't support his use of the vernacular, his description of the unprofessional behavior of the Chain Reaction staff and Mr. Iozzia's tolerance of it is pretty much correct .  This does not bode well for Chain Reaction's future.

Not content with releasing some pressure within the community, several of the offended parties proceeded to spread their ire around the net,  in posts such as Mr. DesMarais' blog entry cited above, and in Laura Wheeler's blog  -  particularly her CRE Loaded's Bad Business Example post.  This was just the beginning of the fracas.

Apparently, a number of Chain Reactions customers were contacted via email by the new 273 Loaded Project.  Mr. Iozzia's response can be seen in the companies forums.   In the interest of preserving the content, I'll quote it here - "

Recently we have seen some pretty disturbing counterfits of CRE Loaded. Many of you have received emails about a offering named 273 Loaded. We are not affiliated with them in any way, we have no official development communications, nor did we authorize them to contact any of our users.

While we welcome competition and forks of CRE Loaded code, we do not welcome raw re-distrobution of our commercial offerings with no added value to the store owner and no value to the community.

Typically these sites are run by people that will not give their names or official company locations or phone numbers. Anyone doing business with these kinds of people end up here on our forums later regreting it, and looking for help. Often having to pay us for legit code and support after having paid someone else as well.

Here are CRE Loaded you can get the official standard for free, here you can get community support. If you want the Pro or B2B we will glady sell it to you, and then provide you official guaranteed support. If you want to share CRE with your friends or hack it or tape the source code to a cat and make funny youtube vidoes you are welcome to do it.

Just do not attempt to misrepresent your offering as CRE Loaded. We will protect our brand, our community and our customers.

To those that find themselves hurt by such activities, contact us and we will work with you to get you going with official products and support.

To those that purpetrate such fraud under the guise of GPL, as my father often said, "I'll give you something to blog about".

_________________
Regards,

Salvatore Iozzia
Founder and Chief Visionary Officer (Evil Overlord)
Chain Reaction Ecommerce Inc.
Makers of CRE Loaded
Official CRE Loaded Hosting at www.chainreactionweb.com"

A look at the 273 Loaded Projects website yesterday looked more like the usual Open Source project website than a "raw re-distrobution of our commercial offerings with no added value to the store owner and no value to the community." - and an attempt to reach the site today retuned a 509 - Bandwidth exceeded error (often a sign that the host has shut down the site, especially when seen in the early days of a month).

In the meantime, Chris at oshelpers.com, after a brief bout of harrassment from Chain Reaction lawyers appears to be gaining some support from Chain Reaction - or at least a reprieve from their Cease and Desist demands, possibly because HIS branch/expansion requires his customers to buy CRE Loaded B2B from Chain Reaction.  See Magnum MVS at oshelpers.com for details.

I found a particular resemblance to the Gleiwitz Incident in this combination of events particularly given the use of Chain Reaction's recently discarded marketing materials and other images clearly modified from Chain Reaction Webs site in the promotion of the Magnum MVS.  This resemblance was furthered by the spate of abusive and intimidating private messages to community vendors by none other than Salvatore Iozzia.

Its all rather tedious you know.   Great amounts of time are wasted by this pompous, arrogant, egotistical tripe.   As one community member put it:

"I am not freecreloaded.com I am not 273loaded.com

Don't ask me about either I don't care...

GPL is GPL

Don't ask me what I know, I wouldn't tell you if I did

Playing these PM games is childish and stupid. Grow up.

If any osc varient needs my assistance for anything please ask,but don't waste my time with "he said she said bs" '

Well said!!   That pretty much sums up our feeling on the matter.  We are here to provide persistent support for users of all osCommerce variants.   We will go to the CRE Loaded forums to do so from time to time as well because we are community members with friends there.  But we no longer much give a damn whether Chain Reaction survives or succeeds.  They've lost that loving feeling...

3 Comments

I was reading an article entitled, "The Cutting Edge of Trade Secrets--How Far Should the Law Go To Prevent Misappropriation by Memory and Inevitable Disclosure" and what I found relevant to most small business computer networks are that employees often can setup email accounts and store emails on their personal home computer should the telecommuter - work at home. How can this be detrimental to your customer database, communications, trade secrets? Imagine a long time employee having access to every single communication between your company and your customers. A long list of readily available contacts should this employee leave the company. While they could argue memory recollection; alternative means of finding the exact same contact, why give them a leg up by allowing remote storage of such sensitive information? Consider emerging technologies into desktop virtualization to centrally store ALL applications and data. Emails, Contacts, Calendars, Documents would no longer be stored on an employee's laptop or PC/Mac. All of it would be centrally managed IN-HOUSE. Hopefully, we will hear from some experts in this emerging field. No Comments

Much is being made of Chain Reactions recent "reversal". Issued before I even completed my previous post it elicited a lot of (predictably) joyous and heated responses - see the thread at http://www.getcre.com/creshare/Forums/viewtopic/t=24174/postdays=0/postorder=asc/start=90.html for example. Having realized that their new model was yielding results substantially less than predicted, Chain Reaction is attempting to reverse their self induced misfortune by supplying a minimal added value to the community. The community is not having it - nor should they. One of the biggest issue is that 6.2 users are already feeling abandoned and cheated because their only option for ongoing patches and support is to buy 6.3 and then pay annual subscriptions. Why should they? Any reasonable application provider continues to provide at least one further year of security patches for their preceding releases and feature maintenance. That Chain Reaction should do so was a matter of policy when I was Chief Operating Officer. That it should no longer be so is a clear indication that the company has little to no clue as to how to interact with the Open Source community which formed its strongest market base. One participant in this discussion graciously suggested that the community should read this blog, as well as the blog of Laura Wheeler, to whom I linked in my last post. The sentiment is much appreciated - but its not going to help resolve the situation. Chain Reaction is so far detached from their community that the only answer is for the community to depart. I would ask anyone who agrees to register on the Open Source Commerce University forums now. I am looking for active participants in working groups for hosting, ecommerce web site services, ecommerce business services, ecommerce store operations, development and documentation. These areas need to be addressed by the community in order to build a successful project. We have existing infrastructure - it can be maintained and improved. Its time for the people to step forward and make their project great. How? Input and debate are the breeding ground of excellence. Without them the best programmers in the world stand little chance of producing software which is usable by a large enough market to make it viable - especially when the scope of endeavor is as large as commerce. So, even if a person doesn't know how to code, they can bring information to the table that can make the software better. If you're a writer, help us mold the results of discussion into workable design documents and rough draft documentation - then we can code the right thing. Want to help? Create an account today, and post an introduction telling us who you are, and where you feel you would fit in these working groups. As we build user mass, we can hold elections for group leaders - forming an advisory counsel that will help guide development and other project activities. Come on, stand up and be counted! No Comments

But is it? There seems plenty of reason to doubt whether the approach is either new or open source. My original concept when proposing CRE Loaded commercialization was to charge a standard fee per copy distributed with a 30 to 90 day support window, following which support could be obtained on a contract basis. Revenues would be further augmented by internally developed documentation and education offerings made available both directly to the public on Chain Reaction's own site, and via a distribution network of existing community vendors. The value of the software would be increased by ongoing addition of new features designed and built in house, and refactoring of the core code to bring it into alignment with the current PHP and MySQL feature sets and changes in the security environment. What has emerged appears to be little more than SaaS without the second S. Here is why. The "manual" posted on the latest incarnation of their website is a thinly disguised knock off of Kerry Watson's 6.2 Users Manual. They may argue that there are few other ways to state the programs use, and that just may be. But why can't the 'designers' of the software do any better? They should for example, have access to and include information on input formats and boundaries, and systemic capabilities and limitations which are not readily available to the non-programmer. Such information is not, as of the date of this writing, available in their "users guide". Their "educational program" consists of a page buried 3-5 levels deep in their site which asks the users to inform Chain Reaction of their educational needs so that content can be developed. So much for educational and documentation support. Their new releases are "subscription" based. But there is some room for question as to just what users would be subscribing. What does Chain Reaction deliver in return for its charges? Development? Please. The order API and forms systems were laid down before I left the company in July of 2007. An improved design for warehouse management was also in place and ready for development. Instead, Chain Reaction has chosen to proceed using the Multi Vendor shipping contribution from osCommerce rather than entrusting their own development team with producing a simpler more maintainable system. Refactoring? None to be found. Instead development has focused on piecemeal plodding changes which have made the software arguably more secure, but no more than PHP 5 tolerant and addressing persistent holes in systems left by ill thought out efforts to bypass a flawed attribute system rather than rebuilding it. Support? It is to laugh. Their forums have an arguably better record of problem solving than their support department, which is hampered by their lack of commitment to fully documenting their systems development and educating their support staff. Manuals? Well, we've already covered that. Leadership? Where has that been? You can't lead people when you are either not interested in talking with them or actively attacking their livelihood. Hosting? Most telling here is the reported closure of Chain Reactions hosting sites to new customers. If Chain Reaction can't successfully drive a hosting operation forward based on their own software, who can? Where then, the service? Chain Reaction no longer has nothing to offer that their potential client base wants. There is no model here. The issues here are legion. For a good outline of what has been going on with Chain Reaction check out Laura Wheelers posts on her blog at http://frumpyhausfrau.com in these posts: CRE Loaded's Bad Business Example CRE Loaded Just Flushed Itself More About CRE Loaded Some good stuff here, and Laura really hits the nail on the head. 2 Comments

In other developments, a complete redesign of the coupon system is underway. The first of a series aimed at replacing the venerable but dated Credit Class and Gift Voucher system, this project seeks to build a system which offers more flexible and powerful marketing tools to users of osCommerce based shopping carts. While the design is still preliminary, the table set already offers significant improvements over the previous system. A clear separation is established between coupons and cash instruments such as Gift Certificates, Store Credits and Gift Vouchers. The extended table set will allow setting coupon application criteria in either allow OR deny formats, and provisions for coupon application management will extend to categories, products, customers and customer groups in ranges restricted only by server capabilities. The use of plugins will allow coupon types to be easily extended without core code modification - a major plus for add on developers. Working design notes can be found in our development wiki, titled discount manager in the EOS Designs chapter. osCommerce developers interested in participating can comment in the forum topic "Re: CCGV Refactoring" No Comments

We are finally resuming the development of educational materials here at our nascent Open Source eCommerce University. A new Flash tutorial on updating prices and quantity with Easy Populate is in rough draft, along with a written guide. Its not before time. Its been months since we released anything new in the Moodle installation - but it is getting a face lift, with a new theme to match the rest of the site and new content to match. We will be trying some new arrangements for our classes, and bringing live chat to the table in the near future for those who wish to meet vendors versed in CRE Loaded, osCommerce and other packages serving the Open Source ecommerce marketplace. Look for a first release of this tutorial in 2 to 3 weeks max.