// Tiger Commerce vs ekmPowershop

So, in your first year with Tiger Commerce you would save £75 vs. ekmPowershop. Ok, so there's not much difference in basic software costs from year 2, but in order to make a full comparison you need to understand that ekm works out significantly more expensive than Tiger Commerce when you take into account some of the core services that you are likely to need to supplement your ecommerce website. What's more, unlike ekmPowershop, Tiger Commerce actually provides a number of these services at no extra charge to the basic software pricing. Read on…

Most new businesses need to register a domain name – Tiger Commerce will do this for you for £34.99 for 2 years (.co.uk domain name) and throw in 3 email accounts as well. ekmPowershop will charge you £109.74 for the same service (domain names are £24.99 /year and email accounts are £2.49 /month). Add in ekm's analytics package which is £4.99 /month whereas with Tiger Commerce you get free integration with Google Analytics (all the stats you will need provided free by Google) plus free Tiger sales and search reports for your shop. Also note, that whereas an email marketing suite is provided free as part of the Tiger Commerce platform (create and mail newsletters and targeted email marketing campaigns to your mailing list), you will however pay ekm a whopping £9.99 /month to obtain a similar service.

Something else that is included within the standard Tiger service is the option to sell digital downloads via your shop, but with ekm this will cost you an additional £9.99 /month. Also, note that you pay a premium rate for ekm's telephone support line whereas Tiger's is free. If you need to pay for some graphic design - for example, a shop banner for you site - then expect starting prices of £600 from ekm. Tiger's comprehensive range of design packages start at just £500 or custom packages even less.

So now you can see why many of the ekm customers who transfer over to us complain about all the 'extra' charges that ekm add on to their monthly bill.

Their advertising slogan is 'everything you need to sell on the internet…'. Now we won't dispute that ekm has some good features and in many ways they originally set the standard for hosted on demand ecommerce software when they launched several years ago. But time has moved on and ekm’s technology has not. Tiger Commerce was developed more recently, with its original version launched 3 years ago as ecommerce moved into its 2nd generation. Tiger Commerce includes all the features and functionality that you need now to make your online shop a success and in terms of ease of use for the shop owner, we will quote the words of one of our recent ekm converts; "Tiger simply crushes ekm on almost every level".

Tiger Commerce software is also updated regularly, taking into account the feedback received from our client base (we have a very active forum which is very important to us, particularly in terms of shaping our software development plan). Many ekm clients tell us that updates are infrequent and continually fail to meet their promised live dates – for example 'customer account log on' has failed to materialise despite promises that it is imminent over the last year.

ekm's software allows you a great deal of flexibility when it comes to customising your shop. But this does cause problems for shop owners as it requires a level of technical knowledge to fully benefit from this level of flexibility. Also, the end effect is not always a 'best practice' ecommerce design which doesn't help when you are trying to win over today’s sophisticated online shopper.

Now, Tiger Commerce has a different approach. We offer a professional, tried and tested template design which will give you an excellent platform for developing a profitable online shop. But we also give you access to a Design Studio feature which allows you a high level of flexibility to determine the components you want to display (e.g. Bestsellers, Featured Products, Adverts, RSS feeds, customised content boxes etc), where they sit in your ecommerce website, the colours and graphics that determine your shop branding and options for the style and layout of your category and product pages. But we won't stop here - store design features are something that is a focus for future development. The latest update to our Design Studio delivers enhanced stability, ease of use and will allow us to add on many more design features in the future. And to prioritise these design features, we've asked our forum members to give their input to our design update plan for the coming months.

We don't want to be too harsh here... But sadly customer service is an area where ekm currently have a number of issues. Former ekm clients who transfer to us always highlight this as a problem. Slow response times to support issues, deletion of negative forum posts, failure to meet update deadlines are just some of the concerns raised. Now it's easy to be critical, but we really do believe that customer service is absolutely essential to the Tiger Commerce ethos.

Tiger is owned by GForces which is now a 100+ headcount web management company. Our business is about web services as well as web software so we have developed a strong support team which can effectively deal with the day to day support queries. We also have a large team of web design and marketing professionals who provide an extensive range of services - we currently offer over 25 off-the-shelf ecommerce service packages as well as bespoke services. We're all about customer relationships over the long term and meeting our clients' service requirements as their businesses develop and grow.

ekm have an impressive looking 'Awards and Accolades' page on their website and we don't begrudge them any of it! But delve a little further and you'll see that most relate to 2005 and earlier. Our reviews are more up to date (2008) and come from some of the harshest critics in the industry - Personal Computer World, PC Magazine, Web Active, Computer Active, IT Week, What PC...

'An effective tool for small companies looking to get up and selling on the web'

'…it's quick and it works, and that's what matters'

'In terms of performance the reference sites all worked well and we were impressed with their response'