Dreamteam Design Ltd EROL Business Edition

The amount of problems and bugs are endless. It 'seems' easy to set up, with a graphical installer and desktop interface for EROL. their 'version manager' which is used to update to new versions of EROL often hangs. It took me three days to set up. Contrary to what they advertise, EROL is largely incompatible with many industry standard server setups running Perl & CGI. (Works OK on 123-Reg, finally.) If you have a problem trying to get it running online, their support technicians will always dismiss you as if you are stupid and try to get you to switch to their incredibly expensive and notoriously unreliable hosting packages. Furthermore, if you have a problem with any part of their software, they just consult the free knowledgebase, yet they charge you £300 per year for this terrible 'support package'.

EROL charge £399 for a very basic version, yet it lacks lots of functionality which are pretty standard across other eCommerce packages, even the free ones such as Magento and osCommerce. No product reviews, ratings system, REAL database and a near constant exposure to raw HTML means EROL lacks a lot of features and overall makes it a terrible user experience.

The whole application has been written in VBA in Microsoft Access and is riddled with bugs that can often render the entire application unusable. EROL uses Perl & CGI which are so tediously slow, not to mention almost completely redundant. The original senior programmer (Pinakin Patel) has moved on from EROL, and is now a freelance web developer in Brighton who mainly uses X-Cart in his projects - Yes, that's right: even the man who wrote EROL's core scripts doesn't want to use it! Yet, EROL continues to run using his very old, and outdated code.

Don't be taken in by their testimonials, these people are part of a quickly apparent clique within EROL's community base, and also know some of the top staff members personally. They don't care about their users, and EROL is a sinking ship, they're just trying to squeeze the last tiny bit of juice out of it before they discontinue it.

software ok, too many versions released close together, you just get one version up and running , then EROL are trying to sell you another version.

Customer support and service is absolute rubbish, once they have sold you the software they drop you until you buy a support contract or until you buy the next version and then 30 days later you are left with the bugs and issues.

They dont even respond to a general support query over a recurring bug issue, and they do not resolve any bugs in previous versions.

EROL is a very flexible piece of software in many ways, especially design. The current version offers new sets of store templates that can be applied in one click, but I can still use EROL to create my original designs quite easily.

Their Technical Support channels offered are good and responsive, which is just as well as I have found a few minor bugs! That said, they were fixed pretty quickly and regularly offer free updates and you sometimes get new features as a bonus.

Overall, EROL is a powerful piece of software once you know how to wield it, but you may need a little patience to get there.