Considering Interspire

Hi Photo,

Thank you for your enquiry.

1 - Potentially, but we do not have anything concrete from them in this regard.  PA-DSS is not a requirement, the most important factors are the payment gateway choice and the impact it has on your hosting and your own PCI-DSS requirements.  Many of our clients are PCI compliant using the Community Edition of Magento and that is not PA-DSS compliant.  To our knowledge it's not a requirement for PCI-DSS (yet) and customisation of the software (which will surely always happen) could lead to PA-DSS non-compliancy at any rate!

2 - To a degree.  There have been issues with some payment gateways, ebay uk integration, localisations etc.  However there are no issues we or our clients regard as 'deal breakers' and we do have a lot of UK Interspire clients who are quite happy with their software.  That said they are focused on the US and this does reflect in their offerings.

3 - iframe implementations can have problems associated with them, are you determined to go with Sage?  There are a variety of offsite implementations available, with and without Sage.  It's worth bearing in mind that if you were going to go for an on-site gateway you would need to be hosted on your own VPS so that you can maintain PCI compliancy.  We do have clients using Sage on Shared hosting but as a hosting provider we don't have a lot of information available on their design decisions I'm afraid!

4 - There are programmers around, we do offer in-house development and have developed Interspire stores in the past - however we do quote on a per-job basis and we're (happily) very busy at the moment.  There are a number of clients of ours who do offer Interspire development services that we could refer you to if you wish.  Certainly I don't believe there to be a particular shortage.

5 - Interspire's support is intermittent.  Sometimes they can be very useful, sometimes they can be incredibly frustrating or slow.  If you purchased the license through us, you would get product support through us, so it's only when we can't deal with the issue that Interspire need to get involved, so you don't have any worries there as our support is fantastic   Despite some slow response times the support is generally good for Interspire.

6 - Unless you require either the product amounts of Ultimate or specific Ultimate only features, Professional should be fine (it's the most common license we sell).  However it's more expensive to upgrade than buy the higher license first time, which is a factor to consider.

And finally - returning to support, you get 12 months of software support and updates for free with your initial purchase, after this period you have an optional support period extension which lasts 12 months and costs approximately 50% of the initial license fee.  This is an optional renewal, but outside of this period Interspire won't allow you to have access to any updates or raise any support tickets, and so neither will we   And please ask as many questions as you like, why not email our support team instead?