For those who have followed me a while, you probably know we used to have a real website beyond this blog at Moonfruit.com. Moonfruit was an amazing website-builder; e-commerce; host. We had them for over a decade, I believe. In 2020, because of so many malware attacks on Flash, it was discontinued by Adobe and removed from basically all browsers. Moonfruit had been a victim at one time from one of these attacks, actually, and had shut our websites down for three days, I believe, because of it. Moonfruit, unfortunately, was solely built on Flash.
At the time it was stopped, Moonfruit announced that it had two options--redo everything from scratch without Flash or stop providing service. Needless to say, they chose the latter and refunded unused funds. This was a sad day because as I already said, Moonfruit was amazing.
I have been trying to find a new provider now for four (almost five) years. I am not necessarily looking for free, but at the same time, we only sell a minimum amount of goods on our website. I don't need a lot of bells and whistles. For the most part, I just link to our Amazon store. Moonfruit allowed us to collect funds from Paypal through our email if people wanted to buy in bulk at a discounted rate or directly from us.
Today, I decided that I would go with the Weebly set up: $13/month for e-commerce or $10/month if you paid for the full year. This was a great rate! Unfortunately, Square apparently bought Weebly several years ago and is trying to make it obsolete. When I went through the setup, Square directed me to its own website and then did a bait-and-switch where I was going to have to pay $32/month!!!
Further, I had to actually create an account to find this out. Once you create an account, you cannot delete it--you can only "deactivate" it. This is the biggest bunch of garbage I have ever come across. I will probably have to end up sending a "cease and desist" letter to square telling them all my information better have been removed, my account deleted, and the website that I did not set up or build, but which they are saying now exists (deactivated and without a domain name--because I didn't get that far), removed. This is a big pain in the rear since they are the ones who did not disclose accurate prices up front.
Weebly looks like a good website builder, but I had also looked at Square directly and disliked what I saw. I would stay away from both!
No comments:
Post a Comment