Classipress, Initial Thoughts
I have been playing around with Classipress for nearly a week now, and thought (as the email suggested) I would share my experiences.
Classipress it pretty easy to set up and for the most part relatively intuitive.
However my general feeling is kind of in the middle with it.
It seems to be lacking a few logical features that I expected from classified software, including a few things you seem to hint towards in you 'sales pitch'.
These features also seems to be top of your 'ideas' list with a high number of votes which implies that they would be a good feature however they seem to have been there for a few years with no action? Are appthemes listening to its customers? (there is a problem around not being able to see what support is offered until you have already bought the product as well, slight issue with that)
The first issue I came across was only being able to list an ad in one category. This seems a bit illogical, and I know that you can add ad's to more than one category from the advert edit screen under admin (though I guess appthemes aren't suggesting you give all users access to this??). If you can do it from the back end then why is it so difficult to do it from the front end? I have seem some comments about its difficult when using the cost per category model however cant see why this is an issue.
The main frustration I find with this software is to do with probably the most fundamental part of the site, the ad pricing/packages/memberships.
They seem a bit half baked and to be honest a bit thin.
The featured option is good, however I think it is handled incorrectly, it should be done as part of packages rather than part of settings.
The memberships packs and ad packs themselves don't have enough option/ability to add extra value for users/customers to pay more that option
Example here
https://members.apolloduck.com/submissions/index.phtml
There is a number of features that you can extend the ad/membership packs with. A must, and one that has been seemingly popular for a number of years now is number of images per add. Most all classified sites have something like this.
There is also ability to add links to outside sites, video etc etc
This shouldn't be too difficult to add.
So that's my tu'pence
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