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Just a Personal Point of View
On the Road to Customer Tracking Software
16-Jan-2006      by Susan Pichotta

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Part 9
Product: SHAREWARE ASSISTANT

The install doesn't start out so well... it's packaged in a zip file, and I have to unzip it. I prefer a nice, easy setup EXE. Which I do have after I unzip it. I like it that the setup asks me if I want a desktop icon (yes) and if I want it to launch Shareware Assistant (yes).

Well, the software is starting out well. Pretty interface, and the toolbar on the left is titled "Orders", with Day, Week, Month, Year and Total under that. They at least have the idea.

But ah, woe is me! They can't import my emails. My email software (Pocomail) can't export anything they can read. SHOOT. But wait. I also have a license to The Bat!. Maybe I can export from Pocomail, import into The Bat, then export from The Bat (at least to see how Shareware Assistant will work). No, I can't do that (which is rather distressing, as it means I can't move from Pocomail to The Bat, even if I wanted to!).

But there has to be a way (now I'm feeling a challenge). Enter Aid4Mail from Fookes Software. It appears to convert everything email related to anything email related, and then some. It was the work of a few seconds to download and install it, and it worked really slick, once I figured out the interface (which only took a few seconds more). Excellent!

So, I had Shareware Assistant import a bunch of order emails... but nothing appeared in the window... I had to press the "Total" button (maybe theyshould make that default?). And then... there they were. My customers. My orders. And with one little checkbox during the import process, it created all the products on the fly, based on the information in the emails. VERY cool.

But I really don't like it that there is one entry per order. I'd prefer one entry per customer, with separate records for each order -- the typical one customer - many invoices relationship. Because one customer might order multiple things, or order multiple times. The way it is, what will I do to update a customer's email address, if he's in my data file multiple times? (Which happens a lot.) Update it again and again in all the different records? (That's no good.)

Another problem is the mailing list. Shareware Assistant lets you build a mailing list with a query, and the built-in query builder is easy and obvious. Unfortunately, it's broken. My queries either return nothing, or everyone in the database.

Most of the meat is in one little menu item, "Stat Report". Here, you can look at totals by time period, by product, or by both. These are nice, but I have one very large question, HOW DO YOU PRINT THEM? It appears that you can only view the "Reports" on screen, or save them to a file (XLS, CSV, XML). That's bogus, I want a real report! That means on paper. But, the data presented is very cool, and they even have pretty graphs. I do like that.

While we're thinking about statistics, I'd like some stats by country, and by geographic area would be nice, too (Europe vs. North America, for instance), but I don't see anything for that.

And there isn't anything to track the source of the sale: AdWords, other advertisements, etc. That's a big minus.