Does it all

Pros

We've evaluated a number of alternatives and even considered building a custom solution. No other system provides the same level of features as Coresense: eCommerce, POS, back office, fulfillment, multi-brand. As an added bonus, even as a SaaS platform, we can pay to customize the software, which we've done quite extensively.

Cons

The back office software is quite complex and the design is showing it's age. That's to be expected though as the software has a lot of features, but it gets the job done.

Gives us a competitive advantage

We've been running our retail business on the Coresense platform since 2005. With Coresense, all our sales channels are running off the same back end. Coresense handles our POS (multiple stores), phone orders, web sales and gift registry. This allows us to manage our inventory most efficiently and economically. Also, customer management and email communication are integrated within the Coresense environment, which allows us to easily track all client interactions. We can generate robust reports using the parameters we choose and export the results to Excel. Inventory management, shipping, purchase orders, bar code labels -- everything is handled easily and seamlessly in Coresense. Web updates are simple. Coresense is web-based, so it runs on any web-enabled device and anywhere there's an internet connection. In short, Coresense provides small to medium size retailers with the feature set needed to compete effectively with much larger retailers, and at an affordable price. Having looked at other retail solutions over the years, I haven't found another that can come close to offering everything that's available in Coresense.

Pros

Robust feature set. Web-based, so it runs anywhere there an internet connection and a web browser. Almost no down time, and no IT department required on our end.

Cons

The feature set is so rich, it can be intimidating to a new user.

Has some nice features but some have odd holes and don't work as expected. Checkout is sloooow.

High cost and usability/functionality holes outweigh the benefits.

Pros

The main thing is that it allows us to support all our channels from a common database. It offers some but not a lot of 3rd party integrations.

Cons

Customer logon and going to the checkout screen is slow, generally takes 8-10 seconds to make the transition. It has an antiquated back office that's very hard to use, even by experienced IT folks. Typically the edit, delete/deactivate, etc. icons in the back office are too small/close together for ease of clicking the right icon. Not all icons have ALT/Title tags so you miss out on screen help if you're not familiar with the icon on a particular page that you don't visit often. Often the help offered is of little value. The back office is littered with all sort of artifacts regrading options/programs you aren't using. Back office has no sorting options for functions like the product and customer managers. The choice of how many items to display on a page ought to use a cookie so you don't have to override the default 20 per page every time you visit a page. Your only option for advancing to the next screen is Next/End instead of incremental choices, ala Google results. It has odd differences with what you can do via the SOI versus what the public user can do. Many of its templates aren't entirely responsive so you have to do custom work. It uses a single state/country table for both the public side and the back office. Clients may want to limit the public side to US locations but be able to order from vendors in non-US locations. Email template process is very poor. While it's expected, it's always disappointing be misled by sales.

A platform so nice we used it twice.

We first found CORESense when we were looking for a more robust platform for our web store. After numerous calls, meetings, and one failed "trial" and design layout with other companies we found that the people at CORESense "just got us". Working with their professional services, we created our store with some fundamental custom functionality for our specific business needs. The overall process was easy and relatively painless, one of the benefits to working with a group that understood our business needs. To this date that original store was our best performing online store/business generator. Fast forward a couple years and a change in ownership, we left the platform for another due to the new owners "knowing better". After spending more money than we had for CORESense the first time around on a "free" platform, the company changed hands again and we're now back on the platform that served us best to date.

Pros

It's incredibly feature-rich, with new features rolling out often. The developer preview area is very useful tool for anyone managing their own store.

Cons

Features and options sometimes "get lost" or are hard to find in all the text-heavy menus.

CORESense is scale-able and flexible platform that will work with you to meet your needs

I've been using CORESense for over 6 years now and have had good experiences with the platform. It's an excellent platform for non cookie cutter e-commerce businesses. In my opinion CORESense excels at making the software work optimally for your business. If there is something you want added (and are willing to pay for it), CORESense will happily make it happen. It also does a fantastic job of running multiple brands (companies & databases) on multiple channels from one login. You can also create logins that only have access to certain brands / channels. It makes it easy to run multiple brands with multiple locations. I am especially a big fan of the closest to customer feature that will automatically choose the warehouse a product will ship from based on the customer's location. CORESese is a complex program that can accomplish a lot, but once you work in it for a little bit you will find that it's intuitive and easy to learn and work in. I enjoy how it handles almost every aspect of business for us. From order placement (website, SOI, eBay), warehouse locations, inventory tracking, and shipping to almost everything in between CORESense handles it for us. As a whole, it is an excellent platform that works well for us, but it does have a few drawbacks. The cost of custom work (conforming the platform to you) is a little high, but I understand that developers are expensive. Also, on a couple occasions in the past they have pushed out stable releases that caused some issues with our daily operations. In there defense, they have addressed this and we have not had any issues recently. Whenever we have had issues, their support is top notch and get things resolved very quickly. It is truly a pleasure working with their support compared to many other tech companies I've dealt with.

Great software and support!

We've been a CORESense customer for 11 years and they have helped us grow from an idea into a multi-million dollar retail and internet retailer. I highly recommend CORESense.

Pros

Point of Sale Features and Ease of Use. Integrated Ecommerce Storefront. End-to-End Functionality

Cons

None for us.

Way more functionality than we need

You can operate an entire business with this software, which is great, but way more than we need it for. We aren't able to get a good value out of it since some much of the functionality is going unused. We only use CoreSense for basic eCommerce and that's it. The Salesforce customer service module is cumbersome, I prefer email.

Pros

Can run an entire eCommerce business.

Cons

Not super intuitive

Good Features in Cloud Based Retail Solution at this Price Point

Our business (11 doors spread across 10 states plus one home office) needed a cloud based point of sale, inventory and SOI retail solution and being a small business, we needed this at a reasonable price point with integrated support. CORESense is pretty much the only option and has met our needs consistently over the last 6 years we've been actively using their platform for retail use. It's been scale-able as we've grown from one retail location to 11 and as we have needed to add features, the CORESense development team has made efforts to create solutions that work with our business model. CORESense has continued to innovate and improve upon their platform and infrastructure and their support team is very responsive. They also offer integration with other business software (Mailgun, Avalara, QuickBooks, etc.) to further the effectiveness of their system and to help automate processes.

A Comprehensive system but....

System is very expansive and has plenty to offer! With that said, there have been way too many bugs and the website is not up to "today's" standards and is far to laborious for adding products/swatches/etc.

Pros

Plenty of reporting

Cons

Too many bugs and website not user friendly or attractive

Too many limitations

CORESense is good if you are only trying to do very basic things with the software, but we were told by their development team that we are aware of our limitations and need to keep them in mind when we are coming up with new promotions. We are a small business and CORESense is the most affordable (so it works for us to run the business day to day), but I don't enjoy having to come up with work-arounds for a lot of processes because of all the limitations that come with the software. They do have good customer support and are quick to respond when we have issues on our end.

CORESense = AMAZING, from simple to complex this solution has an answer to our unique requirements

The team at CORESense has worked in partnership with us for over eight years, and we look forward to many more!

Pros

The incredible flexibility, stability and ease of use.

Helpful!!

My overall experience has been amazing because I have now better skills , I learned more and I can handle my business better

Pros

I like the fact that made me save time and was helping me to be more organized and make more money because of using it

Cons

I didn’t like the difficulty to use but this difficulty once you learn more how to use it you became an expert and is in your profit to manage better