MarketDirect StoreFront Reviews

Integration of Market Direct Storefront (MDSF) with Printsmith Vision (PSV) created a Very Nice Automated path to production. This saves us Hours every day by eliminating the need to interpret email and telephone orders to create Job Tickets. Manual entry was error prone and slowed the process of getting jobs into production.
The integration with our Fiery is also Automated and eliminates the need for the operator to set up the Rip. It already knows the Rip Settings and Quantity so the operator mounts the requested paper and releases it to Print.
We also use MDSF for our Sign Shop, Garment Shop, and Advertising Specialty divisions.
EFI is doing a lot of work to make Market Direct Storefront a leader in the market.
Thank You EFI.

We create Store Fronts for many Clients who's users don't need to know about our production facilities.
I'd like to see a simple Administrative way to customize each Store Front with unique Contact info where our print shop is anonymous.
I'd also like to send the Order Notification from each Store Front to different email locations in a readable format so that Our Customer can see that Their Users have placed orders.
EFI Communities is a HUGE step in the right direction for Tech Support but there are times when 24/7 access to support would have been a savior for me.
I nearly lost a client because I didn't have access to immediate technical information to get their Store Front to perform correctly.
It's becoming quite competitive out there and we need all the help we can get to be the best.
I know that this is a Tall Order, and a significant cost, for EFI but other Store Front builders do this and as a Market Leader EFI should consider it.
With so many Good reasons to choose EFI this may be the weakest link I found.

I like all the different type of options when it comes to products, I appreciate the level of customization across the entire backend such as printing services, papers, products, design, etc.

Some services and specs, filled out by the customer, don't come across to our PrintSmith depending how you have that setup. We had to rebuild all ticket templates in PrintSmith (yes a second time) in order to link products up to ticket templates from our storefront. This was our workaround, some things still don't come across until recently, SIZE wouldn't come over from the storefront into PrintSmith, so I think there is room for improvement here. I like the idea of product overrides, but in the new version it is not working. This could also use some updating keeping ticket templeting to a minimum. Can't copy products that have overrides. Because of this alone, I typically have to create a new ticket template for every product, usually due to the paper. SmartCanvas is very promising, but comes with a large learning curve and even then I feel that a well thought-out guide would be very helpful. Fonts don't show up correctly in certain views and makes paragraph styled text boxes extremely hard to see how type will flow from the customer side. I will say the level of control with SmartCanvas is very nice locking fonts, colors, sizing or allowing the buyer to fully customize the product in anyway.

Lots of features and great security, Our 2 biggest accounts are Universities.

You need to be good a coding and HTML so you can customize your pages.

I love that the software integrates well with PrintSmith our printing and accounting software. The easy of using the different template options is a very simple process. Clients seem to find the navigation of the new site very user friendly and easy to use. The integration however was a very difficult item to over come. It was a very time consumer task to accomplish.

There are certainly features in the old system that would be nice to have in the new system - such as being able to drag and drop line items from one to reorganize things. It would also be very helpful if you were able to have more than 1 invoice open at a time to be able to create new orders based off multiple invoices by dragging and dropping into a new one. The integration with PrintSmith was not an easy thing - you basically had to recreate everything you had on PrintSmith again in MarketDirect StoreFront. We have spent years creating templates in PrintSmith and now having to basically recreate them again is crazy when before it was seamless. It’s also difficult that the pricing isn’t exactly the same from one platform to the other. Now we are forced to round up or down in MarketDirect instead of PrintSmiths pricing just automatically transferring.

The best part of Market Direct Storefronts is that all our customers say that it is so easy to navigate making training a non issue. When users can navigate easily it makes them use it more!
We were able to merge this system together with the EFI MIS we are using to run our business streamlining job creation and billing considerably. Same goes for the build(s) very intelligent software and easy to prepare sites. We probably use 75% of what the system currently has available to us; only because we haven't had the customer requests. The software has many further options that we are still using as requested by our customers.

We have had customers come up with a few challenges for the software but we usually find either a workaround using storefront options or reach out to EFI service people and they can either help immediately or have professional services build or add to an upcoming software update.

Fairly easy customization of look and feel. Plenty of built in UI templates for those that can't/won't play with code. Good user management controls. We haven't any any load handling issues even with almost 2000 products and 900 users. EFI support has been responsive and proficient. Good user support forums. It has integrated well with our PrintSmith Vision install.

Redundancy of some settings. The admin interface has lots of redundacy and is cluttered and inefficient. Batch product import or creation needs a LOT more work. No ability to batch publish items to categories. No ability to create snapshots or backups of settings to revert to in case of user error. Occasional random little glitches/changes (like sort order settings or other fine detail) that pop up occasional or following an upgrade. The inability to create a job template "on the fly" when creating a product that doesn't fit an existing template.

I appreciate that it has a look and feel of an amazon type experience. Customers in health care don't know or understanding printing. They want easy or shall I say intuitive experiences that remind them of something that they've done before on common ecommerce sites.

I think that the maintenance of the store front from the "administer" side needs some improvement. The Admin area seems somewhat outdated. Limited in some respects of what other similar products offer in the space of day to day upkeep. My organization has to engage a freelance person who has experience with the tool to simply do things that should be simple but are really complex.

Straight forward setups. You can have a client online in very little time. Connects well with Pace for ease of job tickets and inventory control. As well as bi-directional communication with all the above as well as Process shipper.

In some cases we have stores that might have more than 1000 franchises that buy through the store front. When it is necessary to make changes and it needs to be done to many of the stores there is no easy way to address this problem. Opening up one customer at a time make a change and close, way to cumbersome when you compare that to either the universal importer or pace connection, where all changes can be made in under a few minutes. Additionally, the reporting is completely non-existent. After adding individuals to a site it would be nice to download all of the data to look for errors, missed data etc. No way to do that with this software. Can't even get to the Database to download from there.

There is quite a bit of customization and security that can be done with the interface, even with multiple storefronts.

I really like some of the new changes to the administration pages, which makes it much easier to manage all of the data we have in MDSF currently. Seems like EFI sees that their customers are using it for more products than they originally had planed. We started our over 10 years ago with maybe 50 products, and now we have almost 8,000 products being offered to about 120 different storefronts.

Tech support is hard to reach at times. Especially by phone. But at least when you do, the techs are quite knowledgeable.

Calculating taxes is a problem if you are selling outside of your state. But there are add-on options for that.

Overall the software is easy to use for both administrators and end users. For end users the sites are very easy to navigate and use. For administrators it is easy to customize site HTML and CSS if you have the skills, or it is easy to use the default templates if you do not. It is also easy to create and manage products, users, and user groups. We have several thousand products hosted on our sites. We are able to run our storefront job tickets into our MIS system with ease.

While the software is easy to use for basic tasks, there are issues with more high level functionality. Part of the issues we have, stem from some of the administrative menus being cluttered and confusing. There are also some settings that are only available as overall site settings, and are not customizable for individual companies. Batch uploads/changes of products needs work, as it is currently very basic and the products need further configuration after they are uploaded.

i have been using this software since August 8, 2008 in a fully operational JDF workflow that is the envy of every print shop that's visited. Digital Storefront and our JDF workflow made it possible for our very small shop to output a TREMENDOUS AMOUNT of small jobs very efficiently for both our customers and my staff.

buggy updates while updating our self hosted site.

I like how easily I can edit the site and how much I can edit. I've used services in the past where the company had full control over the ordering site and we had to call them every time we wanted to update or change anything and it really didn't work out for us.

I don't like that Market Direct Store Front and Print Smith Vision are very different from each other but expected to work together. It would be nice if MDSF was redesigned to match PSV better or at least integrate better. I felt like after setting up PSV I spent hours setting up the same stuff in MDSF. Very few things translate from PSV to MDSF.

This software is fantastic for streamlining the order process for our clients, and processing orders that would usually take someone a long time to manually process! The back end functionality is simple to use and set up too.

Personally when the storefront kicks back a technical issue I find it difficult to get the support with fixing it swiftly. Sometimes it takes a few days for the support team to get onto it. It would be great to have an easier, more direct contact with technical support for the issues that disrupt the use of the storefront.

We love the ease of use and the ability to implement this software throughout our company. This product has opened up more doors as well as new doors of opportunity with our client and prospective client base. We have seen a positive growth in business with a small percentage of that growth credited to this product.

There is nothing we like least about this software.

The product building features are easy to use and detailed. Almost any type of product I can think of can be created with MarketDirect in combination with VDP software.

The pricing can be complicated to set up and maintain.