I have done software development for an organization of literally 10,000 people during my career as an engineer for the USAF, and I have to tell you that being upset about software cost overruns and difficulty in communicating is not a fault of Viart or any other company. The only fault you can assign anyone involved in software engineering is to those that have expectations that exceed reality. This is tough stuff, and I frankly don't know how the Viart team handles what they do! I'm impressed.

Hello
 
Ed, excellently put.
 
I too am really impressed with Viart, having bought it, I can finally get away from Oscommerce hell.
 
Viart team is helpful and even with all the questions and nagging, they do respond very well :)

Nothing more to add to that Ibn

Commercial success depends on more on good product management than anything else. Finding the correct a balance between features, ease of use, documentation, developer support and marketing is necessary for a product to have a long sucessful life. Cost is rarely a factor <$300 software purchases.
 
'Cool software' with a large feature set, tons of utility will get a small, patient, loyal group of users, most of which are sole shop owners or part time developers -- at $300 a pop you cannot get commercially successful off this group. That's a great start and Viart is there now. Their challenge will be transitioning from just 'cool software' to a complete product that has functionality+documentation+dev tools+tech_support.
 
If I were the product manager, I'd do a few things:
 
1) Encourage more user community support. This gets people involved, lets the core team work on other priorities. I'd start by chanelling support questions to the forums, rather than tickets. Then provide some incentives for experienced users to support one and other. (If you look at the current forums, there isn't a lot answered there.)
 
2) Engage more developers (vs shop owners). I'd give qualified developers up to 10 free licenses in year 1 in order to speed up the market penetration. This offsets some of the developer's risk, cost of learning, (good for the developer) and starts the market penetration for Viart. My clients always want their shops to be the best I can give them, if I recommend something new to them they will go for it. A lot of the time their competition call me wanting it too!
 
Soon clients want products that work like "theircompetitor.com".
 
3) Create a focus group that has 10 current users. Share ideas, roadmap, and bounce questions off them.
 
4) Release some basic technical documnetation. A db map, a few examples of customization.

I do agree with what Wazoodle has said.
 
1) Encourage more user community.
For this , i think they really have to improve their forum features. Especially the subscription thread feature and edit feature.
 
2). Engage more developers.
I have requested them for a detailed API documentation. They have said that they will release a simple API Doc in their next release and the detail API will follow on.
 
3). Agreed. This can also help us make a group of Contributors for new features etc.
 
4). Agreed