# Deconetwork awfull!



## PA (Apr 6, 2013)

Hi everyone,

We are just wondering what everyone's thoughts are on Deconetwork? 

A little background on us and our issues to date:

Along with the yearly subscription, we purchased "Decocoach" - mainly due to the pathetic templates on offer as standard. We also purchase Personal training which was supposed to make the whole process even easier. All in all, this has cost a quite a lot of monies and there is very little to show. 

It was sold to us as the best e-commerce software for our industry. We were promised the sun, moon and the stars. In reality, every ounce of Deconetwork is outdated, sluggish, irksome and difficult to use never mind the fact that it is hugely time-consuming. Unless you're a bum or unemployed, I suggest that you stay away! It will take years to achieve a professional looking and functioning website; that is unless you want to fork out serious dosh.

Support! - Pretty much nonexistent! There is one or two, all of whom seem totally disinterested, un-motived and exhausted. I image due to the poor interface (badly engineered backend) staff end up repeating the same information to everyone time and time again which might hint their lack of interest or care.

I could go on for hours about Deconewtok and how awful it is. Honestly, I'm finding it difficult to find anything positive to say. One might wonder, why we continue to pay them - the only reason that we are temporarily hanging on is due to the massive investment we have made building our website.

I would like to hear what others have to say of Deconetwork, reading forums on their own website I can see I'm not the only person with huge issues.

Also? Where exactly is version 7.5 and version 8? Vinyl printing and all the other bits that have been in the pipeline for the past few years?

Deconetwork = An overprice and glamorised Microsoft word - without spell check!


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## Signature Series (Jun 11, 2016)

I always shake my head when I read these type of comments from Deconetwork users, Inksoft users, etc. These are professionally based systems that take time and effort to deploy just like other professional business systems. They are not simple on-line design tools but complete business tools. With that comes a level of commitment a user needs to make. If you want a scaled back on-line designer Inksoft and Deco are not the right tools. If you want to a total solution including backends, inventory, shipping, etc. they can be of great value.

We used DecoCoach to create our site many years ago and we literally did nothing but provide them graphics etc and we had a live site. We also did personal training which Deco recorded so we could refer back to it. From there it truly takes time and effort to build the products, etc. We found one is much better served by dedicating several days to implementing the system then trying to do it an hour here an hour there. 

In short Deco has done everything they committed to and if a person looks at Deco just like they look at their accounting system their expectations will be met. If you go into thinking you will install and have customers designing on line in a day you will be disappointed.


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## PA (Apr 6, 2013)

Thanks for your reply and input Signature Series. Out of interest. Have you continued to use Deconetwork?

Yeah, it's a pity, but unfortunately, their UK division seems pretty clueless or was, at least. I think of late they have closed their UK office? Slowly but surely every contact we had no longer works for the company and all support is now diverted to the US. 

For us and the rest of the UK, this product was sold as an eCommerce solution with an online designer to get up and running online quickly - with everything else as a benefit. Not the other way around. As an established business, I find everything else unnecessary anyway. We have accounting software for invoicing and quoting, production management, inventory software etc, etc. I'm sure or hope most businesses do.

The software provided on Deconetwork is clunky. I find other programmes much more intuitive to use, easier to set-up and price items correctly. Before signing up to DN I was told that they were going to separate their packages. In theory, this was supposed to let customers avail only of the designer and eCommerce software. This hasn't happened either. - 3 years waiting. 

Basically, I have concluded that taking your existing software and let say WIX or WordPress website, coupled with any basic facility for the customer to upload an image or artwork (lets face it, the designer is pretty poor anyway) that you could develop something much more efficient than a Deconetwork website - with less stress, less time and less money.

The only potential benefit that springs to mind is the supplier's products "smart select" however, unfortunately, most of these have found Deconetwork too cumbersome to use also and as a result, the majority of suppliers product isn't configured correctly - so you spend years fixing and correcting everything.


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## brenden (Dec 11, 2008)

Hi Brody,

Sorry to read your disappointment in Deco, but thank you for sharing.

Signature is right that DecoNetwork is not a install and get up and running. A system as sophisticated as DecoNetwork needs time to setup and configure.

If you are simply looking for a website then we are not for you. The website portion of DN is really only 10% of what we offer. Business Hub and all the decoration-specific pricing rules is where the majority of DecoNetwork's value is.

I am genuinely interested in learning more about the problems you've experienced in person. Would you be open to a phone call to go over each of your issues?

I can also direct to you some clients who would be more than happy to share their input on how DecoNetwork works for their business.

We learn from experiences like yours and I'd really appreciate your time.

Were you running DN75? It might be that your site was not updated and I can certainly update your site to DN75 so you can take a look at the new release. It is very intuitive and has stacks of built-in help.

Let me know what you think and thanks again for your time.

Cheers,
Brenden


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## PA (Apr 6, 2013)

Hi Brendan,

I appreciate that what you are telling me is accurate, as I have painstakingly gone through the process by this stage. One major disappointment with DN appears to be the way in which the product was sold to us. While I do not wish to put blame on you, I certainly can point fingers at your sales team within the UK, and for this, I hold management directly responsible for. 

I have been incredibly frustrated with this system since day one, however, it has taken until now for someone to finally be transparent about the DecoNetwork package. Disappointment does not best describe my feelings towards DN and the lack of support and clarity to date.

To answer your question regarding 7.5. no, we are not running on this version. I know it was recently released, however, no one has mentioned this as an option for us, nor can I see an upgrade button? 

Reading your online forums and meeting others at trade fairs, I know that we were not the only people experiencing these issues, which allude to a problem within DN sales or management and precedent of misinforming people to achieve new sign-ups.

While I wished my problems with DecoNetwork stopped here, they don't. They continue throughout every element of the management fulfilment and business hub. Without insult, each is difficult and clumsy, not sophisticated. Every portion of DN appears to be engineered to be sluggish, literally every little thing you try to achieve feels impossible. Even the interface is poorly designed. It reminds me of my very first Mac from the early 90's, but this isn't the 90's anymore. 

A streamlined and intuitive version is badly required. I would suggest part of the issues is that there is too much on DN and as a result, it is badly serviced and awkward to use. I guess this is also a huge part of the issue with the delay in finalising and releasing version 8?

I have had several phone calls with your support staff and our personal trainer in the past. All of which knew of my frustrations and anger with Deconetwork but failed to provide a resolution or educate us about the system and what it is really sold to be.

Your phone support insist on using the ticketing system - I have unanswered issues for nearly two months. I have pretty much hassled phone support for a reply to another email dating back to January. 

Brendan, there is a multitude of problems starting from the very core. Again, going back to your Deco Network forums I know this won't come as a surprise, as I can see hundreds of your customers with the same issues. 

I started this message to collect experiences and feedback from other DecoNetwork users.


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## brenden (Dec 11, 2008)

Hi there,

Thanks for your detailed response.

Much of what you seem to be challenged with was the focus of DN75. A complete new user interfaced designed to streamline tasks, and the speed around the designer, etc is completely gone with our new SVG designer. I'd love to give you a preview.

There were a number of emails sent out regarding DN75 but quite often we find the people using it are not always the ones getting the emails so sorry if this was the case here.

Your points are 100% valid and I'd love the opportunity to walk and talk through each of them one by one on a call if you can make yourself available.

I'll also be sure to share your direct feedback with our team because it's from feedback like this that we learn to do it better.

I'm based in Sydney so a time in my evening would be morning for you.

Would this be possible? Cheers.


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## scoobylyn (Jun 2, 2015)

I have to agree that it's a great concept but way short of the mark. I joined when they had a UK office that is now gone. The prices have hiked up and we still have very limited UK product catalogues. Templates are awful and very backwards. You can go to pretty much any of the ecommerce builders and its relatively easy to build a not so bad looking site pretty quickly. With DN there's next no nothing in the way of templates and if you want to do any editing which lets face it that needs to be done... But it's another ££. That should be free! 

Designer is clunky and complicated and customers will walk away if it doesn't work the first time. 

Don't get me started on the pricing for embroidery. It's still dreadful. Auto digitising does not give professional results and cannot be relied upon to price per 1000 stitches. You certainly shouldn't rely on it to stitch well. 

Business Hub I do like though 😀

Sent from my E6853 using Tapatalk


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## brenden (Dec 11, 2008)

Hi,

I'd like to understand more about your pricing issues as we don't hear this from other clients. We use classic embroidery pricing of stitch count by quantity. i.e.:










My understanding is you want the left chest free and then charge for other areas?

As stated in other posts this is possible. You will of course need to modify your products to make the left chest use a different price method compared to your other areas.

i.e. you will create one embroidery price table as above with charges.

Then you will make another embroidery price table that is 100% free.

You will make your charged price table be the default table that all your decoration areas use (i.e. sleeve, back, front, etc), but then make your left chest location use the 'Free' price table:

i.e.:










As with any system you will need to spend some time adjust the settings and options to chose your needs. Most clients don't offer 'free' embroidery but instead adjust their garment price and charge for the first location so in the end it ends up being the correct price they need.

What other pricing issues are you running into?


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## brenden (Dec 11, 2008)

One more quick point! We actually don't do auto digitising. While Wilcom is the best software out there and our technology is powered by the Wilcom engine, auto digitizing is just not there yet so we deliberately don't provide this.

What we do provide is a stitch estimating of bitmap to stitches which our testing has show the estimated stitch count comes within 10% of the real embroidery design.

This was established by taking professionally digitized embroidery designs and converting them to a flat color bitmap image. That image was then uploaded to DecoNetwork and the system created a stitch estimation. 

For example:









Here is an embroidery file sample from Wilcom's software. This was digitized by a professional embroidery digitizer. Wilcom shows it has 23,816 stitches.

When I take a bitmap capture of that frog and upload it at 1 scale to DecoNetwork it estimates a stitch count of 28,467. Approximately 17% higher than the original. The next question is why is it different?

Take any one design and pass it to 5 digitizers and they will all have different stitch counts. It's a thing I struggled with as an embroidery digitizer myself because my sales team would want me to estimate the number of stitches it a design and mostly it was guessing.

Each digitizer has their own way of digitizing. Some put it more or less underlay, or use more or less top stitching.

You may find in general you use less stitches therefore you need to tell DecoNetwork this so when estimating your designs it will use less.

You do this in the 'Approx stitches per sq cm' setting in Admin > Decoration Processes > Decoration Pricing screen:










I adjusted mine down by 17% to 870 stitches per square inch. The 1,000 figure came from the old way of doing stitch count. Some people might remember the old grid format! Those were the days...

I then upload the design again with my adjust per-square inch value and the results came to:










Very close. Now only 3.9% difference and I think closer than any human could possibly estimate the stitch.

Are you finding the system is estimating more or less stitches in a design?

I'd do some tests like I did. Take some of your real designs, convert them to bitmap, then upload and compare. Just make sure when you upload the design to the designer that you set the white to transparent otherwise it will assume you want to sew the white and that will make for a much larger design!

Hope this helps.


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