AmmoReady

Pros: You will get a website set up...Eventually. The payment processor that they partner with, Fortis, is a good name in the industry. Which is just about the only legit thing about AmmoReady.

Cons: Sold a false bill of goods. I was promised all these different integrations with companies like Gun Broker and Ammo Seek if I bought their top package. Not true. They hide the truth in the wording. They will connect your site to those places, but it will not integrate. You have to pay a ton more for that. The website is super generic. Think of everything that you like about other websites, and forget about them. Additionally, it was well known that I was building a drop-ship only website, and I was never told that a number of their distributors don't do drop-shipping. And lastly, their user/customer interface is cheesy and not very customer-friendly. Routinely getting 502 Bad Gateway errors because they can't seem to keep their service up. There also is no SEO. If you're not good at SEO. Then you need to pay yet another service to make your website searchable.

Overall: I would not recommend AmmoReady to anyone that doesn't need a ready-to-go generic website. If you're selling a single product like ammo, I'm sure it's fine. But it's extremely overpriced for what you're getting out of it. And they trap you with false information to make the sale, knowing that once your site is up, you'll hesitate to take it down to go with someone else.

Pros: They integrate seamlessly with Fortis (payment platform) and Merchant Magic (POS and back office). Easy problems are solved quickly and the support team is very responsive.

Cons: As someone else said, they can solve the easy problems but more technical problems take forever. Expect to see your website down frequently with the 502 Bad Gateway message. They say they integrate with search engines like Gunbroker and Ammoseek, but I could never get their xml feed to work. I hired an outside contractor to fix it.

Overall: Overall, I wouldn't recommend them. I've been with them for about 8 months, but after today may start looking elsewhere. "Scheduled maintenance" which makes the website unavailable was supposed to be completed at Noon EST and still isn't 3 1/2 hours later. In my case I lose about $40 per hour for every hour the site is down.

Pros: Ecommerce platform.

Cons: Fortis the default payment processor, initial cost for setup versus what you actually receive once everything is said and done, customer support from AmmoReady and Fortis personnel. The high risk and level of effort needed by the business owner in setting up the website before it goes live.

Overall: The initial $750 setup fee allows you to add your logo to their generic platform template. A big waste of investment capital. The payment processor does not have any useful fraud identifying protocols and ultimately any purchases are left to the business owner to interpret and decide the validity even though the payment processor will "Decline" or "Approve" the purchase. Two transactions of mine were approved by the payment processor but ultimately charged back to me because it was later determined they were fraudulent, leaving me financially responsible for over $1000.

Pros: Easy to get up and running. The staff is friendly and means well, but consider them able to address low hanging fruit only.

Cons: I gave AmmoReady several years and my sales suffered. I would constantly find products listed for nearly free, like a penny or well below the distributor price when AmmoReady is supposed to add the markup value I selected. They do a poor job scrubbing data, what I mean is if you have multiple distributors and in their daily files provide just a part number vs a nice searchable description than that is what you get. Because they use SKU it is straightforward to create processes on the backend to ensure descriptions shown are optimal. These two issues drove me away, but there are more! MAP issues have been unresolved for years. Expect to see a few canned emails from angry manufacturers each week after they find the MAP value is not current or missing. Once again a data management issue. If a new value is uploaded, odds are it is correct. Same thing if all distributors stop sending that value it probably no longer applies.

Overall: If you just need a website and have the patience of Job then you have a reasonable cost option, everyone else should do a hard pass.

Pros: Absolutely nothing, the idea is great but the execution is horrible.

Cons: Bad planning and setup. Terrible integration with FastBound.

Overall: Still receiving charges even though i asked to have it canceled months ago.