In the late Summer of 2016, PayKickstart was finally getting some legs. This little blog was turning into the engine that could. I built my entire business using the Zaxaa shopping cart. A friend of mine recommended them and they even had their own membership plugin.

How could I turn that down?

These two components are critical to my business. The shopping cart lets me take money and the membership plugin delivers the purchase to each customer. For six months, I build my entire website around Zaxaa.

Then one day I get an email from a customer asking why my payment link no longer works. I can't imagine what has gone wrong. There is nothing worse than a customer wanting to pay you and your website not letting them.

I find the page and sure enough, the link is now broken.

I'm baffled.

I know that I set this up correctly and tested it a few weeks earlier. I immediately reach out to customer support and discover that they deleted the product without asking me or informing me.

They have a rule that if you don't sell a product in a certain time frame or meet other requirements, they simply delete your products. My products are ONLY available through my website and I pay them to handle my links.

After a great deal of screaming and rage, I realize that I have to rebuild everything.

I have customers with a recurring payment. I can't leave Zaxaa for eight more months or I will lose those payments.

The thought of tearing down my entire website an rebuilding it from the ground up left me curled up on the floor in my living room on a Sunday morning weeping. After a few minutes of tears I reached out to my friend Mark on Skype….

A New Home for My Business
I began searching in earnest for a replacement.

There was a big cart launch a year earlier that a few marketers I look up to were using and promoting.

I began to read all the reviews and I noticed that they were turning negative. The company started strong but they weren't keeping all of their promises and people were starting to have problems.

I never trust a review that is all sunshine and roses. It makes my suspicious that someone is just looking for a quick affiliate payday and they don't care if they are lying in their pseudo-review.

(Don't worry I'll point out the main Paykickstart flaws further down!)

After a lot of research I decided to get the information from the horse's mouth.

I have been friends with Mark for a long time and we have promoted each other's products in the past. I've spent time with him in person and we have a good level of trust and rapport.

When I reached out to him on Skype, I asked how serious this new business was and we had a very frank talk about my needs and expectations.

I simply can't have another price shock where one of my tools breaks and doesn't even notify me.

He was honest that the platform was early days and they still needed to add in a LOT of features, but he promised that by the end he would build the best shopping cart in the world…and he did.