Live Designer

[scot]

You know when a company or a person is not up front about the price on a product or service you know its overpriced or a very large amount of money involved. I have been asking around about Live Designer's price for weeks. I called Melco about a month ago and the salesmen were at the Open house at Melco, So I ask the woman that answers the phone how much Live Designer was and she said she didn't know. I am thinking, how could she not know? They dont sell that many different products. I even ask on a forum and a Melco salesman tells me to call him. He takes time to reply and all he had to do was type the $$$. I would not use Melco Live Designer if you paid me now. Sorry, this pisses me off the way Melco does this.

[Steve]

I have Live Designer and my sales have gone way down because of it. Luckily I do this part-time and have a full-time job. User's are confused how to order and what they are ordering. I think there are about 5 shirts that have the brand name with the item. The only way to change it is to delete the item and recreate it. And Melco charges another fee for the dongle to do that. There are many issues with Live Designer right now and Melco won't listen to their customers. You can not set a minimum order plus you have to do the digitizing before a customer places the order. (And hope they order! I have digitized a bunch of logo's after they create an account and tell me they want it then never hear from the customer again.) If a customer wants a T-shirt with the name 'Bob' on it, the T-shirt is $7 plus $1 for the name. ($1 comes from $1 per thousand stitches at 1000 stitches. You can not set a minimum price.) How much money will you make off of this? NOTHING! I'm looking into several other options now.

[TinaK]

I too have been looking on how to do something similar to the Live Designer for my site and there are some flash programs out there that you buy outright they are not cheap however, but would cost less then having Live Designer for a year. You can always have someone develop a flash system for you as well.

I have heard alot of complaints about Live Designer...

[scot]

Wow! Steve and Tina. That's some good info to know. I guess you had to do a contract for a year. It would be nice if Melco would refund you. That is really screwed up. And yes Tina I think that's a good ideal to save a ton of money. The problem with Melco is that, they want to make as much money as they can off you in the wrong way. There is nothing wrong with making money, but not the way Melco does it

[signman]

I browsed around the demo site for a bit, and I can see it 'costing' you more than making a profit. Unless you can set prices for 'minimum' orders, for example-I looked up one of the tote bags-$2 retail on the demo. Someone orders 6 of them, with a small logo. It's going to COST you more than you'll make unless you happen to have them in stock, just to get them delivered to you blank! We do 'one ups' all the time, but we have a profit percentage built into the 'item' plus our embroidery charge-so there is always a profit. If you can't control this markup through Live Designer you can end up screwing yourself. No where did I find any explanation of 'how to set up' the site, so I don't know if there is any real 'control' of pricing, minimum charges, etc. or even if you can control the fonts available, designs, etc. What happens if you don't have the ones that Melco lists on the site?
I know if you use Sanmar and have a good account with them, you get FREE 'retail' website store as a 'stand alone'or as a web link to your own site. I'd use that for 'orders' and have a separate link just for pricing up embroidery.

[Body Cover]

I think Live designer must have been designed by the same people that built the Melco website. It is very unorganized and hard to use and incredible slow and unreliable. These are not things that I want to represent myself to perspective customers that only see me as this link! I think they aren't aiming at the right audience with the pricing and the way it is geared towards higher end sales. Just not of real world application, probably sounded great at the bard meeting but in the real world to low of a performance level for the money invested.

Just my opinion.

[DaveShowey]

Originally posted by scot:
You know when a company or a person is not up front about the price on a product or service you know its overpriced or a very large amount of money involved. I have been asking around about Live Designer's price for weeks. I called Melco about a month ago and the salesmen were at the Open house at Melco, So I ask the woman that answers the phone how much Live Designer was and she said she didn't know. I am thinking, how could she not know? They dont sell that many different products. I even ask on a forum and a Melco salesman tells me to call him. He takes time to reply and all he had to do was type the $$$. I would not use Melco Live Designer if you paid me now. Sorry, this pisses me off the way Melco does this.

Sorry Scot, but www.mymelcoworld.com is meant to be an online community for our customers to discuss Melco's products, share tips, tricks, techniques, etc. It was designed to belong to the customers of Melco. Therefore we have a strict policy to not use www.mymelcoworld.com as a sales vehicle. We want our customers to join knowing it's not to try to sell them additional products. The list price of LiveDesigner varies on what level of the product you are interested in and what current promotions we have in place. To offer your customers the ability to design embroidered AND printed products for example has a list price of $5,000 for the first year and $3,395 each additional year.

[signman]

Ouch! $5,000!!!! well, that isn't going to be anything I will look into...I already have a demo from a website 'store' company for less than $100 per month, setup using their 'templates' less than $300...and I can put in whatever I want for products, pricing, etc. I was looking at this for the sign/lettering/printing end of my business...now I'll do it for the embroidery also!
With the Sanmar link they can pick shirts, etc. from-with the prices I set up-adding embroidery designs is easily done over the phone instead of spending $5,000.
I don't EVER do digitizing for any 'quote' job-only once I get a firm order. I can create a logo or design in a few minutes on my Mac, estimate 1,000 stitches per square inch as a maximum figure-and give them a ball park idea of what the design will cost. Once they confirm the order, THEN I bring that into Designshop, digitize it, and figure out the final cost.
For simple lettering, or designs taken from the Dakota collection-I do those up in DS, save a jpg of the '30-d' image, and email that to show them, at the same time I have the final stitch count.
With the way the economy is still heading downhill-I can't afford to spend time doing digitizing and 'hoping' to get the order...like probably all of you have found-everyone is cutting back-AND also price shopping. So don't give away your time...that's worth money to you!

[DaveShowey]

Originally posted by Steve:
I have Live Designer and my sales have gone way down because of it. Luckily I do this part-time and have a full-time job. User's are confused how to order and what they are ordering. I think there are about 5 shirts that have the brand name with the item. The only way to change it is to delete the item and recreate it. And Melco charges another fee for the dongle to do that. There are many issues with Live Designer right now and Melco won't listen to their customers. You can not set a minimum order plus you have to do the digitizing before a customer places the order. (And hope they order! I have digitized a bunch of logo's after they create an account and tell me they want it then never hear from the customer again.) If a customer wants a T-shirt with the name 'Bob' on it, the T-shirt is $7 plus $1 for the name. ($1 comes from $1 per thousand stitches at 1000 stitches. You can not set a minimum price.) How much money will you make off of this? NOTHING! I'm looking into several other options now.

There is no fee for the LiveDesigner Prep tool. I will be hapy to send it to you right away if you don't already have it. There is a very easy way to edit the products on your site as well. If you visit www.mymelcoworld.com in the LiveDesigner Suite users group I have posted instructions and a video on how to do just that.

You also do have the ability to set your pricing to allow for minimums, and you have complete control over what you are charging for the embroidery. Have you considered charging more than $1.00/thousand stitches?

We also offer over 10k print and embroidery designs so that a customer can browse through your catalog of pre-digitized designs that do NOT require digitization.

Why are you not charging for digitizing? I don't know of any embroiderer that will digitize something for free in the hopes that the customer will place the order. I recommend that you offer a free quote for digitizing, not free digitizing.

It sounds like you need additional training to learn all of the functionalities of the LiveDesigner product. You can see the training schedule on www.mymelcoworld.com or you can contact me personally for a one on one training.

Thanks!

[DaveShowey]

Originally posted by signman:
I browsed around the demo site for a bit, and I can see it 'costing' you more than making a profit. Unless you can set prices for 'minimum' orders, for example-I looked up one of the tote bags-$2 retail on the demo. Someone orders 6 of them, with a small logo. It's going to COST you more than you'll make unless you happen to have them in stock, just to get them delivered to you blank! We do 'one ups' all the time, but we have a profit percentage built into the 'item' plus our embroidery charge-so there is always a profit. If you can't control this markup through Live Designer you can end up screwing yourself. No where did I find any explanation of 'how to set up' the site, so I don't know if there is any real 'control' of pricing, minimum charges, etc. or even if you can control the fonts available, designs, etc. What happens if you don't have the ones that Melco lists on the site?
I know if you use Sanmar and have a good account with them, you get FREE 'retail' website store as a 'stand alone'or as a web link to your own site. I'd use that for 'orders' and have a separate link just for pricing up embroidery.

The pricing you saw is just that - Demo Pricing. LiveDesigner customers have complete control over what products are offered as well what the pricing is for those products. There is a complete backend administration tool to the LiveDesigner website and I'd be happy to schedule an online demo with you anytime.

Thanks!

[DaveShowey]

Originally posted by signman:
Ouch! $5,000!!!! well, that isn't going to be anything I will look into...I already have a demo from a website 'store' company for less than $100 per month, setup using their 'templates' less than $300...and I can put in whatever I want for products, pricing, etc. I was looking at this for the sign/lettering/printing end of my business...now I'll do it for the embroidery also!
With the Sanmar link they can pick shirts, etc. from-with the prices I set up-adding embroidery designs is easily done over the phone instead of spending $5,000.
I don't EVER do digitizing for any 'quote' job-only once I get a firm order. I can create a logo or design in a few minutes on my Mac, estimate 1,000 stitches per square inch as a maximum figure-and give them a ball park idea of what the design will cost. Once they confirm the order, THEN I bring that into Designshop, digitize it, and figure out the final cost.
For simple lettering, or designs taken from the Dakota collection-I do those up in DS, save a jpg of the '30-d' image, and email that to show them, at the same time I have the final stitch count.
With the way the economy is still heading downhill-I can't afford to spend time doing digitizing and 'hoping' to get the order...like probably all of you have found-everyone is cutting back-AND also price shopping. So don't give away your time...that's worth money to you!

Signman, there are many advantages to the LiveDesigner website that you will not get with any other solution. I really recommend you spend some time with me for a personal online demo before you make any decisions. We are running some great promotions on LiveDesigner as well, your cost would not be $5,000.

[DaveShowey]

Originally posted by TinaK:
I too have been looking on how to do something similar to the Live Designer for my site and there are some flash programs out there that you buy outright they are not cheap however, but would cost less then having Live Designer for a year. You can always have someone develop a flash system for you as well.

I have heard alot of complaints about Live Designer...

What you haven't heard are all of the success stories from our LiveDesigner customers. If you think about it, there is no incentive for a successful LiveDesigner customer to tell everyone how great it is because the fewer LDS sites out there, the more money they are making! Designing and purchasing customized products online is not a niche, this is the future of the industry and now is great time get on board!

I would certainly invite everyone to do their research when moving their business online, however there is zero chance of getting a complete ecommerce system with the features and functionality of LiveDesigner for less than what we are charging. We are by far the industry leaders in price and functionality. Let's schedule an online demo and I can show you the power of LiveDesigner!

Thanks!

[signman]

Interesting....a salesman with time on his hands monitoring the CHAT board to harvest it for leads on sales of his product!
NOT what I thought this board is for!

[DaveShowey]

Originally posted by signman:
Interesting....a salesman with time on his hands monitoring the CHAT board to harvest it for leads on sales of his product!
NOT what I thought this board is for!

I'm just trying to clear up some misconceptions. It's a great product and it's painful for me to hear that people aren't happy. I want to do whatever I can to make our customers successful.

[levelbest]

Dave -

I don't think the marketing pitch is going to work. The consensus of the group is that it's overpriced for the average business (that being most of the folks here), it's not flexible enough and that fixes and suggestions have been slow to be implement.

From day one, I told melco that a light or LE version of the product but no one has taken that to heart.

It's a little disheartening at times - because melco seems to be in the business of recruiting us small shops but then doesn't seem to be marketing to us.

It would be interesting to see how the demograpics of owners breaks out. What is needed is an easy way for the little guy to get online and sell product. There really isn't anything out there other than standard shopping cart systems. Another 5k plus 4k a year on top of spending $35-40k on a couple of machines and software/supplies just seems like piling on...

You may be the leaders in price and functionality, but it isn't flying with this target market...