How Did Sproxi Start?
We started selling products online back in 1998 with the company, Lord Henry Enterprises. A lot of things have changed since then, but one has not. Until Sproxi, there really weren’t any plugins or applications we were totally happy with using. So, we built Sproxi.
We Built Sproxi for Us
First, we tried plugins. The problem with using a plugin usually falls into three different buckets:
- Poorly built – this means it uses too many resources and strains the server, and/or at some point, an update will come out and it breaks your site.
- Lack of features – after going through the process of installing the plugin and setting it up, we soon found that the plugin simply lacked the features we needed to set up our Google Feed the way we wanted to.
- Too expensive – many plugins offer the world, only after you install it, you find out you have to upgrade for a feature that should be standard anyway. The value proposition just isn’t there for most offered plugins.
Then we tried other online platforms:
- Many online platforms aren’t built with the features we needed to build a quality, customize Google feed. Custom titles, descriptions, etc., were not available features.
- Overpriced – In our opinion, most of these platforms are simply way overpriced. For what you actually get, it was not worth the extra expense. We even tried to build our feed with a platform that was close to $500/month only to find it was overly complicated and clunky at best.
So that led us to our third option, Google Sheets:
- Every product change, simple and small, required us to export our product database, and re-import it back into the Google Sheet.
- With every new import, the data had to be manipulated with search and replace, vlookups, etc.
- All of this made a Google Sheet too time consuming.
So finally, we decided to build our own tool…and Sproxui was born.
