e-Commerce Research
July 26th, 2006I’ve been building hot websites for the last 10 years but this summer I needed to build my first real e-commerce site for unity3. I found researching the choices for e-commerce to be a bit overwhelming and difficult to sort out marketing from objective opinions. It seemed as if every e-commerce comparison site I found was an affiliate marketing scheme or a review by a magazine writer who had no intention (or understanding) of actually building an online store. Here is the perspective of an experienced web designer (read: not interested in your WYSIWIG interface) on the top choices available today. This list is not all inclusive as there are many providers that I did not even consider for various reasons.
One of the most obvious choices for e-commerce is Yahoo! Stores as they seem to power many of the small businesses online. Their prices appear to be reasonable but wait: what’s this about taking a percentage of my online sales?!? Yep, Yahoo! will take a cut for every sale you make, even if you’re paying for their most expensive plan. Awesome, huh? It gets even better: when your customers checkout, the web address they’ll see will start store.yahoo.com. That’s confusing, since the customer thought they started their shopping experience on your website. I would imagine shopping cart abandonment rates are fairly high for most Yahoo! merchants for this very reason. Yahoo! also uses a proprietary markup language for customizing their storefronts so if you already know HTML or ASP you can pretty much throw alot of that out the window. These first two issues were pretty much show stoppers for me (not to mention that I already host one of my sites with their standard web hosting and I’m sorely unimpressed), so I moved on.
Next, for some strange reason, I looked at Pro Stores, an eBay company. Their product seems solid and easy to use but in the end, it seemed a little too easy to use. I talked to a sales person and didn’t get a warm fuzzy with regards to customization (a big deal for our site) and they too charge a percentage of sales in addition to their monthly fees. I know that in the meat world many shopping center leases have similar revenue sharing provisions but it still doesn’t sit well with me. Why should my e-commerce host share in my success?
Moving on: Monster Commerce, owned by Network Solutions. Now I’m not a big Network Solutions guy since they are absolutely the most expensive registrars around but the Monster Commerce model intrigued me. No pesky revenue sharing and really only 1 plan offered at $99 a month. While a hundred bucks a month seemed a little steep starting out I knew I would quickly be paying twice that amount with Yahoo or ProStores so I looked more closely. MonsterCommerce claims a high level of customization though looking through their client list showed me dozens of sites with predictable and similar designs. But perhaps the most troubling thing with MonsterCommerce is the add-on fees you’ll encounter with their service. Want to export your financial or inventory data to Quickbooks? Just pay a one-time fee of $299 and you’re set! How about just exporting your product data to Froogle or an excel spreadsheet? For only $30 a month additional you can do that too! WTF? That is my data, I should be able to access it whenever and however I want! Next…
Next I peeped on Volusion. Volusion had some good reviews and was even a finalist for a “Codie” in 2006 (whatever that is). They offered all the marketing features like coupons and gift certificates across all their plans and even free Quickbooks exporting! Plus, with no revenue sharing and plans starting at $57 a month things looked good. But wait; I only get 50Mb for my webspace and 1Gb of transfer a month? Yup, that’s how they make their money. At least these are things I can (somewhat) control with crafty web design and efficient coding. The client gallery showed some impressive designs (though I later learned that some of the designs had been accomplished using the $10K licensed version of the shopping cart software).
The other solution I considered was osCommerce. While all the solutions above are what is known as “hosted solutions,” osCommerce software can be installed on your own webserver and can be completely customized in terms of design and functionality. Best of all, it’s free! Even though I’m a super bad-ass PHP/MySQL programmer I was still concerned about my ability to build a stable and secure shopping cart on the osCommerce base. There is a huge support community though and there are hundreds of modules to handle everything from shipping to inventory to marketing.
So which solution did I end up picking? You’ll have to wait for the rest of the story I’m afraid (if you haven’t already figured it out.) Let me know about other solutions you considered that I may have missed.
