Forum Moderators: buckworks
I'm at a point where i'm not sure if it's better to go with a All-in-one Merchant Solution, such as Yahoo (http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/merchant/), Monster Commerce (http://www.monstercommerce.com/).. or to have a customer eCommerce site build with a shopping cart and connect to a merchant account.
The All in one solutions usually charge a monthy/yearly fee, which includes hosting, domain name, shopping cart and the whole site basically.. but you pay for a merchant account separately.
I'm experienced with web design/development, so I'm not afraid to deal with code when I need to...
If you have experience with both, could you see the Pros and Cons of both for me.. and the differences you've noticed over time?
I'd appreciate it.. Thanks.
thought saving $135,00o in Yahoo charges would be more than a good enough reason.But seriously, one of the main reasons why I would not use is hosted solution is this. If a company makes a complaint, however spurious that you are selling goods that may have infringed copyright. They often complained to the webhoster directly who may terminate your account without a court judgement
We paid less than $135k, but yes it was still a significant amount.
The issue of complaints shutting your site is a valid one, and it is not just Yahoo that has done that in the past - Ebay and Amazon have also done it. But it is also very rare - and in most (not all) of the 6-7 cases we have seen, the merchant was, in fact, using copyrighted material (in one case from OUR store...).
I am not saying that Yahoo is the ultimate - far from it. But so far we have yet to see a better alternative. As someone put in this forum a while back, "Yahoo gets a 3 out of 5 stars, but everything else I have looked at is 2 stars".
Over the past couple of years we have gotten 3 quotes/estimates for custom solutions. All had major drawbacks for us without extensive reworking, which would have run the costs up considerably.
And it is not just the costs of the initial site & platform - it is the continuing costs of things like bandwidth, maintenance (how easy is it to add/change products etc.), About a year ago we finally gave up for a while, but we are always looking for something better. So far I have not seen it.
But perhaps we are not your standard store either, we don't have any such thing as product feeds from vendors, our product is often in short supply, many items are large and heavy, and (many) for tax purposes must be shipped from our B&M store, not drop shipped.
If anyone can suggest a better solution, we will look at it, but we first started looking in 1999...
Hopefully they send you a Christmas card each year?
Within this area there are multiple players than can fulfill this for you. Evolution, Interprise Suite (in beta - final release March 1), Everest Software, and Netsuite are a few. Interprise will provide the best bang for the buck...
What I have seen from looking at some of those and others:
Some are fixed width, locked in at 800x600, such as Interprise, and apparently rather difficult to change it.
OScommerce (and it's numerous clones) totally suck for setup and product changes, would not touch them with YOUR ten foot pole.
Ebay - not impressed with, lacking some features, not an easy setup. In the demo we tried the XML upload barfed a lot.
Netsuite seems the most flexible, but also seems to require a lot of setup - did not really have time to play with extensively.
The catch with most that we looked at either lacked a lot of features, or required extra cost modules to get them. Some required a lot of programming or HTML/CSS writing to get beyond the basic templates.
I am not saying there are not good ones out there, but so far we have not seen anything that is "enough" better to move from Yahoo or set up a 2nd store on.
I think the correct figure is less than $135,000 PER YEAR. Since '97 my calculator tells me Yahoo! has made close to $1.2 million in fees.
Actually we paid less than half of that. Still substantial, but until you can point me at a better solution, where the TOTAL costs are less (including perhaps a new employee to take care of the online store stocking), we are still in the "looking" mode.
Since around 2000 we have looked at over a dozen, and actually tried 2 for a short time, and all have had "issues". The most common problem with all was the time and/or difficulty of webstore inventory.
You might also want to look at the new GoDaddy store - have not tried it, but have heard good things about it for a beginning ecommerce site.
[edited by: lorax at 1:16 am (utc) on Feb. 1, 2006]
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