eCommerce recommendations
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- Noggin
Our company is invest in a new ecommerce solution, were trying to decide whether to go custom built or off-the-shelf (like Interspire).
If we go custom we will still need some expert SEO/marketing and lots of data entry for the products.
Any recommendations for custom and off-the-shelf? Im sure a few QBN'ers will have had experience with this...
- acescence0
well, i see interspire is $1800 for the most expensive version, versus a 5-figure number minimum for a custom solution... kind of a big difference there.
- seed0
I think it depends on the size of your business and the amount of features needed. If you aren't doing anything out of the ordinary then you'll be spending a lot of time reinventing the wheel.
You can even buy Interspires code and go from there.
- seed0
Hard to say without knowing anything about your business but a host solution could work for you.
- Noggin0
Well yeah, but manual data entry & SEO/marketing costs will be quite a hefty price too.
- acescence0
i don't see how seo should cost that much. if some person is trying to sell you on some seo wizardry, they are likely con artists.
why should data entry be any different in an off-the-shelf vs custom solution? i think it would be the opposite- a mature ecommerce solution will have some function for importing product data from spreadsheet or some other automated process.
- oh, you were saying the opposite on the data entry part, my badacescence
- Noggin0
We had a custom solution offered to us, what they offered in marketing became the biggest selling point rather than the cart system, theres a lot involved in getting that top position in the search engines.
- our original site was designed by one of the UK's top SEO firms and it sucks... let developers and UI experts do the designing and development,trooperbill
- the designing and development, then get an seo firm in to do the optimisation and talk to the devstrooperbill
- trooperbill0
even tho its a bit slow i'd recomend magento because it just does everything you will need it to do, plus the stock templates are pretty close to all of the major ecommerce trends and dont take too much time to revamp.
they all suck at seo tho, ive tried almost everything.
- don't even go near magento unless you have your own dedicated server hardware!acescence
- youre running ecommerce on shared hosting r u mad?trooperbill
- many people do!acescence
- or a vps, which is typically still not enough muscleacescence
- Noggin0
Yeah I looked at Magneto, looks good. Were currently using Volusion which is ok.
Im thinking off-the-shelf with expert SEO/SEM is the way to go.
- trooperbill0
is it a new business? or the businesses first ecommerce site? my advice would be to start basic and cheap then let your users tell you what they want the site to do, just monitor support/sales calls and collect feedback, this would be the best way to grow an ecommerce site
and as far as seo goes, get someone to do a basic re-write of the templating engine to make it seo friendly and then buy links... all the big names buy links, i hate it but what ya gonna do.
- if you need me to review the seo of the site independently then just ask :) its free.trooperbill
- i mean, the thing is dog slow running locally on my 8 core mac with no one but me connecting, that's just not right!acescence
- oops, i meant to post that up there a few notes ^^acescence
- Noggin0
Thanks for the advice. I know theres not much to avoid going the PPC route.
The current site isnt worth looking at but I may look you up for the new one!
- vaxorcist0
My experience was that _really_ good understanding is all that matters, and clients seem to ask you to make major decisions before you can actually understand their business, partly because they may not understand it themselves...
For example: Does client already have an inventory system in place?
Does it export or import in any particular format? Does it have a very haphazard mess that somebody low-level in IT dept does once a quarter and hates the process but doesn't talk about it?!?
Does client have sizes and colors with differnet SKU's or do they mix and match in a rather disorered way? Many clients don't know these things because they are "not involved in low-level details" but aaaargh! These low-level details may be ALL THAT MATTERS when it comes to a solid estimate and decision about what to buy or build... sorry for the rant....