Top eCommerce Website Platform Technologies
August 17, 2009 – 1:49 pmAs a freelance marketing consultant here in Seattle, WA, I spent the entire month of July working closely with one of my clients to find a new web design, web development and web marketing solution for their 1 ½ year old, e-commerce / retail business. We started out looking for a web marketing firm but then quickly realized that we also needed to build a new, much more stable website instead of staying with our current site which had been built on outdated Able Commerce technology.
We are at a critical point in the business so this is a very important decision which (we anticipate) will greatly increase the company’s growth and so I was tasked with doing extensive research around what options were available to us and the pros and cons of each.
I started by looking at a wide range of companies – apples to oranges to bananas – until we narrowed it down to looking at just apples. Initially we looked at e-commerce technology (shopping cart platform) companies, companies strong in PPC and Internet Advertising, companies strong in SEO and finally companies that were strong across the board with SEM and SEO, web design and development and Internet Advertising.
During the process we came to the realization that we needed to separate our project into two parts; (1) finding a strong web marketing agency and (2) finding a strong web design / development partner and then decide whether or not we should have two separate companies to work with or having one company do it all.
It was fairly easy to find a solid web marketing agency and after speaking with eVisibility, Increase Visibility and WebMetro.com (all listed on the top 25 SEO marketing agencies list http://www.topseos.com/rankings-of-best-search-engine-optimization-companies) we decided to go with WebMetro.com.
Deciding on a web design/web development solution was a much more difficult decision to make.
The first part of our decision was to decide whether or not to lease a platform (like 3D Cart or Volusion) and build our own website (kind of a self-serve model) or whether it is better to work with an agency to build a custom cart using top end shopping cart software (like Shop Site or aspdotnetstorefront.com). The difference in price would be about $20K+ ($20K for a leased, self-serve a.k.a. ‘all in one’ platform and about $45K ++ for a custom site).
As you may know, there are pros and cons of each. As Kirk Waterman of WebMetro.com stated very well: “Websites and the Internet are the new real estate with your site being the home/business/structure and all of the places you occupy on the web being the land. How nice the structure is may be as important as how much real estate you occupy. Leased platforms – ‘all in one solutions’ – are just like renting a house or leasing a car. You often give up control and ownership of your business. Solutions like Volusion, Yahoo Storefront or Pro Stores are good for small businesses or companies that want to build equity and sell. But even then your value is diminished because you’re forcing the new owner to buy into a leased property. And if and when you or the new owner want to transfer the property to individual ownership, the cost to transfer the site to an individual platform is always higher than anticipated and you never know how much of the online and overall value of the site you may lose when you finally do a DNS redirect. Overall you hold much more equity when you own your property.”
Of course, there are pros of going with a leased, “out of the box”, all in one solution especially if you require very minimal customization. The cost can be low and the platforms are very dependable. One has to check with each platform to see if they force clients to use their own merchant services etc. If you want to take a closer look here are the reviews for the leased, SAS software platforms: http://ecommerce-software-review.toptenreviews.com/
Custom sites built with top-notch e-commerce shopping cart software will provide 100% ownership and control and may deliver higher ROI especially when industry leading web marketing techniques are added to the mix. A review of the top custom site shopping cart software options can be found at: http://shopping-cart-review.toptenreviews.com/
So, in the end, we did decide to build a custom site using the aspdotnetshoppingcart.com software and work with an agency to implement. We believe the new site will provide exponentially better conversion and therefor ROI positive versus keeping our current site or leasing from an SAS Platform.
More to come….such as how we improved our PPC ROI and number of SEO first page ranks etc. Stay tuned.
