Christian Affiliate Marketers Blog

Merchant Tip - Avoid ecommerce providers who offer proprietary hosted solutions

Mar 21, 2008 Affiliate Rant

<rant>So, I am talking with a prospect today.  The last thing that is keeping them from signing with my company is their web team signing off on the Performics tracking and reporting implementation and giving them a fair price for doing the work.  My prospect comes back to me and says “well, as predicted, they quoted me 10 hours of work to do the job”

So… we’re stuck.

My next question asked is - do they also HOST your site and ecommerce solution?

Answer “yes”

So - effectively, my prospect is stuck here because his whole site and ecommerce solution are hosted on their proprietary system which gives his internal resources, or vendors like my company,  a way to plug in this tracking code, which should take no more than an hour.

What was his mistake?

There is nothing wrong with outsourcing your ecommerce development.  BUT, I heartily recommend that you both  choose your provider carefully, and insist that your solution is developed on a commercially available cart solution that YOU own and have total access to.  If you don’t you are selling your soul and making your future very dependant on the web company you outsourced to.

Let’s say my prospect gets tired of these guys taking advantage of him.   What can he do?   They control his site completely, and because it’s hosted on THEIR proprietary system, good luck on being able to move it somewhere else to work with somone reasonable.

The work we’re looking to have done is a 1 hour job ( since most companies bill a 1 hour minimum) on almost all of the cart solutions I have ever worked with.  I have even implemented some and I am one of the least technically proficient people I know.

If you are looking to launch an ecommerce site, or to have yours redeveloped, please consider very carefully the approach you take and make sure you are not putting yourself in a bad place for the short and long term.

</rant>

Tags: merchant tips