Choosing the right eCommerce platform when you’re an small or medium sized business

There are so many reports from well established researching companies, when looking at the larger enterprise eCommerce solutions. Gartner has their well known magic quadrant, Forrester their insight and several online based Medias, including Internet Retailer and Website Magazine, holds list and further lists of American based products.

The fact is that many of these American based products are not build to handle multi currencies, several languages and VAT and not-VAT in many sizes and shapes.

Being a small company, maybe even a start-up eCommerce player, decrease the amount of selectable products into a few – unless you’re very well financed.

For many years, 8 to be exact, I’ve had the joy of using a easy entrance product from the Danish company Dandomain (www.dandomain.dk) – where prices starts at 299 DKK (that’s around €39) a month. For that fee you are gained access to their pro-solution with an administrative interface that controls every configurable aspect of the business layer. And there many things to adjust, set and even change. If you do have a small grip of HTML knowledge you can even place TAGS and STYLE’s within most fields and certainly in the code-script fields.

Being more advanced you’re able, for a small fee, to build your own pages with the built in editor – or simply copy/paste the code from DreamWeaver or whatever preferred editor you have. The own pages fully adapt with the overall CSS policies, and you can even set your own set of CSS/STYLE for even language in the shop.

Taking it to the next level the system allows you to customize nearly every page from scratch or from a build in template to adjust from. Making it possible to get just the optimized product list or item card you want.

Growing out of the standard solution

Around 10-15% of Dandomains clients, according to their CEO Jesper Aggerholm, grow close to – or out of the standard solution. Some then choose a Dandomain designpartner to go even further down into customization of the platform, some get a very high increase in traffic that forces them into other products.

Denmark also fostered another great standard product from ScanNet (www.scannet.dk) priced pretty equally to Dandomain. The product just came in a new version. I haven’t used it my selves and can therefore not give any great references. The only reference I can give is on the company – it’s truly founded and led by some great friendly guys with a good attitude towards customer service. Dandomain and ScanNet’s hosting centers are pretty equal in size and stability.

If you’re facing the wall of a standard solution there are many reasons for watching out very carefully before shifting.

· It’s very expensive to do custom development – never ever develop an eCommerce application from scratch.

· Choose one of the market leaders with a fresh and adaptable technology – look after a company or technology partner where you’re more than a number.

· Look for insights in the above mentioned reports – Gartner’s Magic Quadrant is maybe the best and most comprehensive. Be aware that many companies like Hybris (www.hybris.com) offers part of the report as free download if you’re willing to registry.

· Ask somebody who did the challenge of moving from safe ground – he/she can save you a lot of money.

· Maybe sure to have an overall business plan and match the investment up against it or against the more detailed eCommerce business plan.

If you need advise in changing your platform – please feel free to write me on kim@imd.dk for more information.