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Knowledge Base
Prices
Skinny Care to Compare God's Punishment The Engine Black Eye Doin' What We Do The Future? e-Commerce Tutorial by Webmonkey |
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Compare small business e-commerce solutions
As with any industry there is often many different ways of describing a product or service, and this can be confusing to a consumer as businesses and service providers make up their own labels and descriptions for what they offer. The purpose of this page is to cut through much of the marketing mumbo jumbo and compare product offerings by explaining the method of construction being offered and the relative value of that method. In the Skinny page we provided some basic profiles of the various categories of e-commerce solutions available to businesses. On this page we are more focused on web sites that provide products and prices for CUSTOM solutions for comparison purposes. These links are provided for you but the job of comparing the features of one product to another is left up to you. A brief description of their individual approach, or method, in providing an e-commerce solution is helpful, and is included to partially gage their effectiveness. Comparison Shopping: The majority of custom solutions do not have published prices for a very good reason - they are custom solutions. And as such, they have not been built yet, and they cannot be priced until they have been built - or at least designed on paper with a cost estimate. The first example provides online tools that makes use of Macromedia's ColdFusion®. The second example uses application software to build an e-commerce package, and the third example is one that has been developed by hand coding, and probably from scratch. And finally there is our method that makes use of "Mass Customization" techniques. Our first example: Here is a web site promoting online tools for developing e-commerce web sites to resell. It uses Macromedia's ColdFusion® and it is geared toward the web designer that doesn't have the programming and technical know-how to create the back-end. The prices quoted are for wholesale with the idea that it will be sold at a higher price to a client. If you are a web designer this may be worth a look. Just to compare what they offer in features and price will be educational. Some of the drawbacks will be with the proprietary TAGS and SCRIPTS. You will have to dig for the price, but it's there. Second example: Another e-commerce solution advertised as CUSTOM: This site lists a few options and includes prices. You can compare between this and the next example to get an idea of the difference between true custom programming and software applications that create a so-called custom solution. Some of the drawbacks will be with the proprietary TAGS and SCRIPTS that all application solutions use. In contrast, custom work with standard e-commerce programming languages, such as PERL & PHP, is more reliable and readily customized for later upgrades. Third example: A third comparison has prices for three levels of sophistication These prices reflect the time and skill it takes to develop a true custom solution. By using standard Internet programming languages the client receives a truly custom design with the most versatility; and this investment will be a blessing if further customization is required for later add-ons. IT-challenger's Mass Customization technique: Mass Customization lowers the cost without sacrificing quality. In reality, the client receives the best of each level because... the practice is to write quality foundation code ONCE and use it MANY times. The "allbusiness.com" web site is a treasure trove of useful information in many areas of e-commerce. Here is a main resource page. This page will confirm some of the information that you will find available on our site. The following is a quote taken from www.allbusiness.com If you plan to build an online store from the ground up, you must be prepared to do some very basic development, using your own code to stitch together the various database, tax, shipping, fulfillment and page-serving modules that will make up the finished site. These are time-consuming jobs, and your store will take longer to build than an off-the-shelf system. Even a basic custom store will cost you at least $10,000.00 (US) and many stores cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to build and maintain. The bottom line is that unless you have some very good reasons for building your own system, you're better off using an existing e-commerce tool.
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