What I Look for in Store-Building Software
Web Commerce Today, Issue 19, February 15, 1999
One of the most important decisions you'll make in starting your online store is selecting appropriate store-building or shopping cart software to display and enable ordering of your products. Here is what I look for:
Scalability
Is the product able to take you where you might need to go? When people inquire about shopping cart software, my first question is always: How many products do you plan to sell? The second is: How many products do you hope to be selling a year from now? Your software needs to be sized for you. I see four main scales of online software developing:
- A dozen products or less . There are many options here. You need to select the one that is cost effective and allows you a secure way to pick up orders. A couple of options I favor are IBM's Home Page Creator (http://mypage-products.ihost.com/) and ShopSite Lite (http://www.openmarket.com/shopsite/sc/lite.cfm). A store of a dozen products is not to difficult to maintain with a webpage editor such as Microsoft FrontPage or SoftQuad HotMetal Pro, so you can use cut-and-paste HTML code from low-cost shopping cart solutions such as AmeriCart (http://www.cartserver.com/americart/).
- 25 to 300 products . You're now into the range that you'll need to find something easy to maintain. Building the store is one thing, but ongoing maintenance (adding products, changing prices, putting items on sale, etc.) by the merchant is essential. Look for software that will help your organize the task. You'll probably need a database-driven solution here. I'm very impressed with the capabilities of Open Market ShopSite Manager (http://www.wilsonweb.com/smallshop/), and there are many other good choices here.
- Thousands of products . Many lower-end products fall out of the running here, since they become clumsy to use. You'll need a database driven site that uses dynamically generated pages, that is, web pages that are produced from your database in a template only when someone wants to look at them. That many static web pages are too hard to manage at this stage. You can outsource the web hosting aspect, but since you'll need to update the online database remotely -- and that can take time -- you'll may want to consider moving to an in-house server. This also facilitates hooking the online store to your back-office inventory fulfillment system. This kind of integrated effort will become a necessity the more products you are trying to handle. Consider iCat Commerce Publisher, Intershop, IBM Net.Commerce, and Microsoft Site Server (Commerce Edition) among others.
- Tens to hundreds of thousands of products . For a store of this scale you need heavy-duty everything, and that costs money. Many software vendors claim their products can work at this scale, but you'd do well to ask what are the largest stores using their software and then interview the webmasters to see how well it really works. Don't skimp when you're trying to build a store of this scale. Get the top performing software and hardware to attempt this. I hesitate to make recommendations here, since so much depends upon your particular application.
If you're starting with a small store, don't purchase software that will take you to thousands of products, unless you plan to be there within a year. Get software that is really suited to your needs. But do structure an upgrade path for yourself so you can make that step more easily when the time comes.
Positive Reviews
Next, read the reviews. I wouldn't even consider investing in a store-building system that hasn't been reviewed in a major computer magazine. Admittedly, the reviewers are computer experts, not merchants. But they will put the software through its paces and help you learn about key strengths or flaws that may weigh heavily in your decision. In our E-Commerce Research Room we link to every online store-building software review we find to make this process as painless as possible, so use that resource at this stage of the selection process.
Major company
Another important consideration is selecting store-building software produced by a well-known company and that is already in wide use. I hate to say this, but it's important. I'm for the little guy, the start-up, the unknown. But when I'm advising a client to purchase core software for their business, I want some assurance that the software company will be around a year or two from now to provide product upgrades and modernizations. We're just in the early stages of an industry, and many players will either be gone or swallowed up by larger firms before the consolidation stage is over. Getting swallowed by a larger company that plans to keep the main concept intact is okay. Last year we saw ViaWeb bought by Yahoo!, ShopSite bought by Open Market, and iCat purchased by Intel. But who will purchase the unknowns? Many of them will disappear or put their main focus on other lines of software, and their store-building software will die on the vine.
Whatever you do, don't allow a programmer to hustle you into writing software uniquely for your store -- unless you have lots of money and a very specialized need. Once that programmer shifts focus you are out of luck to maintain your program, and to expand and grow you'll have to start all over again with another program.
Do, however, engage a programmer to fine-tune some off-the-shelf software from a major vendor. For example, iCat, Intershop, Microsoft SiteServer (Commerce Edition), IBM, and others are intended to accommodate programming customizations. But the core program from a major vendor ensures you that you can find another programmer to help you if the current one moves on.
Open system
The next thing I look for in store-building software, especially for stores of 1,000 or more, is an open system and widely-used programming languages. What databases are at the core of the software that runs your store? You don't want to be locked into a proprietary database you can only get from the software vendor. You want the capability to use any ODBC compatible database you need to. Let's say that your store really takes off, but your database isn't powerful enough to handle the level of traffic that is being generated. Can you move to an industrial-strength Oracle database if you need to?
An open and common database programming language is important, as well. Here the going gets tougher. It seems like every company is developing its own variation. iCat has its Carbo language, Intershop offers another flavor, and IBM yet another. Microsoft SiteServer (Commerce Edition), of course, offers its own Visual Basic. Of course, Visual Basic is a proprietary solution, too, but it has become a standard. Programmers learn it in college programs, so finding someone who can step in and do programming is not difficult.
In defense of language variations, however, I must say that database programming languages have many more similarities than differences. While you may not be able to easily find a person skilled on iCat Carbo language, any good programmer can pick it up and work with it based on the many programming examples contained in iCat's standard storefront examples. And the same is probably true with the other leading examples.
Hosting availability
The final piece of the puzzle is web hosting availability. For the larger stores, you'll probably want to have your own in-house server. But be aware that most store-building software is rather platform specific. Just being written for "Unix" isn't much help. Programs written in Perl can run on a great many Unix platforms, but since they are an interpretive language, they tend to run more slowly. They're all right for small stores. But higher traffic stores will want a program written in C or C++ or Java so it will run faster. And since those are compiled languages, they must be compiled for each specific brand of Unix operating system. There is no guarantee that the web hosting service you're currently using can host the store-building software you're looking at.
Store-building software also introduces another wrinkle. The databases that run some of the higher end stores need special care and tending from web hosting personnel who know what they're doing with specific database problems. If your store happens to crash, will the on-call personnel at your web hosting service be able to get the database operating correctly again? I've found that hosting services that host databases tend to charge substantially more than those that don't offer this service.
Because the major store-building software vendors charge web hosting services substantial money to user their store server software (in the range of tens of thousands of dollars a year), you may be able to find only a few hosts for a particular software. Make sure that your store-software selection is made in conjunction with a survey of available hosts.
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