e-commerce highway robbery

[Elixir]

I operate an e-commerce store. My partners and I have been growing it for about 8 years, and have gone from ProStores (now defunct) to Volusion, to BigCommerce, which has been good for the last 5 years or so. Today I get a note from BC about their "new pricing plan". Looking into it, it looks like our fees will go from about $2k/year to about $12k/year. I'm pretty pissed about it, but am not sure where to turn. A cart provider that wants a "share" of their customers' revenue just rubs me the wrong way. If they are going to force this "new plan" down our throats, I am ready to make a "new plan" of our own.

One possible solution is to go with an open-source cart, hire an expensive developer to design and set up the store and import all the data, and hopefully live happily ever after without paying for anything but hosting service.

Anyone here have experience with this kind of stuff?

 

[Bronzeage]

If you do hire a developer to design and set up a store, you'll quickly discover why BC wants $12K a year.

 

[Elixir]

If you do hire a developer to design and set up a store, you'll quickly discover why BC wants $12K a year.

The design already exists on a developer template - it will only need migration. I've done that before, once with a developer's help and once without. Both were nightmares, but they were both ground-up builds; nothing was salvageable from the "old" site. I'm hoping that for less than two years' worth of BC fees we could end up with a decent site that we would own. Do you think that's feasible?

 

[Bronzeage]

If you do hire a developer to design and set up a store, you'll quickly discover why BC wants $12K a year.

The design already exists on a developer template - it will only need migration. I've done that before, once with a developer's help and once without. Both were nightmares, but they were both ground-up builds; nothing was salvageable from the "old" site. I'm hoping that for less than two years' worth of BC fees we could end up with a decent site that we would own. Do you think that's feasible?

You won't know until you have a deal with a developer, who can give you a price for the work and then sign a contract to deliver at that price. When and how much are the critical elements.

The last time I tried to set up an online store was more than 10 years ago. I finally gave up on the idea after several tries because paying for maintenance to keep the thing running was simply not worth the cost. At least twice a year, either some licence expired, or some block of code went obsolete. One time, our host was bought out by another company, and this company did not have the proper licence for some of our code. That shut us down for 2 months. I finally said fuck it.

My advice would be to figure out if the one grand a month is feasible and stick with what you know works.

 

[Elixir]

The design already exists on a developer template - it will only need migration. I've done that before, once with a developer's help and once without. Both were nightmares, but they were both ground-up builds; nothing was salvageable from the "old" site. I'm hoping that for less than two years' worth of BC fees we could end up with a decent site that we would own. Do you think that's feasible?

You won't know until you have a deal with a developer, who can give you a price for the work and then sign a contract to deliver at that price. When and how much are the critical elements.

The last time I tried to set up an online store was more than 10 years ago. I finally gave up on the idea after several tries because paying for maintenance to keep the thing running was simply not worth the cost. At least twice a year, either some licence expired, or some block of code went obsolete. One time, our host was bought out by another company, and this company did not have the proper licence for some of our code. That shut us down for 2 months. I finally said fuck it.

My advice would be to figure out if the one grand a month is feasible and stick with what you know works.

Yeah... you're probably right. I've kept the store continuously active for the whole 8 years, and have experienced the gamut of things that can go wrong.... it's not the biggest portion of our business but it does over $1m/yr, and provides instant cash flow to support growth in other areas, so I don't want to take chances. The other extreme is to bite the bullet and go whole hog with someone like NetSuite (which has a $20k/yr ongoing price tag, AFTER getting all the setup and migration done). Think I'll wait until the online store is doing several times what it's doing now before going down that road.

Thanks for your input, Bronze!

 

[bigfield]

For a business with your volumes, you'll need to find an agency that specialises in Magento or another enterprise-level platform. Enterprise platforms provide integration with accounting software and are very good at handling workflow, stock control, reporting etc.

Forget about trying to save money by reusing theme code from the old site; web design has evolved considerably in recent years and you are better off getting the UX rebuilt from scratch and just migrate the inventory, customer accounts, orders etc.

You should consider finding an agency that is not only able to develop the site, but can also handle the hosting, updates, security, and backups.

You may be able to find an agency to do a good-quality job for under US$25k, and perhaps $200-$300 per month for hosting etc.

 

[Elixir]

For a business with your volumes, you'll need to find an agency that specialises in Magento or another enterprise-level platform. Enterprise platforms provide integration with accounting software and are very good at handling workflow, stock control, reporting etc.

I've had an Enterprise platform for a few years now... most recently with BigCommerce. Thing is, it has to work with channel integration software - which has been getting better and better, but is nowhere near where it needs to be. I've been through three different suites of multi-channel management software, and none of them really works for us. Some of the problems include:
* our need for lot-tracking (we do medical) items that, once brought in, might go out the door as a component of one of several assemblies or as a stand-alone product.
* having three online channels that each employ different protocols - everything as to convert to some common language (currently XML)
* keeping track of not only what assemblies have been built, but also which CAN be built, considering real-time commitment of the assembly's components...
* ... and more
Sometimes I think there's a damn good reason that there are so few players in our arena. Growth is easy - staying on top of it - - not so much.

Forget about trying to save money by reusing theme code from the old site; web design has evolved considerably in recent years and you are better off getting the UX rebuilt from scratch and just migrate the inventory, customer accounts, orders etc.

True... I've done that twice already. But now it's getting truly difficult due to the size of the site, with all the associated web pages and shit. "Option" products don't make it any easier. All that stuff can be easily exported, but getting it to import without having to go back and tweak every single attribute seems to be nigh impossible.

You should consider finding an agency that is not only able to develop the site, but can also handle the hosting, updates, security, and backups.

That would be NetSuite. They're truly impressive, but hey - we're not Lockheed fucking Martin!

You may be able to find an agency to do a good-quality job for under US$25k, and perhaps $200-$300 per month for hosting etc.

Yup - that's what I'm seeing. BigCommerce is going to run us about $1200/mo after discounts, but they are making big promises about coming through with all the bells and whistles I've been asking them for over the last two years. There's no contract involved, so I am on the verge of deciding to ride it out with them for while and use the developer resources I already know.

Developers are ... less than reliable in general. BC recommended one company that went belly-up in the middle of a project, leaving me with a site that wouldn't scale for mobile apps. It looked like it did, but some critical functions like "add to cart" went missing from a lot of pages. Then there was one of BC's own ex-developers they recommended... all I wanted was some images retrieved from my previous site and imported and placed into the new site - and he managed to completely hose THAT up. Something I could have (should have) done myself. Recently I've had some minor work done by another outfit that was excellent and low-cost, but of course by the time the project was done, they'd been snapped up by another Company and doubled their rates.

It's mayhem out there, Bigfield!