GOOD CHEESE DOESN'T STAND ALONE

I just got my latest copy of Internet Retailer - the industry rag for all of us hardcore e-commerce geeks. This month's issue features an article about whether you should build or buy your online retail platform.

While there are arguments on both sides of this one, small retailers definitely agree that the cost of building a robust platform is prohibitive, not to mention that it takes so much focus and energy it can leave you short changing other aspects of your venture (like sound merchandising and marketing).

But that's another topic by itself, which I'll discuss in another rant later on.

What everyone who's been in the online retail business agrees on is that a good cheese doesn't stand alone. It will be critical to your success in the long run that your selected platform (built or bought) can play well with others.

Making do can kill you

I was working with one of our recent new clients, who's switching from another program to Suite Spot Commerce's platform. They had started with their existing cart program (we'll change the name to keep our competitor anonymous - a good nickname would be "Satan Cart") because their old web designer had recommended it.

But "Satan Cart" didn't integrate with Quick Books, so they had two full time data entry employees whose job it was to manually re-key orders from their cart program into Quick Books.

He figured it was costing him around $5,000 PER MONTH to re-key orders - and losing money during that time. All because their cart software refused to play well with others.

By the time most small retailers discover their precise data integration needs, it's too late.

The cost of band-aids

Small retailers are often budget bound and overwhelmed by the prospect of picking an e-commerce platform from the hundreds advertised all over the internet. To make matters worse, often small retailers don't pick their platform - they end up using whatever their web designer recommends.

It's easy to think "we'll just start with this, and as we have additional needs...we'll have programmers adapt what we have..." But that thought often leads to a costly mistake.

Often times the cost of having custom band-aids developed to meet your additional integration needs is beyond reason.

What you must understand is that most shopping cart software is "closed source" - meaning that it's comprised of proprietary "compiled" modules that cannot be edited by anyone except the original programmer.

So when you need changes to your "inexpensive" shopping cart program - enhanced functionality, or new features - you must either hire the original developer (at a premium price), or pay another programmer to investigate the database constructs and "reverse engineer" the program enough to add in the required features - also at a premium price.

It costs a whole lot less to spend a little more up front for a system that has features you don't need today, but think you might one day need, and that integrates well with other programs.

Do-overs are expensive

Another common flaw of logic is to think that when you need more functionality you'll just "switch systems". Often times do-overs are cost prohibitive, because they typically require all website code to be re-written to fit the new system - not to mention the cost of copying the data from your old system into the new - which can be very expensive as well.

Assessing for the unknown

If you don't know what your needs are going to be down the road (you should assume that you do not), you can still pick a platform that is likely to integrate well, and inexpensively into other software you may need in the future.

A few basics:

• Check to be sure your selected platform has the ability to easily export customers and orders (separately) to a standard flat file or XML format. Many accounting and inventory management programs will support importing from these formats, reducing the possibility of needing custom integration in the future. Also, this way if custom integration has to be done, your programmer isn't starting from square one.

• Check to be sure your selected platform allows for the importing of customers and orders - you may at some point want to list your products with a 3rd party shopping venue (like Shop.com, or Amazon.com), in which case you'll need to be able to import orders.

• Ideally your platform should allow you to accept orders from 3rd party sources using an XML post over the web.

• Check to see if your selected platform is already certified with other 3rd party accounting or inventory management software, like Quick Books - if they integrate with several, you have options, and you can feel more comfortable that it will be possible to integrate with others that may not be supported currently.

• Find out what format the database is stored in. You'll want a platform that uses a standard database program (Microsoft SQL Server, MSDE, Oracle, MySQL, etc.), versus using their own proprietary database format. This way if you need to have a programmer import, export, or create custom reports for your database, it will be possible.

• Make sure the terms of any agreement allow you to obtain a complete copy of your database, should you need it. Some platforms (like Yahoo! Merchant Solutions) will NOT give you access to your complete database - thus increasing the cost of switching to another platform should you ever need to