The Dangers of Recreating the E-Commerce Wheel

South African’s are Do-It-Yourself kind of people at heart. Although this is a fundamental trait for any would be entrepreneur, the recreation of lots of very un-round wheels in ecommerce has caused many entrepreneurs to become disillusioned with selling online. Why invest heavily in an unproven technology, unreliable contractors, rapidly obsolete infrastructures and a security with holes all over the place - especially when eCommerce is not your core business?

You’ve got enough to worry about running a new business as it is – why complicate it? If you decide to go the route of building your own wheel, you might experience the following story: You hire a wiz kind programmer or a web designer who tells you he can put together the best ecommerce platform ever for you because after many hours of investigation you realize that you’ll never be tech savvy enough to do it yourself. Never mind that it’s likely he won’t have anything to show you in the way of proof in the pudding like previously built and successful ecommerce solutions for his other customers. But eCommerce is easy he’ll tell you and you don’t need to make an investment in something that is tried and proven because there’s so much open source technology out there and it’s free! You ignore your first instinct to run because of your attraction to the no cost solution - other than what you need to pay him to set it up. So you contract him. Everything is looking on the up for the first while but it starts to take him a lot longer to finish... And if he does finally finish it, it doesn’t quite work the way you were promised because no planning was put into it. Arguments ensue over what was paid for and what was delivered and invariably more money and time is required because he is not the whiz he thought himself to be and probably needs to spend a lot more time studying or getting one of his buddies to help him finish it. Once finished, the storefront doesn’t work that great on a number of fronts, because let’s be honest - guys who are brilliant developers and designers are few and far between. Add the ability to really understand how to effectively sell and market your storefront from an informed business perspective and you may very well wait for the next messiah.

So now he hosts your solution on a cheap Internet Service Provider. You find your bandwidth inconsistent and your storefront rather slow but that’s okay because it’s cheap and one shouldn’t worry too much about customers losing their cool waiting for their page to download. Then your problems really start… So you trade for a while with limited success and then your storefront goes down or there’s something wrong that results in customers not being able to buy from you. You try calling the cel phone number of the developer you used and can’t get hold of him or he takes a while getting back to you because he’s a busy guy. You call your ISP and they say it has nothing to do with them. Speak to your developer they say. You finally get a hold of him after a few days and tell him what’s happened. You tell him to fix it because he built it and now it doesn’t work.

He says that wasn’t part of our agreement, pay me. So now you’re angry, but what else can you do – your hands are tied, your storefront’s down, your customers can’t buy from you and are thinking hmmm, this eCommerce business doesn’t seem to be very professional because they can’t manage to run their storefront properly, should I trust them with my money and the delivery of my goods? Wouldn’t you? And the cycle then repeats itself every time something goes wrong or you want to upgrade the storefront to try and keep in line with current trends. And then one day your developer disappears or you fire him so you have to find someone else to familiarize themselves with how this guy has put together your eCommerce solution and this takes time. Time = money. And they don’t charge out cheap… Sound familiar to anyone out there? It really, really doesn’t have to be this way. If I had a Rand for every occasion a new customer told me a large chunk of this story through close-to teary-frustration, I’d have paid someone to write this article!

There are smarter, very cost effective alternatives that will ensure you avoid this scenario completely while getting what you pay for – which must be an online asset that will generate online sales over time. If you’re looking for a no fuss, powerful, trusted, tried and proven eCommerce solution for your new online business, see why ShopDirect is your ideal eCommerce provider.