Ecommerce / Web Development Company Required

Hi, I wonder why nobody commented to your request?

I see a lot of companies who change ecommerce supplier/developer. Inhouse to out-source: outsource from supplier A to B.

(I'm not an eComm supplire/developer by the way)

Sometimes it's a case of from the frying pan and into the fire!

Sometimes it achieves it's objectives.

Without knowing any more than you've written above, I'd stick my neck out, and  guess that your's will be the former. 

Nothing personal, and for the sake of anyone who gets to read this far down the thread... let's explore that slightly critica possibility.

Reason being, you rightly want better value for money, but seem to be measuring that as the hourly rate.

That's not a great measure of ROI - and not one you can take to the board and get sign off.  A good guy might do more in one hour than another....

How about this as a better place to start:

Gather evidence on why you've needed all those hours in the past - specifically what % were for new features (hopefully with added ROI) versus ones that were really 'fixing problems': like 'making page X faster', 'making page Y more usable'.

Gather more evidence - how important is the split between the tasks you mention:

* 'find and fix bugs' - you'll need have 24/7 measurement of the user experience, in going through the multi-page user journeys that 'make the money: that'll mean probably at least 3 or 4 journeys: checkout: add-to-basket vuia search, add to basket via navigation, check my order etc. The 247 web user experience numbers will then show you whether you've got each journey down to 2% or 1 % or whatever loss due to slow downs and sporadic errors

* 'add tweaks' - review the last 3 or 5 tweaks you've done: did the pay for themselves, did you have good evidence in advance that they were more important than other tweaks.

* 'develop existing features'  -ditto.  Did these ideas come from seeing other eComm products in use out there? Maybe those eComm products would be a basis for a new platform; why go bespoke if there's a 'good enough' OOTB product out there? Have you looked at the opensource eComm platforms: how cose to covering 100% of your needs are they?

* 'improve our design' - this is a different skill set again: usability, plus some marketing/merchandising. The latter will be unique to your sector. have you ahd someone do a benchmark with your competitors?

* 'manage the handover from this agency and take responsibility for keeping disruption to a minimum' - well if you decided not to move, that would save a stack of disruption... calculate the actual £ effect of this disruption: best case, and worst case.

* 'host the site' - different skill again: but some designers make good hosters

* 'manage our website / SAP connectivity' - different skill.  How much SAP overlap is there... if the current site already has this integration done...can you re-use that knowledge/code..

* 'provide appropriate cover and support for crashes' - hopefully you dont have any crashes right now, losing your whole website is pretty poor in 2009 - it's not uncommon for a site to lose it's'CheckOut function for an hour: but that's really bad... But if you do, how often, how long? 

It's a tall order, when those are all spelt out, as to the range of skills, tasks to cover.

Making sure that a new supplier is better at *all* those than your current, is not going to be easy:   your current guys may feel 'really bad' right now, whereas new suppliers are always so convincing with smooth mktg talk.... but once it's down to implementation.... a different story!

It's easy to end up being trapped, supplier says 'it'll cost £X to do what you want, we did mention in the pre-sales proposal that it would be wise to include XYZ but at the time you decided to save the money and chose not to..'

Looking forward, you've 3 choices:

* stay where you aware: fix the known issues, bring stability and the hourly-rate will matter less as you need less each month

* move to a whole new platform - bespoke - with a new supplier -maximum risk... maybe your costs to date are due to your whacky SAP set-up, which will be equally hard on the new supplier

* move to an OOTB product, that only requires a little bit of cost to customise, but won't need bug-fixes, tweaks etc.  But may be less flexible (unless you go open source, where you can always make the code do exactly what you want by hiring the right coder).

In summary - some more hard evidence is needed to decide which of the 3 best fits your status.

And perhaps the most useful is to measure the 'what's happening now' for the next couple of months:  24/7 user journey experience: cost of supplier vs ROI received over the period.

Phew.... that's as long as a white paper and half as interesting...

Deri

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