The Late 90's Are Awesome

Last night the bGreen team got together to take the next step in our quest for world domination.  We've decided to get involved with this new thing called "e-commerce."  What's that you say?  It's not 1997?  Oh.  Well, maybe e-commerce isn't a new concept, but it is new to us.  This will be our first attempt at launching an online store, and we want to make sure we do it right.  While we're not serial online shoppers, we do know what we like and what we don't.  In our opinion, it's all about the user experience.  Screw that up, and you're bound to lose customers and not make a sale.  Provide a smooth, easy to use experience, and you're bound to keep people coming back.  Seems simple enough.  Unfortunately, finding the right software package isn't quite that simple.

Last evening we had the pleasure (or not) of playing around with two software packages.  One from Network Solutions, called nsCommerceSpace, and the other from Shopify.  Our first impression?  We're screwed.

While we have some technical experience in our backgrounds, neither of us is really proficient in HTML, CSS, Java, Liquid, or any of the other 500 programming languages needed to truly make one of these two e-commerce packages a fully customized bGreen store.  Designing websites for companies in the mid 90's doesn't equate to being able to customize a web store today.  Sadly we weren't able to get the store to mimic our website design, so we were left to just putz around in the "dashboards" of each program, and try and learn as much as we could about each.

Each program has some shortcomings, and last night we simply put the two up against each other.  The best analogy would be Shopify is a Mac, and NS is a PC.

There are two big categories for us: User Experience & Customization.  From a user experience standpoint, Shopify wins.  Their dashboard is clean, easy to follow, and very user friendly.  We found the NS user experience to be a bit overwhelming.

Both claim that the shop design is completely customizable.  Maybe that's the case, but we sure couldn't figure it out.  The default templates that both offer really look like something from the mid 90's.  We think they really need to update these.  We got Shopify to look a bit more how we wanted, but neither was really very good.  We'll chalk this up to OUR lack of programming skills, rather than a flaw with either solution, and call this point a draw.

A couple more notes from last night:

• NS seems far more powerful/customizable than Shopify


• NS can handle gift certificates, Shopify can not - this seems crazy to us


• Cost is about the same, except Shopify charges a 1% transaction fee


• Shopify has a Wiki, which seems to be mainly a development resource


• The NS salesman got one of our last names wrong


• Both offer up a 30-day free trial for testing & development


• Both allow you to do batch uploads of product images and descriptions


• Both offer some sort of intergration with shipping & fullfillment

So after four hours of playing around, those are our first thoughts.  Neither solution has won us over yet, and we'll be meeting again tonight, this time with our developers, to see if we can make a little more progress in making our web store a reailty.  Stay tuned.