How mature is the eCommerce market?
March 20, 2007 | In Development |I’m involved with an awful lot of meetings and bids for work and one of the recurring themes I see is that people come to us wanting an eCommerce solution, yet want to pay nothing for it. Now this is, and always will be, a feature of business. Everybody wants the full package and not to have to pay for it. So there will always be a certain amount of haggling and negotiating, and that is what makes the business world operate.What we are increasingly seeing is people and businesses who use the internet and want to expand their presence inline: e-commerce, forums, blogs etc. etc. They all use the great eCommerce shopping experiences, like Amazon, and want to emulate the features and quality of that sort of shopping experience.
Now this is not a problem, we offer world class design and development (of course!), and we have a number of real success stories in our portfolio. We can offer people whatever they want, and a look and feel to suit their business vision. What I am finding increasing common though is a lack of appreciation for how much this actually costs to develop and a lack of appreciation of it’s market value. I have been pondering on why this should be and where this leaves the market now.
I have come up with several reasons why people essentially undervalue the development of internet shopping experiences:
- Lack of understanding. This really takes many forms. Many potential customers do not appreciate, for example, how much it costs to employ a designer to create concepts. How much a programmer costs per day etc. etc. Most of these people are themselves employees in larger organisation and so have no connection to these sorts of ideas. Hence, when it comes to looking for costings they have no idea of the market value.
- It all looks easy: what makes a great eCommerce site, or in fact any good web site is ease of use. However, there is no positive correlation between easy of use and “easy” to produce. More often than not, the easier the user experience, the more programming and effort is put into it.
- Availability of the “programmer in a garage”. Web development has a real history of being an amateur “from the ground up” profession and that is great. However, there comes a point when that no longer cuts the mustard. Somethings need to be done by a professional. For example, where is your support, maintenance and professionalism. We have many clients who have come to us with sites they paid little for and now have no support or even hope of understanding how to use it and develop it further.
- Open source development. This is related to the above point really. Open source is great, where appropriate. The availability of free development environments enables the”programmer in a garage” to turn a profit and encourages free-open thinking. However, there are many drawbacks to open source, and I am certainly not going to get into them here. Suffice to say that they can be difficult to maintain, insecure and difficult to scale.
Now, there will always be a niche for the cheap and cheerful solution, most likely open source. But frankly people need to appreciate that quality well designed web sites need time and money.
One example cited to me was that of the high street shop. A person wanting to set up on an average high street is lkely to have to spend tens of thousands of pounds upfront in order to sell their product (possibly even hundreds of thousands). So why is the interent no different? Yes it will be considerably cheape; there is no physical shop presence, no rates and rent, but it most certainly is not free. You need someone to “outfit” your online shop, i.e. design and develop it.
So where is this heading?
Well I think the conclusion from this is that the market is not yet quite ready. People are increasingly using the internet and exposure is undoubtably a good thing, but I think there will continue to be a gap between people using it and people appreciating that it is a maturing product, and that costs money. The home-spun industry is being replaced as a quick money making idea by those people that are making it a professional marketplace, and to compete with professionals you have to be professional yourself. One of the great things about the internet is that it is a great leveller. No-one knows if the company behind the site is a large multi-national or a small one-man-band, so it is much easier to compete if you get yourself a professional looking website in the first place.