> > Saying that the USD 200,- that Mary Jo asks for her CFWebstore is too > much seems like an oddity to me. If the customer cannot pay USD 200,- > for the licence, how on earth is the customer able to pay for the > consultant/developer fees for installing and modifying the webshop if > needed?
Well, actually the price for a new first-time store is $400. And yes, that's a fair amount more than any of the various PHP carts, but even that price is barely enough for me to support future development with it. There's a reason there are so few CF carts out there....the amount of work needed to build and maintain even a reasonably good cart is pretty significant, and there just isn't a big enough market for CF apps to easily bring in the sales needed to support the work required. There's a lot of pitfalls to using open source software for ecommerce (and yes, I may be biased, but I also speak from lots of experience in this field). Anyone that has spent anytime with OSCommerce knows how convoluted the code has become from years of many people messing with it. And yes, there are tons of addons you can get for just about any payment gateway, shipper, etc. you might want to use, but what happens when they change their API and your client's store stops working? I can't tell you how many times I've had to redo code because of API changes, or how many times I've had to go onto a site to debug a particular server issue that they might be having that's causing things to break. I've got a pretty long to-do list at the moment of things that have to be updated, changed or added in the next several months to keep sites running properly. Most of my customers will agree...they are paying just as much for the support they get as for the code itself. Knowing that if something goes wrong or stops working, they have someone to go to that will get it working for them again. With something as mission critical as most ecommerce sites are, that's usually worth a few bucks to get, versus saving some up-front with OSS and then being on your own should any problems arise. I do agree that the fact that my code is still procedural though is a bit of an issue. Not that it's *bad* code, just not OO, and I've always felt one advantage it had was that I get a lot of web designers that really know very little CF but can do minor changes to the application since it's fairly easy to learn as is. But I definitely have seen more in the last year or so the need for a more enterprise-level solution that provides APIs and proper MVC architecture, that can easily plug into other apps and work directly with them, etc. There's a ton of stuff I have in the works right now but an almost complete rewrite of the code is a hard thing to fit in there in terms of time and money needed to do it....particularly since the only way to get it done in a reasonable amount of time while freezing other development is probably to hire some good developers to do a sizable chunk of the work.. The amount of time involved in refactoring an application of this size and complexity is definitely not trivial. But I'm looking into some possibilities and hopefully can continue to move this forward. I'm certainly open though to ideas for how we might get it done (and done well) without it costing tens of thousands of dollars! One thing I have considered doing in the past and if we are able to update the architecture I might consider doing is having a free version that just includes the most basic functions needed for a shopping cart...and then the commercial version that would require purchase for the full suite of features. --- Mary Jo ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~| Order the Adobe Coldfusion Anthology now! http://www.amazon.com/Adobe-Coldfusion-Anthology-Michael-Dinowitz/dp/1430272155/?tag=houseoffusion Archive: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/cf-talk/message.cfm/messageid:334871 Subscription: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/cf-talk/subscribe.cfm Unsubscribe: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/cf-talk/unsubscribe.cfm
