Hi all, Has anyone used Avangate <http://www.avangate.com/>, FastSpring<http://www.fastspring.com/>, PayPro <http://www.payproglobal.com/> or similar to sell a software product?
We need to outsource some work to fix / re-develop our website and we want to minimise the amount of things that can be done poorly. As such, we're looking at ecommerce providers and I'm hoping we can get to a point where the web developers are just building a UI that hooks into a quality back end that's not tied to them. <rant> We've had a lot of trouble with our website. We don't have the resources or expertise to develop it in-house so we went with a web design company. This kind of worked initially, but the result wasn't quite what we wanted. Soon after, the powers that be decided to partner with another web design / marketing company who were going to design a new website with all the functionality we wanted (specifics were discussed and agreed to at the time) and they would manage online marketing campaigns, SEO, affiliates, etc ongoing. In return for this they were getting a cut of the product sales. After many frustrating months telling us they couldn't do things they'd agreed to (which was really because they didn't want to customise their out of the box solution even though that's what they promised to do up front) they finally wanted to go live with their site that still had a number of problems. In the interest of moving things forward we eventually agreed to go live. Two weeks later frustrations are boiling over and they want to pull out of the deal. Now we have two websites, neither is quite what we need, the new one has lots of problems and a couple of features that the old one doesn't. Both sites are PHP by the way. We're trying to salvage the relationship with the original web developers and get them to either fix the new site or modify their old site. The painfully obvious thing here is that in both cases the web developers... well, uh, sucked. They often told us things we'd asked for weren't possible when what they really meant was "I can't be bothered doing that now" or "that's a little more difficult than we though so we're not doing it now". </rant> Cheers.
