I asked:
> > What should the "best" e-commerce system contain?
Michael A. Stone writes:
> first and foremost, an e-commerce system should be based on a very clear
> understanding of how the organization in question uses communication as
> part of its business. that's the basis of your system design, and the
> thing which will lead you to other, more specific questions.
Words to live by for any system design, but I guess I was assuming
more of a narrow case, the kind of situation most of us here would
typically deal with (though, come to think of it, if measured by the
dollar, my past experience is more the opposite, with large
corporations). Perhaps that points out a need to break it down a bit
more:
By type:
Retail
Business-to-Business
By size:
Billboard web site with single-product, single-click ordering
small-to-medium sized company
large company
For type, we can assume that vertical backoffice (inventory / POS /
shipping / order processing / accounting) solutions fill a separate but
related niche (or set of niches). Otherwise the discussion gets far too
large and is about software design in general, instead of web software
design and e-commerce design. For size, use the fairly conventional
definitions based on orders of magnitude; a small company employs tens of
people, medium hundreds, large thousands, with accompanying budgets.
Obviously, in some cases, mainly large companies and companies that
specialize in web business (like Amazon, Egghead, etc) the back office
will be completely custom-built and integrated with the e-commerce
technology, put together by huge projects involving hundreds of thousands
to millions of dollars of hardware investment and as much in development
costs.
Billboard sites, at the other end of the extreme, are fairly
straightforward. While they could be said to provide "e-commerce",
there's not much more to building and running them than a conventional
form and making sure you have SSL so payment data isn't exposed.
That leaves the small-to-medium businesses, where the site is hosted
on a third party server or on a server dedicated to supporting a
particular e-commerce solution. (or, rarely, on a colocated small scale
server, like a Linux box, or behind a company's office T1), and
interoperability with the backoffice systems is minimal or non-existent,
so far (*).
(* and likely to stay that way. I'm not familiar with any
market-dominating, low-cost, generic backoffice technology. Until
the custom developers in this arena start working with more
mainstream interoperable technologies, connections to their systems
will have to be custom developed to fit. The best that can be done
now is to make sure the systems you're developing are ready to play
nicely with others; ODBC compliant, maybe someday CORBA support for
the big players, etc.)
> too many organizations go charging off after the buzzword toy of the month,
Too true; I guess I'm trying to get beyond the buzzword syndrome.
Or maybe I'm trying to hijack the buzzword process and make E-commerce
mean something substantial, so I can use it to talk to people who care
about buzzwords. Maybe that's the most constructive thing we can do
about the problem.
> > What should it cost?
>
> no single answer is possible, for all the reasons above.
Having narrowed down the range a bit, now what should it cost? Or
more to the point, if a client comes to you with such a project, what
should you budget for software (either bought or for the time to find a
GPL package and install and configure it), what should you budget for
custom software development, and what should you budget for doing the
site itself?
I remember _The Geek's Guide to Internet Success_, by Bob Schmidt if
I recall correctly (also a member of this forum - hi Bob!) suggested that
a web site should cost $5K and hence you should limit your target
audience to companies that make $20 million/year. He arrived at that
number by applying a rule of thumb about gross profits vs. amount spent
on marketing and assuming that the customer is only going to blow part of
their marketing budget on a web site. What should the numbers be for
e-commerce?
> the one thing i can say, with absolute confidence, is that a good
> solution.. not overwhelming, just functional and reliable.. will cost a lot
> more than the customer thought going in. wish-lists are big, quality
> costs money, there's never enough time, and training goes slowly.
Ain't it always the case... a good book about *that* is Ed Yourdon's
recent _Deathmarch_. And of course there are Steve McConnell's books,
_Code Complete_, _Rapid Development_ and _Software Engineering_ (not
terribly impressed with this last, but I understand it's more of a
cookbook for engineers who don't have time to read the theory in _Code
Complete_; _Rapid Development_, on the other hand, is more management
focused).
Steven J. Owens
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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