What are the specifics that was not met by the builders? My guess is that any/every PHP jockey web site company has got the mediocre specs of a web commerce site down path and that is why they were trying to flog what the have in the first place rather than start from scratch.
Alterantively have a look at the some of your favourite software sites that are not too big, they would be already selling the software using somebody elses platform, looking at the footer of the page and see who is their provider. A software selling website has number of requirements that not just any web commerce building companies can match, it is not same as mum and dad's Jam selling site. Regards Arjang On 30 September 2011 16:26, Matt Siebert <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi all, > Has anyone used Avangate, FastSpring, PayPro 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.
