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we were looking at this the other day while trying to assess what the standard tools are for ecommerce these days. We were using google trends. There is still

we were looking at this the other day while trying to assess what the standard tools are for ecommerce these days. We were using google trends. There is still a lot of interest in wordpress, compared to say joomla which had its day in the sun but is now on the way out. However there seems to be a big move towards people using more SAAS (e.g. your broucure site being instagram) and less maintaining your own kit. Also anecdote: my sax repair guy is moving off woocommerce onto an offering provided by his PoS vendor. PoS integration is also quite common - a local non profit I'm involved in also does this.

catsarebetter 3y ago
If you want, you can email me with a few ecommerce domains. I can generate some data and send you a report with the custom tech I used for this article.
- singingfish 3y ago
  Not really relevant to our problem tbh. At our scale (b2b) the answer seems to be there's a big trend away from places owning their own IP and using partnerships instead. Which is a problem when your competitive advantage is closely linked to owning your own IP, as it's hard to get external partners to advise you well in a way that's going to get the dev team and the execs aligned. However there have been many attempts to kill our code over the years, all of which has been unsuccessful to date because someone's got to route around the horrors of the ERP and the rest of the enterprise stack.
  - catsarebetter 3y ago
    Agh we're facing the same problem at my job, build vs buy conversation a long time ago that resulted in a buy decision that we're suffering from. Even worse is no one involved in that decision is around today
    - singingfish 3y ago
      The fact that our competitors don't own their IP makes writing the occasional price scraping bot much easier, and has the knock on effect that there is likely a lack of people that care what I'm doing inside the competitors. The link between business process and customer activity is quite tricky to codify in our case, and it's a substantial source of value because it creates high availability in a less-than-robust system and gives a single point of entry to how the management of business processes links to outcomes. Currently we're pushing the org to avoid complete rebuild and go for targeted rebuild where the old and new systems can share common functionality / features can get backported. It's not the standard type of work that partners do though, so that's tricky.
  - spcebar 3y ago
    Be weary of ERP solutions and vendors selling one stop silver bullet integrations for B2B. We've had clients get badly burnt that way. The setup fees are often large, and doing any kind of customization can require going through the provider's reps. Implementing Kalviyo on an ERP storefront site cost the client somewhere around $5,000, which, on any number of other e-commerce platforms we could have done for them in an hour at our hourly rate (which is less than $5,000). Let me know if you want to talk B2B e-commerce as I have plenty of war stories.
    - singingfish 3y ago
      yeah pretty much ... it's rare to see decent architecture in those systems. Masses of spaghetti curated by spreadsheets are popular though.

catsarebetter 3y ago

If you want, you can email me with a few ecommerce domains. I can generate some data and send you a report with the custom tech I used for this article.

singingfish 3y ago
Not really relevant to our problem tbh. At our scale (b2b) the answer seems to be there's a big trend away from places owning their own IP and using partnerships instead. Which is a problem when your competitive advantage is closely linked to owning your own IP, as it's hard to get external partners to advise you well in a way that's going to get the dev team and the execs aligned. However there have been many attempts to kill our code over the years, all of which has been unsuccessful to date because someone's got to route around the horrors of the ERP and the rest of the enterprise stack.
- catsarebetter 3y ago
  Agh we're facing the same problem at my job, build vs buy conversation a long time ago that resulted in a buy decision that we're suffering from. Even worse is no one involved in that decision is around today
  - singingfish 3y ago
    The fact that our competitors don't own their IP makes writing the occasional price scraping bot much easier, and has the knock on effect that there is likely a lack of people that care what I'm doing inside the competitors. The link between business process and customer activity is quite tricky to codify in our case, and it's a substantial source of value because it creates high availability in a less-than-robust system and gives a single point of entry to how the management of business processes links to outcomes. Currently we're pushing the org to avoid complete rebuild and go for targeted rebuild where the old and new systems can share common functionality / features can get backported. It's not the standard type of work that partners do though, so that's tricky.
- spcebar 3y ago
  Be weary of ERP solutions and vendors selling one stop silver bullet integrations for B2B. We've had clients get badly burnt that way. The setup fees are often large, and doing any kind of customization can require going through the provider's reps. Implementing Kalviyo on an ERP storefront site cost the client somewhere around $5,000, which, on any number of other e-commerce platforms we could have done for them in an hour at our hourly rate (which is less than $5,000). Let me know if you want to talk B2B e-commerce as I have plenty of war stories.
  - singingfish 3y ago
    yeah pretty much ... it's rare to see decent architecture in those systems. Masses of spaghetti curated by spreadsheets are popular though.