Managed ecommerce; Application Service Providers

A study of SiteSell.com (http://www.sitesell.com/ )

To start with…. This type of site is not completely without it’s merits, they exist, but if it’s of any use it’s for the very ‘nubile’ webPreneurs. Great as a starter. Once one has a grasp of business and the internet, control is everything. These programs take away much of that control in the guise of making your experience more user friendly, when in essences, you are merely giving up control for a lack of other options.

The navigation of member pages is very poor. China town at rush hour poor, I’m talking here. The member’s area is littered with various ‘marketing’ scheme links like so many billboards along the highway, which are undoubtedly affiliate programs of their own. When I pay a fee for a service I really don’t need more ‘sales-crap’ pushed on me. Visual SPAM to me, and always a sign of a business run unprofessionally.

Now they certainly ‘try’ to give added value for their offering with various reporting tools, such as it is. The problem is that almost all of these reporting tools can be had via any reputable host running cPanel or the like and the simplest of FREE open-source shopping carts such as OS Commerce. Truly, there is probably greater reporting power with those as you backend systems. Once again the usability of the admin panel is more than a little lacking.

So maybe the marketing tools can save it? Well, sorry again. Right off the bat when I start hearing catch phrases like 5 Pillar Manual, I start looking for an Amway salesman. Granted there are some tidbits to be had, but nothing a dedicated search of Google (or elsewhere) wouldn’t turn up quite easily. So not something I would pay for.

The CMS (content management system) is…well…. Archaic. Pretty sure we created a better site builder 4 years ago ( an eon in the tech biz), that was easier to use than this. Nothing here that any CMS (ttCMS,Drupal,Mambo) doesn’t already do 100x better. I am truly saddened to see such a blatant LACK of reinvestment. If I am charging $$ for a product, that product should at least be state of the art…..

It also has a TrafficCenter section aimed at SEO and submission goodies. Has the standard horrid navigation. And One more time… completely at the risk of getting redundant… NOTHING NEW HERE. Consists of a Link Exchange program (many freely available out there), keyword tools (which CDS has freely right on our site and can be found elsewhere), ranking and report tools which I can name 2 that are better and free right off the top of my head (search Analog X). Spider reporting lists can be found in the stats of any cPanel enabled host.

In short…Pass on this route. Certainly there are better example such as Yahoo stores and ecom, but this leopard never changes it’s spots. Regardless of vendor, services like this are best for the newbie to get their feet wet. You are always better off creating a system around your business, not the inverse. Business is a fluid beast and the more control you give away, the less able you are to adapt ‘fluidly’. God forbid this service should ever go out of business, one would have to start over from scratch..not an enticing though to say the least.

Save some money and some heartache. Obtain a good hosting company, implement a shopping cart and CMS of your own, then grab a couple free SEO tools and away you go. You’ll get far more in the terms of tools and value offerings, and much more control in how you do business and collect data.

There’s my thoughts…take them or leave them…everyone else does.

Watch your step