About the right approach to choosing an engine for an online store

About the right approach to the choice of engine for the online store.

For many years, programmers have been offering e-merchants their solutions for creating online stores. In this case, usually people who choose their own engine for an online store are beginners. They did not trade and they still do not know what they need. And programmers look at them as a source of money and consider software for an online store solely in terms of ease of implementation, and not in terms of ease of use. This situation leads to the fact that most stores are abandoned by owners rather quickly. So what is the mistake of this approach? The mistake is to consider the store engine from the seller’s point of view. A novice trader can turn on fantasy and hard work and imagine that he is an experienced seller. Then he will choose the right engine. And to choose the wrong one means to get involved in cycling on a scooter. Loss of time, money and deep disappointment in online trading.

What should a novice do?

Find a niche to trade. Find out the specifics of the product and the audience. It is obvious. Examine the competition. If you are already at the stage of choosing software for a store, you have already done all this.
1. Look at all possible price lists and balances with which it will be necessary to work . Find potential suppliers. Take from them the price lists and look at them. It seems to be obvious, but in practice it makes a minority. The store should always be the current price list. So it needs to be updated. Practice shows that this is a big problem for many.
2. Fully several times scroll through the procedure for updating prices in practice . Take a test account or download a test version of the engine for the store. Try to update the price list.

In a normal system, one person copes with updating the price lists of dissimilar goods from forty suppliers coming daily. It has also been noted in practice that the format of the price list is changed by the supplier 1-2 times a year. The system must be reconfigured very quickly and for free. This is the moment that is missed when most store owners choose an engine. Of course, this paragraph does not apply to those who do not have suppliers and only their products.

3. Add 10 dissimilar items to the store. Import their features and photos. Note that you will need to add hundreds or thousands. Calculate the time and cost of such work. Until you experience these three points and do not calculate the labor costs, you cannot even write a business plan for the store. After all, it is not known how many man-hours and personnel will be needed for these items.

Looking for an example, I decided to look at the shops, well-known to me topics - bicycles. Google.ru and open the top ten stores for the request "bikes". Alas, no store allows you to make a normal electronic order. Out of ten “Runet leaders” (at the time of this writing). The maximum that you can do is order a bike model . But, for those who do not know, I will explain. 95% of bicycles have an integral parameter - the size of the frame . A person with a height of 188 will not be able to ride a bike of size S. And vice versa. This means that in response to an order, they will call you back, asking for your height, and they will say that "there is no bike for you. Sorry " And of course the aforementioned stores on the site have a terrible situation - half of the goods are not available, in some leaders ”you will learn about it only by placing an order and spending half an hour to choose a particular model.
But that's not all. The real price-remains for bicycles of all the major suppliers I have seen (several dozen) looks like this:
product name price balance
MR12344 BikeGood S 234 1
MR12345 BikeGood L 234 1
Those. Not only that, even holding the price in our hands, we actually cannot update the balance (the positions in the price list and in the store, due to the frame size, are completely different), so we are constantly misleading the customers. Here you have a great example of the “selected engine” that makes both the buyer and the owner suffer. But these nasty shops are located in some web studios in the portfolio with a loud sign "one of the bicycle shops - leaders in runet." So, the examples are more than convincing. It is possible and counterexample. Take a similar top three in Ukrainian Google. Two of the three shops are correct - With the choice of frame size, with bicycles that can be perfectly distinguished between those that are absent and those that are absent from the display ... conveniently. The inscription on the update of the price today and yesterday. Acceptable.

Returning to the choice of engine for the store. Unfortunately, people pay money for the program without understanding whether they are suitable for their business in principle. People do not test engines, do not try them. Then suffer all my life. The best engine may simply not suit you, and the worst - come up, because there are no good and bad ones - there are right tools for your business model and there are wrong ones. The main thing is to choose, guided by the practice of their work, and not by their appearance, with cool features for the buyer or recommendation “in one authoritative forum”. Just scroll through the entire purchase cycle several times. Adding goods, buying them by the buyer, accepting the order by the manager, transferring the order to delivery, working with the warehouse and everything else .
A few words about the capabilities of the store are not " for the owners, " but " for the buyers ." Ninety percent of the possibilities for the buyer are in ninety percent of self-respecting engines, which have at least several dozen implementations. The remaining 10% can be added. If they are even needed. And the basic capabilities are all about the same. But in any case - check it out. Test the demo engine from all sides and do not waste your money.
Someone will say - "This is obvious!". Then why are there so many offers on the market without being able to test them for free?