After a few years of trading we are reaching the point of outgrowing our initial ecommerce set up and realising that there is not much between your £200 off the shelf store and £20,000+ dedicated ecommerce system.

We have been using a mix of EE and a off the shelf shopping cart. The membership systems are not compatable but because our site content is as important as our store I have insisted on EE for its advanced publishing features.. we are a brand as well as a store.

As we are outgrowing our setup we have been looking at solutions such as netsuite and a couple of other dedicated ecommerce solutions in the UK.

To be honest they scare me because I feel they will lock us in and will charge a premium for custom development and ongoing costs. A bit like insurance.. they offer incentives for new users but once they have you they don’t reward you.

Just as we do not outsource our warehousing, product design or call enquiries my gut tells me that we should develop our ecommerce in house, building a team and adding value to the company.

But am I being ridiculous, this would be a major personnel investment for us and the netsuites of this world must have already spent millions on developing the perferct erm/ecommerce systems.. to build that from scratch would be insane wouldn’t it?

I was wondering if any forum users have been at this point and have any advice to offer?

Hey Kenny,
I was just talking to someone whome I was suggesting to switch to EE. They are imprisoned by custom php solution without any level of access to simple things such as adding item categories...it is all per request (read per invoice)...ridiculos rip.
It doesn’t have to be £20,000...actually it would not be that hard to do it with some php. along with EE. Keep it separated from core EE and you should be ok with updates...I would imagine keeping in separate table would make it easy to restore after update as well.
It really depends how far you want to take it beyond basic ‘wam-bam-thank-you-mam’ shopping cart.
-Any reporting and/or expense charting for customers?
-Is it a multi-component item that can be purchased (eg. egnine parts+labor= custom engine)?

Just a thought for now...have not implemented anything like this.
All the best!