Thread

I just thought I’d start a new thread on the current beta version of eeCommerce, as a thread created earlier got hijacked by it.

Now, from what I understand, this is going to be a very pricey eCommerce solution that integrates EE with Magento.

A few thoughts I had about this.

1. I don’t really recognize Lee Bolding as an EE developer at all, and he seems to have posted on this forum only 4 times now (all seemingly related to eeCommerce). I’m hoping to get a little background information on him and why he chose to do this for EE if he is not really familiar with it or its community. Perhaps his focus has been on Magento in the past? Hopefully Lee could respond.

2. That said, with a general unfamiliarity with the community and its needs, I’m wondering if they gathered any input from the EE community prior to producing this beta version.

3. The price is pretty hard to swallow for most EE developers. I know that there MAY be a good reason for charging this, especially if all the eCommerce bells and whistles are offered up, but was there any thought to perhaps offering differing pricing models based on feature set/support (gold, silver, bronze… that sort of thing)? Remember, this is a community that is used to paying $100 or less for modules for the most part.

I probably have other thoughts on this whole thing, but I just wanted to put this out there. I notice that some have signed up for the beta trial and been accepted. As beta testers try this out, I’d love to hear feedback on eeCommerce and the support provided by the developer. At that price, support expectations will be VERY high for me.

$1300 per year and $2500 for a lifetime licence is totally unrealistic for a bridging script IMHO. Additionally, if I had a budget like that I wouldn’t be using Magento!

True. I mean there are a lot of great expensive eCommerce products out there already. Why would someone use this one? EE as a CMS in front of Magento does potentially bring something more to the table… flexibility, its great templating system, the fact that you can have much, much more than a store, security, etc., etc.

But, this is a good question for the makers of eeCommerce. Why would anyone use this system over systems? Stores that can afford to pay that much have the pick of other top products after all… You put the price up that high, the expectations for feature set and support will follow…

A system that brings the power of Magento into EE is worth that cost in my opinion. But only if was doing a few ecommerce/content sites a year. This is way beyond your mom and pop goat cheese store (I used simple commerce for that one), and I would jump on it for a big site. Definitely worth it.

$1300 per year and $2500 for a lifetime licence is totally unrealistic for a bridging script IMHO. Additionally, if I had a budget like that I wouldn’t be using Magento!

I have to agree.  That’s an almost impossible sell.  If I’m using EE for a site, the bulk of it is probably not eCommerce related.  So, a cost of $200 for a license and $2500 (who would do $1300/yr?) for a lesser part would be a hard pill for post to swallow.

I was fairly excited when I heard about this, but this bursts the bubble a bit.  I have an inkling this won’t live up to the hype anyway.

Anyone in the beta want to share their experience?

Hi guys,

Sorry for not replying earlier - Easter got in the way 😉

Thanks for your questions - I’ll try to answer them as best I can. But first, please have a look at my previous response to similar questions here : http://ellislab.com/forums/viewthread/103206/P72/#547317

Also, it may help to read Chris Pollock’s blog entry about meeting us a few weeks ago here : http://sim.plified.com/2009/04/01/meetup-with-eecommerce-developers/

I should also mention that Chris is one of our beta testers.

Firstly, I have to concur with AJP - this isn’t a solution for a mom and pop store. Magento isn’t designed for that kind of set up, in those situations it’s WAY overkill and I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend other solutions such as SimpleCommerce and FoxEE. Magento - and therefore eeCommerce - is designed for much larger scale stores; have a look at some of the clients already using Magento: Jack Wolfskin, TimeOut, poster.com and many more.

With that out of the way, I’ll address your questions.

eeCommerce is being developed by the development team at the company I co-founded, PHP UK. My role in this is Programme Manager for eeCommerce - basically, I’m overseeing the whole project, managing the developers, the budget, the roadmap all that stuff. I’m familiar with both the ExpressionEngine and Magento products and communities, as are most of our developers. They’ve produced plenty of ExpressionEngine plugins and modules for clients in the past. We also have a great deal of experience with ecommerce - we have staff here at PHP UK that have worked on ecommerce projects for truly massive clients in the past.

The eeCommerce development team is a dedicated resource for the eeCommerce project. Once the product has been launched they’ll continue to work on it, adding and improving features, as well as fixing any bugs that are reported. Additionally, they’ll be continuing to ensure that eeCommerce functions with all future releases of both ExpressionEngine and Magento, which is an ongoing task. eeCommerce customers will be able to exchange an eeCommerce 1.0 (for ExpressionEngine 1.6.x) license for an eeCommerce 2.0 (for ExpressionEngine 2.x) license free of charge.

As you can probably imagine - a full time development team, dedicated to a specific product - isn’t cheap. We must reflect this cost in the price of the product, as I’m sure you can understand.

We chose ExpressionEngine and Magento because we believe that these are 2 best of breed components. Our decision was further backed up because both components have some form of professional network - with ExpressionEngine this is the Pro Network, and with Magento this is the partner network. We felt that this was incredibly important to us, because when it comes to ecommerce, nothing sells more than customers having confidence in your product, and the support that they can expect. Members of either network are at a distinct advantage here, and we anticipate that this will encourage members of each community to join their respective support network as a result. We’re further encouraging that by offering significant discounts on our products to members of either support network.

Ofcourse, that brings us to our own support - when eeCommerce launches we will be offering telephone support to all customers that have purchased the product. As far as we’re aware, that’s not available for any other ExpressionEngine extension - commercial or otherwise. Infact, telephone support isn’t offered by EllisLab themselves, and is only offered by Varien by paid subscription. Additionally, we’ll also be offering support via our forums, wiki, knowledge base and email.

Something else that isn’t available for any other commercial ExpressionEngine extension is an evaluation - try before you buy.

We’re fully aware that some of these concepts are new to the ExpressionEngine community, but we’re quite happy to pioneer them 😊

What I’m keen to impress upon you is that eeCommerce isn’t a product aimed JUST at the ExpressionEngine community. It’s aimed at the Magento community also, and further, it’s aimed at the much larger customer base which currently doesn’t include either of those products. eeCommerce is a product which is greater than the sum of it’s individual parts.

What eeCommerce promises is a far more rapid time to market for any ecommerce store than is currently available. It also makes Magento a viable option for those who don’t know Magento’s complicated XML/XSLT templating mechanism, or where the budget doesn’t stretch to the weeks or months labour required to create templates inside of Magento. To implement ecommerce on your ExpressionEngine site with eeCommerce, you only need to add about 6 new templates. The cost of the module may seem high - but stacked against weeks or months of labour saved, it’s a bargain - that’s cost savings to both you and your client. When you also consider the level of integration we offer with users and authentication, and the professional support we offer - that you can use that as a selling point to your client, it just keeps getting better 😊

It’s the bigger picture that you should be considering. Overall, eeCommerce offers a much lower TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) than many other ecommerce solutions currently available. Remember, as I previously mentioned, there will be an evaluation version available for free download - so you can try before you buy, totally risk free.

Lastly, I’ll leave you with some of the reactions we’ve had so far :

“I’m actually more exited about this than I am about EE2.”
“wow that is amazing! “

As Programme Manager, it’s responses like those that help to confirm to me that we’re on the right track 😊

If you have any further questions, please email them to beta [at] eecommerce.com

Regards,

Lee Bolding | PHP UK
Programme Manager, eeCommerce

@Lee

Thanks for the reply. I can possibly see this being of benefit to some of the larger EE developers and perhaps some of the mom and pop shop developers if they contract their services out. With a lot of work put in, they will be able to expand their skillsets… which I believe they could have done already by just learning Magento. The advantage for them here is that they can utilize their EE background to minimize the Magento learning curve.

But, what is the advantage for a Magento developer? I’m assuming they already know the “complicated” Magento templating system and have discovered ways to speed up the work required. They will not, however, know the EE system. While I find it easy, others have trouble. Why would they want to learn EE and add the extra cost of EE. What does it do for them?

As for pioneering this in the EE community, I’m hoping that this doesn’t turn into a trend. I like the lowcost of EE and EE modules. I don’t need phone support, although I admit that some might. In my opinion, it would be unfortunate if this sort of thing starts to occur for any module considered “complex” and requiring a “team” of developers. I hope it is NOT your intention to start creating other modules that are similarly larger than the sum of the parts. Every add-on created inevitably makes EE something “larger” than it was before the addon was installed. This sort of pioneering opens up a can of worms in a way. What makes YOUR module worth so much more than any other? You seem to be basing this off of the support you will provide and the size of the team required to create it. Seems to say that you COULD offer bronze, silver, gold types of prices based on the support an individual may want. If I don’t want or use phone support, why can’t I pay less?

I know I’m debating here, but this is important. It is a very different pricing model than what EE is used to. It changes the overall product is a very significant way… maybe not much with just this one product, but it would be quite a change if others decided to do something similiar with other products… a slippery slope as they say.

In terms of pricing, I’m assuming you are trying to compete feature for feature against other eCommerce software providers that are already well established out there. The ones I’ve looked into do offer differing pricing levels based on feature set. If Magento isn’t suited to that already, then it isn’t competing in an important way. As a developer, I would ideally like to utilize my skills efficiently. If I have stores of different sizes asking me to develop a website for them, I would love to be able to use the same app for pretty much all of them if possible… granted, not all features would be active for all stores, but the development would be similar. This is possible with the pricing models provided by many of your competitors. This is similarly the way I’m sure most of us like to work in terms of a cms… we’d love EE to fit as many website requirements as possible, because then we don’t have to spend time also learning Drupal or any of the various other cms packages out there.

I know this may be prying, but it does provide context for the community here (think Billy Bob Thornton).... what modules/plugins/extensions has your team of developers provided to the community in the past? Feel free to answer or not, but I don’t see why that should be a secret.

Thanks again for the reply. Sorry to put you on the hotseat, but this issue is oddly important to me.

Just to pop in my two pennies worth if I may? 😉

I’m kind of in the same boat as Shannon on this one. Whether or not I’m coming from having a good knowledge of ExpressionEngine or Magento though to me it just seems very very expensive for a bridge. As he has said any Magento developers would probably just use the Magento templating to do their work whereas ExpressionEngine users would use ExpressionEngine so from what I am reading the module wouldn’t be as good for Magento users to take up as it would be for ExpressionEngine users. I could be wrong on that but that’s the way I see it.

If you (just for now) then rule out Magento users and bring the module down to what it seems to me to be, a bridging module so that ExpressionEngine can utilise the features of Magento then it seems like a lot of money to me and especially if you are expected to pay that each year.

I can honestly say that I don’t think I would ever pay that much for e-commerce although this isn’t aimed at mainly your module rather the whole of e-commerce itself but if ever I did pay out that kind of money then I definitely wouldn’t be expecting to pay that as a yearly license.

As Shannon mentioned above and you hit on it yourself above too you say that you know the community here very well although I have to be honest and say that I don’t remember you from previous users and your post count is currently only on 5 so I’m wondering how you know us all?

Please don’t take that the wrong way as it admittedly may have sounded a little harsh but it definitely isn’t meant in that way at all it’s just that I’m trying to gauge exactly what it is that you know about us all that’s all.

My final question is that I’m just wondering why you didn’t just create a module that would be solely for ExpressionEngine for e-commerce seeing as how most Magento users I guess would just use Magento and not bother mixing it together with ExpressionEngine if they know Magento so well. Just wondering why you couldn’t have created an e-commerce module solely for ExpressionEngine? I think that would have been received a lot better here.

I’m just a little scared that as it’s a bridge then if ever ExpressionEngine updates something or Magento updates something then as developers you are having to test out not only ExpressionEngine but you are having to test it in with Magento too and that might open up a whole can of support issues. I could be wrong on that though but it seems like an awful lot more work to me although that is work which obviously you are prepared to take on 😉

Just my thoughts anyway. Thanks for coming in to the forums so openly like this as it is very much appreciated.

Best wishes,

Mark

Hey Mark… You echo my thoughts exactly, so I think you are agreeing with me, right? Not Lee? 😊

Oops there I go again mixing names up. Must be my old age!! Yep I was agreeing with you, sorry 😉

No problem Mark, but you don’t look all that old in your photo! 😉

I do love your idea of an eCommerce module built for EE. FoxEE is getting there, but still needs more development. They are trying though and they will be a good solution for a variety of purposes I believe if they can get all the features they want to work working.

I think that the majority within our community don’t require ALL the bells and whistles that come from Magento… also, I would love to see a good membership subscription module (this is where FoxEE is having the most amount of trouble right now). Magento does not do subscriptions yet. Maybe in the future, as it is on their “list of things to do”, but it isn’t available now. Many of their competitors in eCommerce have this in place.

I think a lot of us would be fairly happy with a robust paypal/google checkout module that does some taxes, shipping, subscriptions, discounts, order tracking. Those mom and pop shop websites need some decent eCommerce too… I guess that’s where FoxEE will have to fill the void. I just think there could be something even more simple than FoxEE that is built for EE alone. Similar to Simple Commerce, but going above and beyond and incorporating your shopping cart code. Maybe we should build it. 😉

The free trial is pointless. Who would invest the time learning a system that they know is too expensive.

Try as you may, you cannot justify the pricing. At those prices, only a handful of subscriptions should pay for the development costs.

As a developer, this kind of greed irks me. I try to create first class applications, but I don’t use that as ammunition to justify overcharging.

I’m going to chime in here as well. A full featured commerce solution for EE is worth its weight in gold, however, I think the biggest problem you face right now is your pricing. I’m pretty confident in saying that EE as it stands, will be a more polished solution than eeCommerce will be for a long time, and technically EE offers a whole lot more opportunities, and yet they charge well below half the price you’re proposing for your product?

Are you trying to say that EllisLab doesn’t have a team of developers working on it, and they’re not offering as much as value as your extension of their product? Because I think you’re going to find that the EE community struggles paying for something that costs three times what they’re used to paying for the full EE solution, when they know just as much time and love goes into it (if not more), than eeCommerce.

/rant

Actually, it’s more like 10x the price of EE… $2500 to buy it outright (or $1300/year… which would eventually be even more than 10x the price).

I started this thread to debate the merits of this sort of thing. Personally, I think EE is a steal at the price they charge…. others think, why isn’t it free like Drupal? So, there is no way to win with everybody.

In comparing what other eCommerce solutions are charging, what they plan to charge is sort of competitive if you take all features into account along with a few other things they have mentioned, like unlimited support and upgrades. When comparing to EE, it’s just not competitive, but they’d likely argue you can’t compare them because they aren’t the same. The bridge aspect of it makes it harder to swallow though, because it feels like they are cashing in on the hard work of others… in terms of both EE and Magento.

But, you mention a good point… there are LESS opportunities for this sort of product than there are for EE. Perhaps they feel they have to charge more, as they can’t really expect to get many orders… no matter what the cost. There just isn’t that much business out there for this full featured of an eCommerce solution.

Anyway, I do believe that a good integrated EE eCommerce module would be fantastic and worth its weight in gold. I’m thinking a good module could fetch quite a decent price too… just not this price. It would need to be fairly flexible in that it would be the right solution for a wide variety of needs. I’m also obviously ok with tiered pricing options.

Of note, it is worth mentioning that .net applications are regularly outrageously overpriced. Funny how they can get away with the greed, but the php world seems to constantly debate it.