Thread

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.

I think that’s the key here. It needs to be flexible, it needs to be built to work with EE from the ground up, use EE’s templating system, easy to add payment gateways, and finally well documented. I think that’s what we want (or at least what I do), and hell I’d be happy paying a few hundred bux for that, but I don’t negotiate with terrorists, and that’s what this pricing feels like.

It’s becoming obvious from these posts that I need to explain our pricing model in more detail, so let me try to clarify it a bit more for everybody.

eeCommerce will be available on a free 30 day “evaluation” license, for download from our website: http://www.eecommerce.com

The evaluation license will be fully functional in every way - you can use it in production, the only caveat being that it will stop functioning after 30 days. The aim of this is to give the developer enough time to build and deploy a website for their client WITHOUT any upfront costs, so that it can start earning income as soon as possible. As I’ve said all along, when an ecommerce site is not live it is costing money, not earning it.

We’re offering a completely risk-free trial, you’re going to make money with this product before you part with any.

After 30 days, you’ll need a new license. We fully expect customers to buy a yearly license in the first year, allowing them time to build up their clientele, products, stock and to establish their brand. The license costs just over $105 per month, which any moderately successful ecommerce business should be able to cover even in it’s first year.

The following year, once the brand is established, the customer will need to renew their license again. At which point they’ll have 2 choices:

1) renew their yearly license for $1299.99 (the wrong choice)

2) upgrade their yearly license to a full license, costing the difference between yearly and full licenses - currently $1200 (the smart choice)

As you can see, the yearly license isn’t intended for customers to cough up on a rolling yearly basis, it’s intended to spread the cost of the full license over a period of 2 years, making the customers initial setup costs much easier to shoulder.

Regarding Mark’s comment about “ruling Magento developers out”, we’re certainly not doing that! If we did, our projected customer base would be significantly smaller and the product would ultimately be that much more expensive. We believe that Magento developers will use eeCommerce simply because the expanded functionality that ExpressionEngine offers will mean a faster turn-around time and a website with increased functionality. Today’s successful ecommerce businesses create an entire experience for their visitors; forums, user reviews and ratings, product comparisons, to mention just a few. These things are much easier to implement in ExpressionEngine than with Magento, allowing developers to submit tenders on jobs that would have previously been outside their reach.

There’s more to eeCommerce than just “minimising the Magento learning curve”, eeCommerce is more than just a “bridge”. Even once you’ve used the Magento templating, you still have to synchronize user accounts and logins, display a summary of the visitors cart and allow them to checkout. As it stands, there aren’t webservices in Magento that allow you to do any of this, so we’ve had to add them. As a result of adding these webservices, you can completely decouple the frontend of the store from the backend - you could for instance, use Flash, AIR, Drupal or Joomla! for your frontend. Of course, using a different frontend (such as EE) brings a whole heap of advantages - SEO is a major part of most ecommerce implementations, and obviously this becomes MUCH easier. Another really nice feature is that the visitor NEVER has to hit the Magento server, even for checkout. You can literally use Magento only for the backend stuff, and what it does best - managing orders and inventory etc.

Ultimately ANY commercial product needs to pay for itself. The price is based on what it has so far cost us to produce the software and what it will cost us to continue to support it. We have a dedicated team of developers, - they need to be paid. Our support staff need to get paid, otherwise when you call for support there won’t be anybody to pick up the phone, and our testers need to get paid so that we can continue to make sure that eeCommerce works with every future release of both Magento AND ExpressionEngine. It’s not being greedy - it’s simple economics. We won’t ever release a product unless it’s commercially viable for us to do so - if it isn’t, we won’t release it, and we’ll reap the benefits ourselves. We’re in business to make money, just the same as you are 😊

You can however, buy the product heavily discounted by joining our Partner Program - but you’ll need to be in either the ExpressionEngine Pro Network or a Magento Partner in order to do that. Why? Because we expect our support costs to be significantly reduced – and we can pass our savings on to you 😊

I’m afraid we won’t be removing support options – as we need to be sure that the store owner has absolute confidence in our product. We ensure this by offering the same level of support to all of our customers. The importance that your clients have confidence in our product can’t be stressed enough, encouraging our own customers to join our Partner Program further increases your clients confidence - in our product and in you.

This also helps to answer Mark’s query about why we didn’t create something new. The bar was already set high with Magento - why COMPETE when we can use the BEST there already is, and all play nicely together? Our solution builds business for Varien, EllisLab, you (or Magento developers), us and for your clients. Everybody wins - any other solution would have compromised that at some point, and would undoubtedly have produced a far inferior solution. We’re much more interested in developing an ecosystem where everybody benefits rather than just a few.

Finally, if any beta testers would like to say anything at this point, it would be good for everybody to hear from an impartial source that has actually seen and used our product. We’re more-than-happy to listen to everybodys views and feelings. The more feedback we get, the better the end product will be 😊

Thanks for coming back on here Lee and explaining things further… I’m sure this is leaving you feeling quite a bit beat up.

I would also love to hear from beta testers on this…. I don’t want to hear so much about bugs, because that is to be expected. I want to hear about features and possibilities for this.

Magento is a very nice product. I’ve examined it, but never tried to really work with it. At first glance it is very good, but complex. I guess because I haven’t really worked with it, I wasn’t aware that certain things would be “easier” to do in EE… like product reviews and comparisons. I thought that was all handled quite well in Magento. I guess this is trying to cover off the philosophy that “products” are content… just like anything else, and all content like stuff should be handled by EE… including reviews and comparisons. Magento then handles the order processing. Content people only see the content backend, order management people only see the order management stuff.

Let’s hear from some beta testers then.

Hey hey hey hey…..

Before chastising the folks from PHP (UK)—I say, let’s encourage this sort of professional development and extension of the EE platform.

If an ecommerce module can be built for half the price, and sold for half the price, let someone else do it, and then PHP UK will have to make a choice.  If it’s hard to make an excellent ecommerce module (and it is, believe me!) then PHP UK won’t have to lower their prices.  And if a $1300 ecommerce module can help me sell a $42,000 contract (which is the most recent proposal I put together for a significant ecommerce shop), then heck yeah it’s a good deal.

I strongly believe that EllisLab should remain focused on the small Web site market, but I don’t think we should discourage / attack / dismiss 3rd party developers for aiming at a different level, and from bringing more functionality to what is already a great product.

TTFN
Travis

Where I’m really falling down here is why it costs so much more than the total EE package? There’s just as much, if not more development that goes into EE than this will have.

Here’s a thought, which I’m sure will be shot down, if PHP UK have the ability to trial for 30 days then it stops working let our clients pay monthly. $105/month is a lot easier to swallow for a client than $1299.99 upfront. I know this is more work on your part, but it also makes more sense for the client. If it’s a brand new store 30 days isn’t enough for a client to start turning over money and be confident they can cover their costs. Hell, let them buy 3 month blocks.

Travis has a point. This does add to the EE arsenal in a good way for the larger developers that can easily take on a big project like that… so this new software is a catalyst for them. I agree with this. Said that right from the start… the price is quite possibly worth it in these circumstances.

My concern is if it becomes a trend, as there seem to be a lot within the EE community that work on projects of a much smaller scale. If EE addon developers start focusing on these bigger ticket items hoping for a bigger payout, will that wash out what’s available for the smaller projects/jobs? Obviously there are some other additions that could be added to EE that could demand big bucks as well…. does the community want to go there? 

I don’t know… maybe it does. I’m just throwing it out there. This is a debate and I see both the merits of this new software option and the potential pitfalls/psychological barriers. Obviously a good integrated module is a tough thing to create (likely why there isn’t one already) and trying to recreate Magento’s features is almost definitely a losing proposition for any third party developer unless they can demand a good price for the module when it’s complete.

I’d glad to hear from some in the community that support this new initiative. Now, if only some of those beta testers would respond… nudge, nudge.

And if a $1300 ecommerce module can help me sell a $42,000 contract (which is the most recent proposal I put together for a significant ecommerce shop), then heck yeah it’s a good deal.

I’m noticing a trend. Those that don’t understand EE and why it costs money… perhaps they are working on contracts that are small enough that the 250$ cost is a substantial percentage of the overall project budget and they therefore sacrifice their time in order to turn a decent profit for themselves. Perhaps that is why they turn to Wordpress and Drupal.

Travis’ comment makes sense and I whole heartedly agree with him that if someone else can build it for cheaper (or even more expensive for that matter) and offer it for less then let them do it. Capitalism at it’s finest.

The reason why I brought up the whole Drupal Wordpress thing is that it seems to me that what we were all looking for was a solution like the Forum module where it plugged in and cost $100 - $250 and had some bells and whistles but did not necessarily have all the overhead of a robust ecommerce piece. Those of us that were looking for that solution need to keep looking because this product is geared towards ecommerce solutions that are 25k and above to where the percentages make sense.

Most of my business is a lot less than that as I work mostly with small business owners. The large percentage of designers here are in that same boat. We will not be able to justify the cost of this product in those projects. I think out disappointment is that even those of us in the Pro Net that work on smaller sites for clients with smaller budgets still have the need for a solution and would love to use this but it is priced out of our range.

Again, you have made the decision to price this in an arena where it is a smaller quantity of client but higher quality of sale. If you worked a lower price I think you would make more money as the audience would be significantly higher and your transactions would go up… but that is totally your choice.

Anyway. I guess I am just as disappointed as the next guy. Now where did I put those 75k dollar projects…...

I can understand the cost.  For a professional ecommerce solution, it’s not at all out of place.  But the cost is going to be prohibitive for the lower end (those that need functionality above SCM but also won’t go for a $2500 ecommerce solution) projects.  There is still no good solution for that space. 

For higher volume ecommerce shops, $2500 is reasonable (IMO).  I’m just hoping it has a usable interface.  Some of the other solutions (including SCM) require too many steps to get something live on a site.  There are way more intuitive ways to do things.

Just a quick update everyone:

I’ll be making a presentation at Mage::Camp in London tomorrow (16:00 GMT) on the subject of “Enterprise ecommerce and content management”.

Mage::Camp is part of the Internet World expedition, so if you plan to attend please come and see my presentation - it may answer any questions you still have.

If you are unable to attend the event, you can view the live video stream from the Mage::Camp website, which is http://www.magecamp.com

I’ll also be attending Internet World every day - so if you have any specific questions or suggestions, I’ll be happy to talk to you.

I’ll update this thread with the slides from my presentation once they’ve been put online.

Lee Bolding | PHP UK
Programme Manager, eeCommerce

As promised, the slides from my presentation earlier today can be downloaded from here : http://bit.ly/eecommerce_magecamp

Hopefully, it will give you a better indication of what we’re doing, and what to expect.

I’m going to be attending Internet World tomorrow and Thursday, so if anybody wants to ask me any questions or would like a demo in person, just come and find me.

Lee Bolding | PHP UK
Programme Manager, eeCommerce

Just to show the thoroughness of the eeCommerce solution, I thought I’d post the link to the api guide listed in the above presentation. It is clear that they’ve put a lot of thought into the module by looking at this 165 page guide.
http://download.eecommerce.com/api.pdf

Still wanting to hear from some of the beta testers out there.

Question to Lee. I was just looking briefly at the api guide. Does Magento take care of the member management part and you don’t worry about member management in EE?

Does Magento take care of the member management part and you don’t worry about member management in EE?

Hi Shannon,

The API document isn’t yet complete - it only shows the template tags and usage for the existing webservices offered by Magento. We have still to add documentation for the webservices that we’ve created ourselves, of which user registration and user authentication are some of those.

We’ve identified 4 scenarios that we shall be catering for regarding member management :

1) neither ExpressionEngine nor Magento already installed
2) Magento already installed, but not ExpressionEngine
3) ExpressionEngine already installed, but not Magento
4) both ExpressionEngine and Magento already installed, but not integrated

We’ll be creating wizards/scripts to import/synchronise users for scenarios 2,3 and 4

Once users are synchronised (if applicable), member management should then be maintained using EE - we’re creating extensions the plug into all of the EE member hooks, so that when members register or update their profile (or if an admin does it), the changes are reflected back in the Magento instance.

Hopefully, that has answered your question 😊

Thanks Lee. That mostly answers things.

One limitation of EE membership is that members can only belong to one member group. Is this also the same in Magento? It is an annoying limitation in EE, so I’m wondering how that integration might work with EECommerce if Magento does not have that same limitation.

One limitation of EE membership is that members can only belong to one member group. Is this also the same in Magento? It is an annoying limitation in EE, so I’m wondering how that integration might work with EECommerce if Magento does not have that same limitation.

The limitations of the EE membership system have caused a few headaches for us - particularly with MSM.

Magento has similar limitations in that users can also only belong to one group (groups in Magento are generally something along the lines of “retail” or “wholesale”). There is some documentation about that here : http://www.magentocommerce.com/wiki/welcome_to_the_magento_user_s_guide/chapter_6#customer_groups

The headaches for us have been that unlike EE, within Magento, users belong to a particular website. Websites can also have multiple stores - it’s a bit complicated to explain, but you can read more here : http://www.magentocommerce.com/knowledge-base/entry/overview-how-multiple-websites-stores-work

Maybe with EE 2.0 some of these problems will be gone. Certainly, we’re anticipating needing to rewrite portions of the eeCommerce code, and to provide a separate download for EE 2.0.

However, at this stage I can’t say for sure as we haven’t (yet) been accepted into the EE 2.0 developer preview.