I'd be interested in hearing some honest, unbiased opinions on the following...
An online retailer has, say, 300 products (with varying sizes for each) and wholesales to 100+ outlets as well as retails direct from their website. They have a Magento set up which is horrendously slow and basically broken. It doesn't speak to their inventory control system despite them spending $!!! trying to develop an API. Manual data entry is required in both directions whilst this is the case. The inventory control system is an obscure one that appears to have little in the way of a future.
Their options are...
1. Keep trying to find a Magento developer who can rescue them (but being based in a rural area makes this hard for the in-house option and they have been burned by numerous agencies).
2. Use a combination of Shopify and Trade Gecko or BrightPearl to manage inventory and the online store. (Trade Gecko recently launched a feature whereby a retailer can control inventory in multiple warehouses.)
The costs associated with Shopify pale into insignificance (even including the 0.5% transaction fee) when compared to employing a dev or team of devs.
Their instincts are that Shopify is too simplistic for their needs...but, in reality, their needs aren't complex in any way and their existing system fails to meet almost all of them anyway.
One side says that hosted solutions are maturing rapidly and that the shortcomings of Shopify in terms of flexibility will become less of an issue. Also, the costs associated with running the set up are a fraction of what they have experienced (and project) for a Magento set up. If they just got a system that "worked" they could then focus their efforts on promoting their products rather than spend another 2yrs wrestling with Magento.
The other side says that Magento is the best and anything else is a compromise.
I'd be interested in hearing some honest, unbiased opinions on the following...
An online retailer has, say, 300 products (with varying sizes for each) and wholesales to 100+ outlets as well as retails direct from their website. They have a Magento set up which is horrendously slow and basically broken. It doesn't speak to their inventory control system despite them spending $!!! trying to develop an API. Manual data entry is required in both directions whilst this is the case. The inventory control system is an obscure one that appears to have little in the way of a future.
Their options are...
1. Keep trying to find a Magento developer who can rescue them (but being based in a rural area makes this hard for the in-house option and they have been burned by numerous agencies).
2. Use a combination of Shopify and Trade Gecko or BrightPearl to manage inventory and the online store. (Trade Gecko recently launched a feature whereby a retailer can control inventory in multiple warehouses.)
The costs associated with Shopify pale into insignificance (even including the 0.5% transaction fee) when compared to employing a dev or team of devs.
Their instincts are that Shopify is too simplistic for their needs...but, in reality, their needs aren't complex in any way and their existing system fails to meet almost all of them anyway.
One side says that hosted solutions are maturing rapidly and that the shortcomings of Shopify in terms of flexibility will become less of an issue. Also, the costs associated with running the set up are a fraction of what they have experienced (and project) for a Magento set up. If they just got a system that "worked" they could then focus their efforts on promoting their products rather than spend another 2yrs wrestling with Magento.
The other side says that Magento is the best and anything else is a compromise.
Opinions my learned friends?