Saturday 30 August 2014

Ecommerce software - analytical review of different options

If you are an artist and want to market and sell your art online then one of the things you'll end up doing sooner or later is investigate ecommerce software. The aim will be to try and evaluate whether any of them do what you want and which one might work best for you.

For those who have never had to deal with anything more threatening than a new version of Microsoft Office, this can be a major challenge!

The first thing you learn is that, with few exceptions, most of the software is generic and not targeted at artists.

I've just come across a website called G2Crowd which provides a way-in to:
  • understanding what the options exist relating to ecommerce software
  • typically in-depth customer reviews for different products
  • an evaluation and rating of different business software according to market presence and customer satisfaction
Home Page - GCrowd website
The idea behind the site is that there is too much spin out there in relation to products available for sale in the marketplace - and not enough well informed reviews.  
  • The idea is to eliminate "vendor spin and outdated analyst reports".  
  • Products ranks are aggregated from peer reviews and social data. 
  • The reviews are intended to be real, unbiased feedback or ....advice from people who had actually implemented and used the software and related services

This, for example, is its page relating to ecommerce software and below is the widget it uses for demonstrating how one site relates to another.
  • The y axis is documenting presence in the marketplace with those in the top half being the bigger players
  • the x axis looks at the satisfaction scoring attributed to different sites - with the more established sites tending to have more and higher scoring ratings.



This is how GCrowd describes the four quadrants of the four cell table
The best E-Commerce Software products are determined by customer satisfaction (based on user reviews) and scale (based on market share, vendor size, and social impact) and placed into four categories on the Grid:
  • Leaders offer E-Commerce products that are rated highly by G2 Crowd users and have substantial scale, market share, and global support and service resources. Leaders include:Amazon WebstorePaypalPayPal Payments
  • Contenders have significant scale and resources, but their products have received below average user satisfaction ratings or have not yet received a sufficient number of reviews to validate their products. Contenders include: MagentoIBM WebSphere CommerceYahoo Merchant Solutions
  • Niche vendors do not have the scale and market share of the Leaders. They may have been rated positively on customer satisfaction, but have not yet received enough reviews to validate their success. Niche include: ZuoraCloudCraze
It's worth taking a look and checking out what you currently use (I've just had some validation of my choice to use PayPal for payments by clients!) and investigating how well it stacks up relative to competitors.

To the extent that dedicated software for artists actually exists, you can assess whether (1) it's recognised and (2)  its performance in the market in general for that type of product.

The ecommerce categories for software are

Click any of these links above and you can find the software which comes into this category.

Use the column on the left to define attributes and further sub-categories which you want to focus on. You'll end up with a list of options for your particular needs eg for Digital E-Commerce Software

You can also use the platform to assess other business and marketing software - for example, find out which product is rated as the best email marketing tool


1 comment:

Daniel Honigman said...

Thanks for not only checking out G2 Crowd, but for taking the time to write about it as well! We think our site is a great resource for anyone looking for reviews of business software, but we're glad it's helpful to artists as well. (And that it validated your PayPal choice!)

Please let us know if you have any questions about the site. We'd be honored if you were to post some of your thoughts on PayPal - and other platforms - as reviews!

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