Why Magento? Why With Classy Llama Studios?
Following is an excerpt from an e-mail I sent to a client that was considering building an eCommerce site from scratch and couldn’t understand the cost of building an effective eCommerce site on Magento considering it was “out-of-the-box” functional…
First, Magento is a primarily an eCommerce platform that secondarily is plug-and-play “out-of-the-box.” What that means is that thousands of development hours have been committed to generate the core functionality of Magento. The fact that you can plug-and-play Magento to be a functional shopping cart is an added perk that opens up new opportunities. To build an eCommerce platform that offers all of the functionality that Magento does would cost a minimum $15 million to recreate… and you wouldn’t even have the advantages that come along with it being an open-source application. So building something from scratch will undoubtedly be massively inferior.
Second, to call what we do “design” is over-simplifying the reality. Magento is a powerful foundation, but we build the house on top of that foundation that specifically accomplishes your goals. This process consists of the initial consultation and exploration, wherein we understand your business and clarify your business goals, the UI design, wherein we gather, organize, and structure the content and functionality in such a way that drives conversions most effectively (a process that doesn’t end with the build, of course), the graphic design, wherein we make the UI beautiful, consistent, and attractive to the target audience/s, which further drives conversions. Then we take the graphic design and build it to interface correctly on the Magento platform and with web browsers. Then we train you and your team to manage the Magento admin effectively so that you aren’t bound by a “webmaster” to add products, change images, descriptions, videos, launch promotions, give discounts, change pricing, and on and on and on. We want you to be in control of your e-commerce site as much as possible.
Third, when we build the site, we do so cognizant of potential future developments to ensure we don’t box in your options. We build everything using SVN, which is the first line of defense against anything subpar making it live. The second line of defense is our staging server, which gives us the closest thing to a live environment without it being publicly available. (Read about our Three Lines of Development Defense)
Much of your value is already received by the time we’ve generated the graphic design. The plans generated to build the house are critical to the ultimate success of the construction. The construction needs to be quality, but there is a lot more competition in the ability to build a house than to design the house to accomplish the goals of the owners. Don’t get me wrong; we build very, very well. But without sharp, intelligent design, building is worthless. You’re an eCommerce firm. You need an eCommerce business, not a well-coded website. We can talk more about this in our next dialogue, but I hope that provides you with some perspective on why the cost can be so high. We do what we do very well, and we help businesses experience more success than they could achieve without us. That’s what we’re offering you. (Read more about our Magento design approach)
This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 6th, 2010 at 3:32 pm and is filed under Magento. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
July 6th, 2010 at 4:00 pm
@Kurt – Great article. Thanks for sharing.
July 11th, 2010 at 4:32 pm
“You need an eCommerce business, not a well-coded website.”
Actually you need both. An “eCommerce business” without a well-coded website tends to work against its own purpose. Anyone that frequents a “crappily” (technical term) coded eCommerce website is probably either a friend or a relative.
July 12th, 2010 at 11:08 am
@camenoj Thanks for noting that possible miscommunication. To be clear, when I say you need an “eCommerce business,” that most certainly includes a well-coded site. But it’s so so so much more than quality code. It’s quality customer-driven UX design, aesthetic design, intuitive functionality, and quality execution on the code, all extending from a central pivot point, the mission/passion of the business.
In short, I wholeheartedly agree with you.