We are proud to be working with DNN...and look forward to releasing our product on their platform. Nina's comments were off the mark, and that's what I was responding to. For healthy discussion about product features, plans, benefits, etc...we are all ears...that is how we have built our business. 

I went back... read the entire thread. Finally a thread that is up my alley!!!! LOL

I looked at the shopping cart site, Ok. I have been to well... TOO many of them over the years.

50 products for $499? I'd call that expensive. www.actinic.com, Actinic Catalog is $499 Free Trial Download, again, runs on your local PC. No limits last I knew.

Actinic was? is? The #1 eCommerce solution in Europe. Again, been a few years since we dumped from most online sales.

-------------------

MANY people in this thread make some VERY valid points.

Again, in our sales history we saw failure for some 2-3 years followed by considerable success (followed by overload, boredom and now a renewed interest :) ).

There are many many ways to fail in eCommerce and many ways to succeed.

The TOOLS USED ARE IMPERATIVE. For example, once I got the "Schwing" of search engines we had over 1800 pages (of over 3000) that ranked on the first page of EVERY major search engine. In fact, Lycos and MSN stiffed us in that the murdered our page ranking as we did "too well" for never spending a red cent on SEO. Note: Dynamic Web Store Pages work like POOP in Search Engines UNLESS you know software engineering and can do what say or Amazon does or Onsale did.

Again, much depends on what a entrepenuer considers a success. If $100 a day profit is cool then thats fine, but I bet they'd think $600 a day profit be much nicer, or $2000 clams 7 days a week. Is that alot of money? 14 grand a week, 52 weeks. Thats what, $720 grand a year. Contratulations, that basically means major banks consider a small business a success as you figure that'll be on sales revenues of 2-4 million a year.

Can anyone do it?

Well... need to learn and the problem with that is everybody wants to be paid to teach and/or sell you things that may be wonderful OR may actually be the exact opposite. See... many who enter SERIOUS eCommerce as entrepeneurs think things wither make money or they dont make money. The concept of something actually HARMING them from making money DOES NOT enter the noodle!!!! Something may LOOSE them some money but cause PERMANENT HARM in achieving best revenues, never enters the noodle.

See... One of the things that I found REALLY annoying about places wanting to sell me this/that tools/softwares, marketing, that/that was *IF* the stuff they are peddling to me were THAT GOOD then WHY are they not SHOWING me sites/themselves making OODLES of dough and allowing ME to connect with the webmasters/business owners. Miva did, give em' credit for that. Miva bent over backwards with us but the bottom line is the commerce platform was not what we needed. We needed Actinic or Lagarde Shopsite (which as I recall is Windows based completely).

Point all being THERE IS NO SUBSTITUTE for the prospect eCommerce Business to HAVE THE KNOWLEDGE to SUCCEED and the BEST WAY to get the know how is READ, look at what others who succeed are doing etc. NEVER EVER think that a place trying to sell you this/that be it software or marketing KNOWS your INTERESTS, PRODUCTS, BUSINESS... They know theirs and want to sell it to YOU or shall I say, "Sell You On It".

One poster noted that "Programmers do not understand marketing". That poster is incorrect. A few of us do LOL. I LEARNED the HARD WAY. My other half is genious at marketing... and politics. To be exact the second most powerful lady on Capital Hill now my lady chaired her intial run.

See... Programmers think Marketing is childs play. They would follow the LOGICAL paths to get comsumers to come and to capture sales. Just like programming, logical this and logical that. Problem with that is consumers are not logical. Each one is an individual and while many have commonalities striking the proper mix for maximum market penetration is extrordinarily complex. Take the average excellent programmer, put them in charge of marketing at say BestBuy or Target merchandise and I guarantee they will drive it into the ground.

Programmers deal in a finite world where variables have ranges of values, programs have bounds. Its a finite world to build an application, extend it on and on. Marketing and humanity is the exact opposite. Full of variables of all ranges, chock full of potential pitfalls, demographics, price points, margins on and on.... and on and on... and on some more.

Over the years I guess one might say "The hard way" (learning without college) I learned much but by no means the full picture of marketing. I sold a little 2 person business to some of the biggest players on the net of the day. See, anyone reading this wanting to be an entrepenuer... FIRST LESSON:

LESSON 1:

DO NOT BELIEVE ANY OTHER BUSINESS THAT IS SLINGING YOU PITCHES ABOUT HOW THEY CAN MAKE YOU SUCCEED. IT IS YOU WHO NEED LEARN WHAT YOU NEED TO SUCCEED AND INDEED CREATE YOUR OWN WAY TO EFFECTIVELY PITCH YOUR BUSINESSES INTERESTS TO OTHERS SO YOU MAKE THE MONEY.

LOL.

THERE IS NO ECOMMERCE SOLUTION THAT MEANS "I SUCCEED" AND ONLY "YOU" KNOW WHAT "YOU" CONSIDER SUCCESS.

-----

I noted in another thread sometime ago about DNN for example. DNN says its had I think half a million downloads. Lets say that 50% of that use DNN day to day at sites (its less, but for sake of argument lets say 50%). So thats 250,000. Not bad. Its free. Now slap a $99 price tag on it and market it online. That 250,000 will drop to less than 100,000, probably less than half that in reality.

Now... Lets polish it up so its a fine tuned well oiled machine. Lets make sure that anyone who walks into Walmart and picks it up goes, "Wow... Easy to use. Wow... Look at all this can do right out of the box. Wow! Look at the $59 price tag!". Now we can get back to those 250,000-500,000 numbers... Best yet in the case of DNN cuz' its not a bimbo game, or a kids program it can actually SUSTAIN just like Corel Draw or Norton Internet Security.

From "HERE" to "THERE" means that someone need be able to represent the engineers interests, know marketing and know how to pitch and hit.

Microsoft is good at marketing but they are not by any means "the best". Vista is an example of market dominance. "We wont compete against XP, ourselves, so XP leaves, Vista arrives." Wella. Yet, if you look at the X-BOX Microsoft leveraged the computer architecture, tools and more to effectively attract dev firms and create a platform and sales thereof to compete against Sony whom had enjoyed basically the dominant market share.

All and all programmers do not know marketing and marketing folks dont know engineering. When the two jibe well together fortunes are built. There are however some of us that understand (or at least some decent level) of both.

As noted, I am a programmer. C++, VB, Assembler, PHP etc. I've worked for Atari, EA, Sierra (Vivendi) and many others. I've done work for places such as Continental Financial/Collections, Citizen Utilities, Citizen Financial etc as well. Any programmer who has had any real exposure to marketing will tell anyone flat out that it is far far (far) more complex than software engineering.

I'm not knocking anyones product(s)... I have not used this particular commerce solution so I cant say IMHO its this/that.

What I can say is from experience eCommerce Software that is client/server where the site is administrated on your PC IMHO is a much nicer way to go than web administrated solutions.

What I can say is EVERYONE wants to SELL you things to make you succeed but ULTIMATELY success requires YOU LEARN what you NEED to learn by reading and observing HOW others succeed. NEVER EVER EVER get nailed by pitches. I dont care if package "A" has 2 million installed, my "1" is the ONLY "1" that matters and as such I BEST be SURE I know what I NEED **OR** I talk/learn from someone who can PROVE TO ME the information to aid/help me succeed. Anything else... take it what its worth, ANY info is good info but ALWAYS in your HEAD is "EVERYONE IS TRYING TO SELL ME" where-as where you WANT to BE is "I WANT TO SELL EVERYONE".

After a time you will see pitches come at you that you would NEVER thought a pitch when you first began. Again, all good information. Learn. You can learn why others fail. You can learn what they do to succeed. You wont learn POOP from pitchmen except how to enhance your pitches perhaps.

Go to the library, get some marketing books out. Fascinating stuff. Humans are the ultimate buggy computer LOL.

Oh... and hey... Programmers, peep's often defend what they create. Its just NATURAL people. If you built a new form of great bike and folks say, "It sux" its going to feel like it hurts you (kinda).

What in reality it means is, "You do not know marketing at all". I've been a coder on many a video game for example. In such things, "It sux. It's buggy. It's crap. It's good" not to mention the managers going, "WTF did you code that for? WHY WHY! is THIS BUG STILL APPEARING" on and on...

MARKETING LESSON 2:

People are variables. Some will like things, some will love them, some will hate them, some will publically be nice and critical or even abusive and critical. Not like writing software where the compiler says, "I hate you!" LOL.

Consider it like driving a car. GOOD MARKETING means 1. The consumer who loves us we love too... We wave everytime we see them in the store or the car. The consumer who is critical of us we try and convert. So we stop the car and communicate (NOT PITCH), we dont need defend ourselves. If we agree to disagree then thats that. The abusive consumer we avoid confrontation with. We do not run them over with the car as it is exactly what they want you to do.

Programmers need to realize what they are making is not THEIR CHILD. ITS A THING. Its a thing we want sell, give away whatall to people who are all different. Nothing PERSONAL. If I am working on the game Gothic then some may love it, some may hate it, some inbetween... So what. Not everyone drives a Volvo ya know? By all means, take PRIDE in your accomplishment but NEVER expect others to. Furthermore programmers need to either A. Learn Marketing or B. Work with resellers who SELL software. This is just one of those "Gee Davy" things.

How many here would run to BestBuy to purchase DVD Videos if all they carried was one DVD Video?

Duh.

95% of ALL Shareware authors do dumpy because they are NOT attempting to SELL their work WHERE PEOPLE SHOP FOR THE STUFF! But! They are smarter than marketers! LOL. Which is good in some ways. If shareware authors (the good ones) really got a taste of effective marketing there would be a WHOLE LOT more competition in commercial software. The lord blesses stupidity in strange ways.

See... alot of these "indies" in programming see resellers as slime. "Why should a reseller get $50 for selling my $500 piece of software?". Easy, because they will sell them. Its just a plain stupid argument especially for "indies". Look, any money is good money, the more sold the merrier, any other mindset is again just ZERO Brain marketing. When Macromedia, Symantec, EA or other publisher with REAL distribution and retail abilities then we can yell... "Why am I getting only 5% of dealer cost for MY WORK". Again, "Welcome to capitalism". But your little program sitting at Walmart will even at 5% make you a WHOLE lot more money than you can ever make web-peddlin'.

Thus folks... Dis' da' reason on the net we get to see so very many places attempt to "hoe'" the masses. Its all strange-o-rama especially engineering/software.

See... Take say, Adobe Photoshop. INFINITELY more complex program than say a non-enterprise (ie: Distributed computing) eCommerce package and runs what $599? $699?. Further, enterprise (real enterprise) solutions tend to call Amazon.com like Target does or implement custom solutions. Go figure.

Then!!!! We can take say... hmmm... Supreme Commander (game) with MILLIONS of dollars invested in it and there it is for $50 on store shelves, more complex than my shopping cart by far, less complex than photoshop in some areas, more complex in others. Market dynamics are how professional marketers operate (and then some). In fact software programs to analyze markets and market statistics are often more complex than whats being marketed including software! Crazy-Noodles!

Anyways in closing if you want to be an entrepeneur in eCommerce then FIRST you need to be a consumer. A smart one. You need to make sure that whatever software you decide to use as tools give you the best chance at success and the only way to know that is to "shop around" and learn. THINK. DEVELOP YOUR BUSINESS PLAN and preferably a decent marketing plan BEFORE YOU SPEND A DIME. BOUNCE your business plan/marketing plan off some friends you can trust. See if they have ideas. Go over it. Then go over it again. And again. Refine. Then imagine WHERE you want to be a year from now. REFINE. Now start looking for the tools/software that can MEET or preferably EXCEED your requirements BUT NOT something that EVER comes into QUESTION in your head.

You'll know it when you see it and trial use it. "This is exactly what I need". You will KNOW IT. In software it does not need to be dependent. Your "store" does not have to integrate to Joomla, DruPal, PHPNuke or DNN and realizing that also keeps your options open. There is no golden rule saying, "Gee... shoppers wont shop or my site(s) wont work unless they completely use modules". In fact, in eCommerce you want above all else your store to be rock solid in stability and comfort of use for you and your customers while affording you the ability to be versitile (why I loved Actinic).

AGAIN, YOU need to learn/know WHAT you need in eCommerce. NEVER EVER count on someone else trying to SELL you what they THINK you need cuz', thats what they need.

Again... no knocks of products, for us Actinic Catalog was what we needed. Others may need this or OSCommerce or Lagarde Storefront.

John, please tell me you are not serious ... please do!

Show me stores based on Catalook or PortalStore you've put together.

---

Tom Kraak
SEO Analyst
R2integrated