There are a few things in life that guarantee a “frying pan into the fire” experience. If you’re lonely, you shouldn’t get back together with your ex-girlfriend. If you’re broke you shouldn’t gamble. If you’re having e-commerce web site problems, you shouldn’t turn to your accounting system for the solution.
“We need something that is fully integrated!” cries the prospect. “We can’t be updating product data and inventory in two places…our inventory system has the e-commerce functionality all built-in!”
And its true, using XML, CSV files or other methods to synchronize disparate systems does introduce additional failure points into your business, be it a simple act like importing orders from the web site system back into the ERP or accounting package…or trying to update new products to the web site, or adjust prices or inventory counts on the web site at regular intervals. But the price you pay for integration is generally manifold. Let’s cover them individually.
Search Engine Optimization. If the developers of your accounting software were professional web site developers before they decided to work at a back-office software firm, they would bring with them all of the in-the-trenches experience of search engine optimization. URL structure, dynamic meta data, marketing-friendly product descriptions, product image and ALT tag support and other techniques would be second nature. But it NEVER is. They got the job to design the e-commerce web functionality because they were intimately involved with the creation, improvement and maintenance of the back-office software itself. After all, that’s how it got “integrated.” They’ve been in a cave with captive users that have to deal with whatever functionality they dish out. As we always say, most business owners would rather change spouses than accounting systems. This is the most un-web-like world you could develop in.
An Accounting System is for Bean Counting, An E-Commerce Site is for Marketing. The part in the conversation that I always enjoy is the length of the product description field in the inventory system. “oh, its about 25 characters.” then I say, “and I bet its in all caps and half of the words are abbreviated to conserve space right?” and they always say, “Yes, but its worked for us internally, all our guys know this stuff backward and forward.” And then all of a sudden a light goes on in my prospects mind. “Wait a minute!” “I guess our product description wouldn’t be understandable to a retail consumer!” “And worse yet, our inventory system doesn’t have any product photos in it!” And then, that is when the gnashing of teeth and beating of breasts begins. The prospect realizes that they have to go in and create new, better marketing descriptions and obtain product images for every single frickin’ product. How’s the “integration” feel now? Are you willing to screw your web site into the stone ages in order to have constantly updated inventory and pricing numbers? Or is there another way?
Customizability. The primary virtue our firm, Distant Horizon, brings to the table is that we almost never have to say NO to a request. A programatic customization may take 15 minutes or 15 weeks but we’re always willing to do it if you’re willing to pay for it. If your inventory system provider is either too big, or the e-commerce module is too “one-size-fits-all” you may find yourself really badly wanting to do something that may never be possible. They’ll tell you, “oh, yes, that’s coming in the next version.” But don’t hold your breath. The worst firms are the ones that will only help you if you are using one of their partners. We once met with a consultant that specialized in integrating with MAS 90 (Sage). What we can usually do with a few .CSV files or an XML file in a couple of hours with one of our programmers, they played up into a $20,000 ordeal. (A $10 per hour employee would have to manually enter orders for a solid man-year of work hours before you would break even on that…does your e-commerce web site get that many orders?)
Integration means Murphy’s Law Hard At Work A few years ago we tried to do some Pay Per Click work for a client that was complaining that their integrated e-commerce solution ( Prophet 21 ) just wasn’t generating orders. After we got knee deep in the situation we realized that the site didn’t even have secure credit card acceptance and processing built into it yet. The checkout was…impotent…like a dead end street. I’m not sure how they explained that to my client. In another case we were the unfortunate pioneer in using Intuit’s Eclipse XML integration tool…we ended up with three man-weeks worth of arrows in our back (that was fun to explain to our client’s controller). We had to work over the phone with Intuit staff and show them where their solution was broken and what error messages we were getting that they had never seen before. (and this was a company that looked very responsible, they had a published SDK). Speaking of Intuit SDKs, I would love to talk about our experience with Quickbooks, but I start to shake and a nervous tick starts in my eye.
Hosting. Unless you have multiple T1s, a data room and a full-time IT staff, you probably shouldn’t be hosting your own web site. Even if you have all of that stuff, you would still want to think twice. Hosting is a huge pain in the butt, especially in this world where it seems like every human being outside of the USA is a hacker in their spare time, determined to crack your web site open like an pistachio nut. So if your accounting/inventory system suggests that you host your web site on a server at your facility, that’s because they know that it will never get any traffic anyway. You wouldn’t want to host the average Distant Horizon e-commerce web site in your office. Would you like an extra 60,000 people per month hitting your network? Successful web sites get a lot of traffic.
Speaking of Fully Integrated “Hosted” Solutions. You may have heard of Everest I-Code and NetSuite, two progressive companies trying very hard to replace not only your accounting / inventory system, but also your e-commerce web site developer too! I love this idea, and I even explored becoming a reseller for these folks, but let me tell you, there are risks. First, Everest requires that you host on-site at your location. This is great for seemless, instantaneous communication between your inventory system and your web site. However, it means that next time your T1 goes down because a backhoe across the street took out your connection to the central office…well, your web site will be down for hours, or days! The alternative approach is no less discomforting. With NetSuite’s Software as a Service approach, all of your business data is hosted on someone else’s equipment…and if your T1 goes down, your web site is fine, but you have to send your accounting staff home! Both of these solutions are enticing for a new business that is starting from ground zero. However, for a long-standing business that has lots of legacy data, you will find that the implementation and fee structure gets exponentially more intense with your demands for data continuity.
What Initially Sounds Like Hell, Ends Up Being Comforting. There is something beautiful about separate systems that don’t need each other to function. It has taken me a few years to come to this understanding. If you go to the trouble of creating improved marketing descriptions and photography for your products, it is indeed possible to export that information from the web site and into your inventory system so that it can benefit your employees as well as your customers! If you build an e-commerce web site that stands alone with on a third-party hosting company’s server, your physical location can be wiped out by theft, fire or a tornado and you still have a foothold in the economy. If you build a separate web site from the perspective of usability and search engine optimization it is almost always possible to export inventory counts, pricing updates and other data from your ERP, inventory or accounting system…and it is almost always possible to import web orders into your existing system. This approach gives you a diversified, unbeholden solution for your business that can lead to additional choices down the road for how you will run your business.