{"id":5203,"date":"2014-08-20T17:05:58","date_gmt":"2014-08-21T00:05:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.affiliateprogramadvice.com\/?p=5203"},"modified":"2014-08-20T17:17:15","modified_gmt":"2014-08-21T00:17:15","slug":"who-own-your-business-a-warning-to-any-one-selling-online","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.affiliateprogramadvice.com\/index.php\/2014\/08\/20\/who-own-your-business-a-warning-to-any-one-selling-online\/","title":{"rendered":"Who own your business? A warning to anyone selling online."},"content":{"rendered":"

I wrote an article in 2008 called who really owns your business. http:\/\/www.affiliateprogramadvice.com\/index.php\/2008\/08\/02\/who-really-owns-your-online-business\/<\/a>\u00a0 still relevant today.<\/p>\n

Recently, I have encountered two ecommerce platform \u201csolution\u201d providers that have had such a dramatic effect on two of my clients business in terms of sales. \u00a0One client has to redo his entire site using software that no one developer will ever have total control over his business ever again. \u00a0The other clients ecommerce platform provider is so bad, her check out is completely rendered useless and is now seeking a new platform.\u00a0 What\u2019s going on out there?<\/p>\n

Client one. Trusted his entire lively hood to an ecommerce provider , who is just one person by the way, that had a website template which he could customize over and over again for all his clients. A great business plan when you think about. Buy a template and then, like a conductor of an orchestra, hire cheap freelancers to meet the demands of his clients which may include daily maintenance, updating images, functionality adding widgets and aps and so on. Essentially, managing the clients selling vehicle and allowing the client to just get on with the other aspects of running their business. Sound familiar? Of course it does, this is how most ecommerce platform agencies work. Only in my client\u2019s case, it was just one person managing a bunch of freelancers who only get paid per job. So what happens when the ecommerce provider gets sick and can\u2019t work anymore? Who is around to manage the freelancers? Who has kept track on all the client\u2019s needs, who is there to prioritize jobs? And when the clients check out process fail, who is there to fix it, who has the passwords? Answer is no one. At what point do the clients lose their compassion? Answer, when their business of sales in is affected.<\/p>\n

Client two. \u00a0\u201cI don\u2019t think the tracking is working, did the website change?\u201d \u201cNo, nothing has changed.\u201d \u201cSomething is not right, let me check\u201d. \u201cI can\u2019t test the tracking because your shopping basket does not work, I can\u2019t check out\u201d.<\/p>\n

Maybe the online retailer should take some part of the blame for losing business? Should they not be checking their website every day? Should they be leaving their very livelihoods in the hands of just one person, just one agency, just one employee? Misguided and naivety is all I can attribute to the clients, if they were promised a solution and ended up with what essentially is nothing more than a blog site then they should get some kind of remuneration for loss of sales, who knows what the potential of new sales in would have been.<\/p>\n

My advice for any want to be online retailer, choose an ecommerce package like shopify\/open source, this way if your developer should suddenly disappear, there are thousands of other developers out there that can jump in and take over at a moment\u2019s notice. \u00a0Know all user names and passwords so you never get locked out of your own business.\u00a0 Know who controls the different parts to your website, who is your hosting company, who has the hosting details, who has the domain name details, who essentially can bring down your website, your business and your income, make a list today and make plans in case anything happens to you.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Recently, I have encountered two ecommerce platform \u201csolution\u201d providers that have had such a dramatic effect on two of my clients business in terms of sales. One client has to redo his entire site using software that no one developer will ever have total control over his business ever again. The other clients ecommerce platform provider is so bad, her check out is completely rendered useless and is now seeking a new platform. What\u2019s going on out there?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[5],"tags":[1190],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.affiliateprogramadvice.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5203"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.affiliateprogramadvice.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.affiliateprogramadvice.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.affiliateprogramadvice.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.affiliateprogramadvice.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5203"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.affiliateprogramadvice.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5203\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5205,"href":"https:\/\/www.affiliateprogramadvice.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5203\/revisions\/5205"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.affiliateprogramadvice.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5203"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.affiliateprogramadvice.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5203"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.affiliateprogramadvice.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5203"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}