Been in this office now for 5 years taking ecommerce calls from people who have spend 1000-100,000 thousand on ecommerce websites and did not get something that could work. One sob story after another 10’s of thousands of dollars unrecoverable and nothing to show for it. People call ProjectThunder to fix someone else’s mess but they immediately missed why they experienced major loss to begin with. With out proper planning you will spend 2-3 times more than you need this is a given we have seen this over the years. After some time we stopped trying to help people put out their fires instead tried help people who haven’t spent their money yet and show them how to conserve resources. Save your money and be happy. 

I spoke with the owner of this website blah.com, John  many years who took it personally that our sales lady didn’t call him right back. He told me straight up he would never do business with us not till after I sent him a quote with a generous discount. It was obvious he wanted to use his existing vendor but wanted a competitive quote. He spent over XX,000 thousand to get done what should have cost half that. Why? It took John over 12 months to get his website online. Why? Admittedly I took some pleasure that months would go by and he still didn’t have his website. I would email him periodically to see if he wanted to chance his mind about working with us. The first company he hired went out of business. Funny how karma works but still doesn’t explain why it took so long and why the site is slow and not very usable. I told John the software he choose was half a million lines of code and only an experienced developer could work on it.

Losing all your money is easy but similar to crashing an airplane. It’s not one thing you do wrong but usually several things in row. There are other stories like this I have acted as a negotiated bad relationships between developer and business owners. Trying to keep people from suing each other. Why does this happen so often people? Well first most people don’t have a process in place to choose the right vendor strike 1. Let’s be honest usually your going to give the work to someone’s cousin or a referral when you have no idea if they can deliver. Most likely you don’t know what you need or how much something should cost strike 2. It’s easy and straight forward you think. Don’t follow-up on references strike 3.

If you can’t get a reference there is a good reason. Failure to document all website creative and process on paper before coding begins strike 4. Would you build a house with out a blueprint?  Failure to agree on metrics for success and progress strike 5. How can you agree of it the project was a success if you don’t define what success is? When project goes over budget you have no idea why and keep paying strike 6. If your project is not close to finished then you already in trouble. When you feel like a hostage and start taking out your lack of understanding you blame the developer and get anger strike 7. You have to take responsibility your actions. You try to go legal and loose the case strike 8. Laws protect vendors pretty straight forward. Then it all crashes down.      

What does planning look like? Planning should include all the details even the website creative. Every link and every button should be included with all the details of what it should be responsible for. Don’t assume anything easy just because Amazon has a feature on their website that it’s easy. Their code base is over 10 years feature rich there was not easy about it. Whatever features functions and process are needed for your business GET IT IN WRITING every last drop. Include the creative in the planning document. No wireframes outside of representing navigation. If you are moving an existing website to a new website DEMAND a migration strategy. One of my dear clients moved her website away from us to save money and that part worked. However because the links were not redirected with a 301 redirect she lost 90% of her traffic and even after several months it still has not recovered. If you don’t have a migration plan you might as well take 15-25 %of your gross sales and throw in your BBQ.   

If still feel like you don’t have handle of software planning call us before you deplete your budget. Instead of spending 10’s of 1000’s in on lost funds you can spend $3000 and we will develop a plan for you that takes all the details to in consideration. We will do this for you even if you aren’t using ProjectThunder to develop your site. Planning is our specialty and takes 4-6 weeks depending on the scope of the project. Small insurance policy to ensure you get what you paid for when you expected to get it with the result you agreed on. If you would prefer to shoot from the hip, roll of the dice, play of luck I like your style but if it doesn’t work out be prepared to start over from scratch or spend 4 times as long trying to get your site completed. For projects under 250k don’t wing it, get a planning session from ProjectThunder. 

e-commerce software planning