Newbie looking for Software Suggesion for Internet Retailer

I work for an Internet retail company that currently custom programs most
everything we use, our websites, inventory, shipping, recieving, purchase
orders, etc... As our business is growing it is becomming increasingly hard
to keep up with the needed changes to our sofware.

We want to take a look at purchasing software and determine if we can
utilize out of the box software, primarly for inventory, shipping,
recieving, and purchase orders. My main consern in making this work is that
we currently have a single database for everything. We can't just put new
software in, we need an open database that we can rewrite our websites to
use, i.e. list of products, stock levels, prices, etc... Additionally we
get files of our vendor products daily that we programatically update our
database with, we would need a facility to continue this as well. We
currently offer about 30,000 products.

Any suggestions on where to start with this? Which products I should start
reveiwing? Industry leaders?

Thanks!

Hello,

I need to tell you I work for an ecommerce company, so I'm bias, but
I'm also informed, so take it for what you will.

In the age of automation and cheap hardware, building an ecomm solution
is almost never the way to go. We have clients with the money to build
any application they like (USA Today, Hershey's, Alcoa, Korbel). They
call us for our solution. Why? Because we can spread development
across hundreds of client's small budgets as opposed to saddling that
same huge development cost across one company's small / enormous
budget. Plus, it's our job! We can focus on I.T. you can focus on
marketing and sales instead of servers, SSL and scalability.

It sounds like what you have now to run the core isn't going anywhere
and if it works, why should it. You need a flexible solution that
integrate via an API or XML or similar. It sounds like your servers
can communicate with others, so let them. Don't get boxed in. Not to
mention letting an ecomm solution push your products to outside
channels (Froogle, etc.), communicate with customers, calculate
shipping and more.

If you want to talk; JSebastian @ Nexternal.com. If we don't fit, I'll
give you at least two other choices to contact.

Cheers and Good Luck
Josh


Bishop wrote:
> I work for an Internet retail company that currently custom programs most
> everything we use, our websites, inventory, shipping, recieving, purchase
> orders, etc... As our business is growing it is becomming increasingly hard
> to keep up with the needed changes to our sofware.
>
> We want to take a look at purchasing software and determine if we can
> utilize out of the box software, primarly for inventory, shipping,
> recieving, and purchase orders. My main consern in making this work is that
> we currently have a single database for everything. We can't just put new
> software in, we need an open database that we can rewrite our websites to
> use, i.e. list of products, stock levels, prices, etc... Additionally we
> get files of our vendor products daily that we programatically update our
> database with, we would need a facility to continue this as well. We
> currently offer about 30,000 products.
>
> Any suggestions on where to start with this? Which products I should start
> reveiwing? Industry leaders?
>
> Thanks!