About a year ago I had a funny email forwarded to me. The email had two pictures — one of a piece of electronic equipment labeled “Man”, and another of another piece of equipment labeled “Woman”.

Take a look — here’s “Man”:

 

 

And here’s “Woman”:

 

While these pictures were intended to tickle the funny bone, there’s quite an element of truth to them, wouldn’t you agree?

So how can I possibly draw an analogy between these pictures and eCommerce software? Simple.

The “Man” is like a PayPal “Buy” button. If you want to quickly start selling something, all you have to do is slap the button HTML code onto your sales page. Or paste the email link into your email. Voila! With a single step your business is “ON”!

This simplicity comes at the price of flexibility . . . no possibility of “one click” upsells after the initial order, no affiliate program, no personalized “thank you” emails or web pages. But it’s fast and it works — and sometimes that’s all you need. (Fast and working is always better than “still tweaking the system”!)

Now, the “Woman” picture is like one of the “do everything” eCommerce solutions. InfusionSoft and FantaSos (a.k.a. Delavo with all the plugins) come to mind, and there are others as well. These solutions are indeed powerful but to some people they’re just “too much”.

I’ve had clients who used one of the “do everything” solutions who dropped them in favor of a simpler solution — they just couldn’t handle all of the perplexing options available to them in the other system.

I’ve also had clients report to me that their “do everything” solution had a lot of features, but some of the fundamentals were plagued with problems.

Obviously it doesn’t do you any good to have 100 features when the most critical features like affiliate tracking or order processing don’t work — so make sure the fundamentals are covered, THEN look at the additional features.

Usually there’s a solution that lies somewhere in the middle of these two extremes and fits “just right”.

I’ll be releasing a new version of my eCommerce and product launch software soon — I think it’s a nice “middle ground”. It may or may not be what you need — but watch for it and judge for yourself!

Best,

Paul

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 22nd, 2009 at 5:45 pm and is filed under Business Tools. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.