eCommerce Cowboys, the ‘Yes’ Men.
We don’t profess to be the world’s best eCommerce company. Probably far from it.
But we have a lot of experience in online retail and development (10 years+) and we use that experience to help our clients in the best way possible.
Recently we have been getting a few Magento & other eCommerce clients coming to us for assistance, for reasons that fall into one of the categories below:
- Previous developer is unreliable
- Spent too long trying to get something up and running, need it finished
- Have tried number of devs, need someone to help
- Don’t have many sales or much traffic, help!
Our most recent client came to us with a Magento site that had been built by a 3rd party. They wanted someone reliable to help them with development and some consulting. They wanted to know why after spending all this money and 3+ months of development and effort they hadn’t received a single sale.
What frustrates me isn’t the clients that want to get something done economically. It is the ‘I.T. Consultants’ out there that say ‘Yes’. These cowboys might be ok at I.T, and might have a little experience but please be honest when dealing with customers. If someone comes to you and says “can you build me a solid site that functions well and will get some traffic and generate sales’, don’t say Yes when you know it will be a learning curve.
Don’t waste their time.
Don’t waste their money.
Don’t ruin your reputation.
Reputation in the online world (and development in particular) is key. You simply can’t afford a bad reputation or you can lose business.
So why did this nice looking site not have any sales yet?
The answer turns out to be the contents of Robots.txt on the server
User-agent: * Disallow: /
*sigh*
Simple fix that makes us look good. But it’s a pretty basic thing to overlook!
That is GOLDEN! It is amazing how a slight oversight can cost a company $$$$$$
I think the problem is that a lot of people are inexperienced and people take advantage of this. Especially with the internet where people all over the world can do the job and then never see you again, it’s easier for people to be dishonest. If I was paying for work to be done, I’d pay a certain amount upfront and then the rest when the job done has been agreed/a snag list has been worked through. For the website, I’d make sure that a few test orders have been made before I would be convinced.
I’ve found when trying to find someone to sort out the Magento multistore with Chinese that so many people agree to doing the job then see that although they can translate into Chinese sligtly better than I could, they can’t use Magento enough to do what is required.