By Mel Ronick, President of Stack and Stacks

It seems to me that far too many small and mid market Ecommerce sites and, most likely, some major Companies as well, are following the premise of the movie “Field Of Dreams”.

If you recall, the plan was to “build it and they will come”. Vendors are offering complex, expensive programs that in many cases are far too sophisticated for most sites. Many of these solutions require more FTE’s (full time employees) to install and manage than companies actually have on staff.

Since there is so much competition for business, e-commerce sites are buying into these programs out of a fear of being left behind. It seems that these sites have forgotten about the economics, in other words, the concept of how these programs are going to generate the solid ROI needed to justify the investment.  

Stacks and Stacks, www.stacksandstacks.com, attempts to stay with the market, and when possible stay ahead of it, but we start out small, by building our own features like internal site search, product reviews, a “you may also like” feature, a wish list function, a bridal registry, and more.

When we find better ways of serving these programs, we outsource for more robust applications. At that point, Stacks only brings in applications that improve our self made programs, and are affordable.

In other words, we don’t just go out and buy programs when they hit the market. We wait until we need them and we don’t need them until our sales volume justifies the cost.