Hi Peter,
I've registered to reply to your post. Regarding this script: I've seen many + & - about this script. The price also very high. Thinking what to do. Need branding removal, installation, modification etc.....
Spoken to Erin too.....:hi:
Hi Medialab,
I'm certain Erin will provide you everything you need to know now and in the future if you decide to move forward. She's really good like that.
The price of ILance software is in fact priced to sell believe it or not. Having something like ILance coded from scratch would cost you in excess of $50k :
- Gathering a trusted crew
- Software application testers
- Technical software bug reviewers and fixers during the initial period of development
- Marketing, advertising and promotion
- Web Designers
- Search Engine Optimizers (SEO development, content development, etc)
Once launched:
- Customer support for your own development
- On going development (new trends form, new ideas come to the table)
- Accounting and Financials (locally and integrated solutions like paypal, moneybookers, etc)
- Credit Card support and administration
Now, take ILance for example. Spending < $1k for a solution in a box where you grow as you need to seems like a much more professional investment. Think about it - do you really want to sit there for the next 6 to 12 months waiting for your marketplace to be built or do you want something NOW where you can get pro-active immediately, hire your programmers to change what you need vs. creating from scratch and go go go. Why wait? If this is your market you don't have time to wait.. correct me if I'm wrong here.
I do agree with you that whenever there is choice, there will be pros and cons no matter which ways it's looked at. Lately, we've been seeing a new trend at ILance where it's not so much the "start-ups" looking to venture in the Reverse Auction / Forward Auction markets, but already branded and established companies more so than anything. This makes perfect sense, as the goal of ILance's Forward Auction logic is to have companies and/or individuals liquidate their assets from arts and crafts to heavy equipment, to ipods, iphones, and everything else that can be sold online - quickly and efficiently.
In terms of you being concerned regarding "bugs" let me give you a hint: Take what people say about ILance as a grain of salt. Why? Because you can prove them wrong yourself, no strings attached. Here try it:
Go find someone saying rubbish about ILance. Find a bug someone is pointing out and go to the ILance online demo and try to reproduce the bug yourself. I do think this will be difficult because last time I checked people were not pointing out anything specific with their statements. You know? "ILance sucks" doesn't seem to tell me much about what problems are specific or "ILance doesn't work" doesn't exactly say which part out of the 300 various features and options isn't working
I'm not saying ILance is perfect but it's certainly not far off
You see, our business (ILance) is a mixture of customer support as well as application development and testing. Chances are if you did spot a bug which was in fact a true bug, it wouldn't remain a bug for very long as we have methods in place to report bugs, reproduce bugs, fix bugs and release updated patches to our customer on a regular basis. ILance software is not a hobby, it's a business and we serve our customers like any other business. Do you think if we had some major bug our existing customers would return to purchase other add-ons, services or customization? I'd say no.
Security flaws are patched almost instantly as this could be the downfall of our customers marketplace so we take this extremely serious to ensure our product stands tall to hackers, developers, designers and the owners once the product leaves the building (so to speak). To date, we haven't had one single hacker successfully compromise an ILance site whether it's in the Front end or Back end of the admin panel. Our motto is trust no one (in terms software development of course).
I think for any business, starting out is always a huge feat. "Will it work", "Can we become successful", "Will people use it" and the answers to these questions are two fold:
1. Yes it will work based on your efforts to promote and market.
2. No it will not work based on you just buying a license to run a marketplace hoping to become successful.
I will also tell you is we've spent nearly a decade on refining the ILance software solution to handle almost anything in terms of auction from Reverse to Forward Auction processes.
What I think makes ILance stand out from the rest of the competition is the fact that we have everything in place from buying and selling items or services to the entire process of payment, delivery and everybody is aware of whats' going on during the entire processes because everything is simple in terms of the User Interface, big buttons, bold actions and there is very little room for error or mystery. What is more, ILance is the only solution provider currently offering both Reverse and Forward Auction processes in one solution.
Not many products available today offer this type entire process out of the box without spending hundreds if not thousands on customization or integration. ILance is all template driven meaning we don't mix php and html code together as the presentation layer is separated from the application layer making everything quick and easy to extend and scale the solution as you need to without the pre-condition of having programmers from Team ILance sitting there helping you. The code is professional, it's all documented and developers have no problem working with ILance. If you know PHP you'll know ILance. If you know your CSS and HTML you can make your ILance look anyway you want whether it's making it look like your "existing site" or some other idea you had in mind for your design overhaul.
Please review the ILance product and ask the questions you need to know before jumping in head first. If you are interesting in moving some of your ideas offline or in a more private manner let me know. We can do PM here on the NP forums or you can head over to ilance.com and send me a quick message to expect a reply. That choice is yours.
Best regards,
Peter
