Peter -
I dont care to pick a fight and what i am saying is just honest opinion. if youre trying to get me to spend a ton of money on your software, its you who should be answering questions and showing proof and not telling us to assume that its amazing because you say so. that is just sales talk.
I'm not trying to fight with you, I'm trying to educate you (re: ILance) because you think this stuff is developed on peanuts. It took 8 years to develop what you see there now and if you think you can have this done in 3 months with 10 developers you're still a far cry from an established, developed framework which not only works, but is fully supported. I'm talking about the "after effect" any coder can develop an auction site... but will it work? will it be professional? highly unlikely. That's why there is only a handful of auction sites, some are decent, some are priced low, but you get what you pay for.
* It does not take $50,000 to create freelancing software, not even close. Anyone with experience knows this.
Then you obviously haven't taken into consideration Security, Maintenance, Bugs, Support and overall customer input. These things might have nothing to do with "development" but when you get stuck with a solution handed to you from a bunch of developers and you know nothing and want to extend it or fix a security path you'll end up paying those developers weekly if not daily to support you and your "software". $10k software turns into $20k, $50k, $100k very quickly but if you knew this you wouldn't have said what you did above. When one bug fixed turns into mutiple unknown issues and your customers are trying to use your site to no avail, you are forced to pay developers to fix it. At least with a supported solution like ILance all this is handled for our customers. They report an issue, we review and apply a fix update patch release free of charge.
* At least what I know I create works. You are asking us to assume ilance works. i have tons of buggy scripts in the php grave yard. I havent seen you list a few ilance sites that does and the only one you promote failed pretty badly.
Don't assume anything. ILance does not expect you to assume anything so I'm not sure where you are coming from. In fact, we offer a fully interactive demo of the software you're investing in to ensure you can see for yourself it works. If you have already gone through ILance and know it works and coming here now with all this nonsense you're leaving much to be desired unfortunately. People these days aren't stupid. As for your grave yard remark, it's quite the opposite as ILance is just beginning to see people looking for Product Auction Marketplace moreso than Reverse Auction. The move we made to introduce both logic scenerios (Reverse Auction and Forward Auction) into one solution is the reason why people choose ILance over any other solution available. It does everything and you're telling me it's a script ready for the graveyard? LOL If that's the case why the heck did you contact us in the first place?
* an ilance site appearing on the news with tons of press is not a good thing if the site cant sustain any traffic. domystuff dropped really quick after the news. this is one of the many examples that shows that this script works really well?
Are you telling me when you buy vBulletin it comes with Forum Posters? Are you suggesting that ILance should help our customers market their own sites ? If we did that there wouldn't be any reason to sell the software. The way you're putting it, we would be a consultation firm which focuses on helping "auction sites" obtain and retain customers. That's not what we do, we license our Enterprise Auction Software to anyone who has an idea with the plans on running either a Reverse Auction or Forward Auction marketplace. We don't market our customer sites, we don't even reveal their urls to potential customers such as yourself. It's not how we roll. Besides, that statement is getting old. We sell the software and it's up to the ILance customer to put it to good use. Period. ILance works very well or we'd be out of business pretty quick don't you think?
* Even sites running cheap scripts like kubelance and others show more life and i can name them. they didnt have all the news of domystuff either.
If you want that software go buy it
Seems like it will do what you need since you're bringing it up now. It's incompariable to ILance. ILance is a solution, the rest are simply "scripts" thrown together to do this and that. None of these scripts you mention don't even come with MVC logic coding, it's not OOP like ILance, it's actually PHP mixed with HTML templates. I should know, I had to upgrade many customers from Kube to ILance. They leave much to be desired and if you actually talk to real people over the phone using these solutions, you'll hear the same thing over and over again... I need to upgrade to ILance because my software doesn't do this and the developer doesn't reply to his emails. What am I suppose to do? leave that guy hanging? We set them up on ILance and they never look back.
* we are all serious about running our sites. We know the sales talk on the major forms of financial success on the internet. what we do need is proof of concept.
If you are serious then you know exactly what to do. Develop your own or buy the best available today (which is ILance). Remember, I'm serious about having something developed from scratch costing you more than $50k. You wait and see. I've subscribed to this thread so when you make ends meet 3 years from now we'll see how much it cost you. If I told you how much time and investment in ILance has been made, you wouldn't believe me anyway. This is also why I mentioned eariler that development is free if your time is worth nothing.
you may have done a lot of work on the script but it doesnt mean it has the same value to the customer.
Finally, something we can both agree on. You're right. If I had to price ILance for what it's worth to the average customer and was only going to sell it one-time, I'd sell it for $100k. Instead, I decided to release it as a solution which people can buy which ultimately reduces the cost quite a bit. $500 is a great price to launch your own business. Anything less you're not getting a solution you're getting a script that needs work period.
i think ilance is really confusing. i think you put in tons of features but miss on some of the critical basic stuff.
You forgot to mention what you found confusing? to me you're talking and talking but have nothing to back up what you are putting ILance down about. Am I supposed to read your mind and discover what you're confused about? 9 times out of 10 it's most likely to do with the phrases in the templates. Joe wants to say "Service" but Bill wants to say "Reverse Auction", Sally wants to say "Products" but Mary wants to say "Forward Auction". The point is you can put ILance in the position to work for you, not hire developers to charge you through the roof for some of the most simpliest of features and functions which should already be available to you like ILance.
There is a phrase manager you can change EVERYTHING in ILance including adding new languages for a multi-language environment which is pure-UTF-8. This here puts ILance in a position to cater to bountries much further than the US/Canada market and we see clients buying ILance from Brazil, China, India, Germany, and so many other countries. I can almost guarantee you that other scripts compared to ILance won't even support Right-to-Left localization (Hebrew, Arabic, etc)..... ILance does in fact support this too.
i also think there are differences in auction scripts and freelancer scripts but ilance throws them all together in one.
ILance can be put to use to utilize both, Reverse Auction and Forward Auction because it occured to our customers 5 years back that if they are successful with the Reverse Auction component in ILance why not offer Products. The team went to work, spent ample research on what needed to happen with the current release and framework and made ends meet to allow our customers (since they demanded it) to use both, one or the other. So what does this mean? It means our customers can make a Reverse Auction site OR a Forward Auction site OR use all and go full blown with both without having to invest in other solutions. We even have Stores coming up which should be ready very soon.
to me that is a lot of bloated features and bloated code which also makes for a bloated price. i dont know why you didnt do 2 scripts that did each type of site well.
If you think $497 is a bloated price then you really aren't investing for your own business you've got other ideas in mind which I don't believe ILance wants to be subjected to. You've already made your decision not to purchase ILance so why all the drama? Why can't you just let it go already or purchase a license? We're good people and we know what we're doing. In fact, I see domain names being bought and sold here on NamePros for thousands of dollars that really suck! if you want to make a sound investment, launch a marketplace to cater to all these domainers buying and selling domains. You're forgetting what popular sites are doing today :: Sitepoint with their enhanced "Flippa", NameJet, Godaddy, all the big wigs are investing their futures with Auction Software.
I don't think you're listening to me and I can't help but tell you to read between the lines:
Top 3 forms of financial success on the Internet (again) are:
1. Search
2. Traffic
3. Auctions
The 3rd is what ILance is offering to anyone who wants to run a auction site (reverse or forward). $497 is not a lot of money if you consider how much money can be made. Don't be silly rinkle, you know this already (hence the fact you're looking for solutions that work for you). All good.
there are other people now creating freelance software with the success of odesk and others. $200 buys me a decent freelance script that can be customized and be easy for my visitors to understand. i dont know why anyone would spend $497 for your solution and have to brand it with your brand too. and even that is gonna end up costing a lot more money with your per member license fees. i dont think anyone wants to pay for potential dreams.
If I may, I encourage you to come back to this thread in the future and give us an update on your development. You'll be surprised down the road how much money and time this stuff takes. If you decide that other solutions aren't working as well as you'd though, come see me. I'll personally work with you as I do with all ILance customers
Peter
