This post comes to you from Staci Schipporeit, co-owner and lead software developer at MightyMerchant. This is my first blog post, but I’m full of ideas and always reading so this will be the first of many!
Today’s issue of Ecommerce Notes from Practical Ecommerce announces that NetSuite received the 2008 CODiE Award for Best Ecommerce Software. My curiosity was piqued, to say the least. I frequently recommend to our customers that they subscribe to eCommerce Notes because the newsletter contains good content and ideas for online merchants. Will our customers who subscribe to the newsletter (or see the award in the countless other places you can find it online) click over to NetSuite and abandon us?
I clicked over to NetSuite and, my god, it does EVERYTHING. Part of their service is running an online store, but it does payroll and sales force management, too. My first question was, hmmm, how much does this cost? Since it got a CODiE award, it’s probably good software so that wasn’t my first question. I tried to find pricing information on the site, but couldn’t find it quickly. The most obvious options are “FREE Trial”, “Schedule a Demo” and “Contact Me”. Apparently, they want to know who you are before they divulge pricing. But, hey, this is the internet, so I popped over to Google and searched for “netsuite pricing“.
The first result was this blog post, which has a comment with a long list of the pricing as of March 08. If you’re interested in NetSuite, you’ll definitely want to take a look at the price list which is vast and certainly in a much higher bracket than the MightyMerchant services and platform. But the post topic and the comments that follow are what’s most interesting. The blog post is mainly about “churn” or customer turnover. It claims that based on filings with the SEC, in the past 5 years NetSuite has been losing more customers than it is gaining. A response from a NetSuite employee says in part that given the nature of the small merchants they serve, that’s to be expected.
So, what does this all have to do with MightyMerchant? Plenty. We have extremely low churn. The vast majority of web sites we develop are still online and still with us years later. Maybe 90%. I’m going to see if I can query our billing system to find out the exact number and if I can I’ll post it here. It’s clear that our product is serving the market we target quite well based on customer satisfaction and success. It’s clear that our pricing delivers the value that our customers expect. We’re growing slowly and have a much smaller customer base than NetSuite, but our customer base is quite stable. So, at least for today, I’m not worried about NetSuite. But, oh, how I’d love to get a CODiE award of our own!
