Buying SuiteCommerce and Building an Implementation Team

So you want a SuiteCommerce website. You have weighed the alternative sales channels and determined that an ecommerce website natively integrated with your ERP and CRM systems is the cleanest, most efficient approach. So now you might find yourself asking, “What do I do next?”  In this article, we will first cover what you need to know to purchase SuiteCommerce licenses, and then lay out the options for hiring an implementation team.

Buying SuiteCommerce

SuiteCommerce, just like NetSuite, is a form of SaaS (Software as a Service), which means that instead of a single one-time cost, there are ongoing licensing fees, kind of like with Netflix or your utilities company. The size of these fees depends on several factors:

• The size of your company and its data.
• The processing power on the NetSuite servers is required to handle all of your transactions and customizations.
• How good a negotiator are you? There is wiggle room in the price. Often, you can lock in a lower rate for the first two years, as Oracle has an incentive to get you invested in their software.
• Whether this is your initial purchase or you are signing a second or third contract.

You can, of course, only purchase SuiteCommerce if you also purchase (or already use) NetSuite, as they are a paired team designed to work together.

Who Do I Contact About Purchasing SuiteCommerce?

This depends on whether or not you are already using NetSuite.

• If you already have NetSuite, you can reach out to your account manager to initiate a SuiteCommerce purchase.
• If you don’t already have NetSuite, you can either reach out directly to NetSuite, or you can contact them through a NetSuite partner/reseller. 

If you aren’t sure which makes more sense to you, you could always reach out to a SuiteCommerce agency (such as Anchor Group) for help deciding. You have a good chance of receiving personal attention from partners, due to the lower volume of their customers. Responsive ongoing support can be worth a lot, especially if your system ever has a serious bug that needs to be fixed today, instead of in two weeks.

SuiteCommerce Implementation

SuiteCommerce is, just like its parent NetSuite, highly customizable. This is especially true of SCA, but even SC involves a whole setup process. This general setup includes, at a minimum, Theme Setup (so the website has your branding and desired look), Item Setup (configuring your items and images to display properly in the webstore), and Payment Setup. It is much, much cheaper and faster to hire a team that has done this setup many times before than to try to figure it out on your own, or to try to train one of your current employees. This is, in part, because, while the continued use of SuiteCommerce is slick and easy, the implementation at the beginning can be complex and finicky.

With Great Customization Comes Great Complexity

It is important to remember that this complexity is a good thing, because it enables a myriad of precise customizations. Needing this kind of customization is a sign that your business has reached the next level of growth; you are a unique company with specialized sales, purchasing, fulfillment, and reporting processes. SuiteCommerce is complex to set up because you are in the big leagues; one-size-fits-all ecommerce software no longer meets your demands.

This is a crucial shift to understand. No longer does your software tell you how to operate – now you tell your software how to operate. You get to dictate the way things work. (As with any software solution, of course, there are built-in limits and best practices in SuiteCommerce, so this is not true carte blanche, but it is certainly many times more customizable to your own needs than something like QuickBooks).

Choosing an Implementation Team

Part of fully recognizing the value this customizable software offers you is acknowledging the need for an expert team to ensure your ecommerce platform does what you want. You will definitely want to factor in the cost of hiring an outside NetSuite consulting firm when calculating the overall start-up cost of SuiteCommerce. In particular, you should insist on engaging only a firm with experience in SuiteCommerce, not just in NetSuite.

The number of consultant hours required to get a webstore up and running varies based on three primary factors:

• Complexity of the website
• Expertise of the implementation team
• Quality of your requirements

The complexity of the webstore will depend on the needs of your specific business, so we won’t go into much detail on that here.

The expertise of your SuiteCommerce consulting firm is a significant factor, but not one we can properly address in a short blog post. Suffice it to say, if you find yourself unhappy with your first implementation team, don’t be afraid to fire them and hire a new one; the cost of the transition can easily be outweighed by the benefits of a final website with fewer bugs and easier maintenance. A good team will generally be able to pick up pretty much where the old one left off. Our own firm, for example, has stepped in mid-implementation to replace other consultants quite a few times, and those clients have always expressed how glad they were to have made the switch. So don’t be afraid to switch consultants if you aren’t being served well.

The third factor that will influence the cost and quality of your implementation – the quality of your requirements – is the one most in your control. However, that's a pretty in-depth topic, so we've put together a separate blog post on gathering requirements for SuiteCommerce.

NetSuite Commerce Partner

That's all for now, but we hope that this article was helpful and informative. If you have general questions about buying and implementing SuiteCommerce, or specific questions about how you can better approach your SuiteCommerce implementation, feel free to contact our team at any time. Anchor Group is a certified Oracle NetSuite Commerce Partner, and is equipped to handle all kinds of SuiteCommerce projects, large or small.

We are a premium SuiteCommerce agency that creates powerful customer portals. Unlike our competitors, we have already solved your problems.

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