Buying Software Sucks

What follows is a rant about the state of marketing in the software industry.

We happen to like our system

So we’ve branched out and offered fulfillment services to other merchants, as I’ve mentioned before. Essentially, other e-commerce stores or merchants can store their items in our warehouse and then transmit orders as “fulfillment requests” to us. We either ship the request or mark it as invalid with a little message (“item has insufficient stock, delivery point validation failed, tax identification number required, etc.”). If they want to re-attempt, then they re-submit an entirely new fulfillment request.

This simple model has worked surprisingly well: the system doesn’t track “orders” (since each merchant handles backordering and cancellations differently), and while it does maintain an inventory log, it doesn’t track the cost of goods in inventory or anything like that, since that is not necessary for us to do our job. (Instead, it tracks a whole boatload of other information that people don’t normally think about, like HS codes or unit weight.)

Some of our merchants need some hand-holding

We have an API so merchants can integrate with our system. And so I’ve written a few plug-ins for Magento and osCommerce that auto-transmit their orders as fulfillment requests, sync outbound shipments back, and deduct inventory from their systems (since we are the authoritative inventory count). This works great for their retail businesses.

We have a merchant that we’ve been doing retail business with for some time who now wants to do wholesale stuff with us. He wants a sales order/invoicing/inventory management solution, and it needs to be able to track multiple inventories across multiple warehouses (our integration, if any, would only be adjusting inventory for a particular warehouse). He wants to enter sales orders remotely, press a button that shows him how much is ordered so he knows how much to make, have that manufactured and sent to us, click another button to transmit the sales order as a fulfillment request to us once it’s in stock, and then have us sync back with the shipment info, creating an invoice.

“Shouldn’t they have had these features prior to switching to you guys?” you ask. Well, yes. In this case, all of these features were provided in an all-in-one system provided by their previous fulfillment warehouse. They have since learned their lesson about keeping all of their data in the hands of a third party because when that relationship went south, so did their access to their own data.

We would rather not add these features to our system. Since all merchants have different ways of handling backorders, pre-orders, cancellations, cost of goods sold (FIFO, LIFO, average, priority), we’ve been maintaining the position that–unlike our competitors–our system is essentially feature complete, since it’s ours and does what we need it to do to ship things out. The features that I’ve mentioned should be things that the merchants are keeping track of themselves–since that’s their business–and integrate with our system via the programming API. While an argument could be made that our system would be abso-freaking-fantastic for merchants who need an all-in-one software and data solution (yes, it certainly would), the reality is that our competitors have an outsourced team of software developers, and we are a small business working in an area that is tangential to our core business as a result of the “new economy” that has a software development team of just one person (me) and can’t even begin to dream of hiring any more until we start seeing some serious cash flow.

In any case, to land this deal, we need to find a system for this merchant, and fast, because there are some important trade shows coming up.

Welcome to marketing Hell

Now for the rant, because you would think that these requirements are not exotic:

• Let salespeople enter sales orders remotely.
• Keep track of inventory in multiple locations, and track the cost of inventory.
• Provide integration hooks so the user can send orders to the warehouse and so the warehouse can send shipment data back.
• Keep track of sales-order-to-invoice conversions and payments.
• Provide reporting features.

QuickBooks 2010: Same as last year! Now with more shininess!

You might take a look at integrating with QuickBooks, but you’d realize that once you’ve penetrated the marketing speak that the software in 2010 is essentially no different in terms of fundamental feature set as it was in 2006, and that it doesn’t support inventory in multiple locations and doesn’t scale well. In fact, QuickBooks performance once you start approaching 10,000 SKUs is so bad that they sell an “enterprise” version that essentially–aside from some fine-grained access permissions–has no added features other than the feature of not crashing when dealing with large lists of information.

We could pay another couple of thousand dollars for Fishbowl inventory, which would add multiple location support to Quickbooks, but then we’d have created a Rube Goldberg machine straight out of the gate, with me synchronizing with Fishbowl which is then synchronizing with Quickbooks. I’m sure nothing would go wrong there. That would be insane; we might as well just stick a few fax machines into the sync process and call it an insurance company.

A gap in the market

The reality is that there is a huge gap in the marketplace between merchants who are moving $200k or less per year–just use commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) QuickBooks, you can do most things manually and use your e-commerce system’s native order management functions–and merchants who are moving $5m or more–just use SAP or some other enterprisey software. If you’re in between, like we are and like the merchant that I’m researching for is, the options available to you are not pretty.

I’m not sure why this is. All I can think of is that perhaps companies historically did not spend much time in this space–they either stayed small or had venture capital to acquire the big boy systems and grow quickly. People aren’t exactly lending money anymore, so I suspect that this is a segment that is only going to grow.

If you try to look for COTS software in this segment, you’ll never find the feature matrix that you need:

• inFlow Inventory is pretty, but offers no integration features, as if an entire business could be run out of one app, and doesn’t offer Web access.
• WorkingPoint is Web-based but doesn’t offer inventory tracking in multiple locations or an integration API.
• QuickBooks has a Web-based extension that lets QuickBooks understand multiple inventories but costs thousands of dollars, assumes that the company owns its own warehouse (that is, needing picking/packing/shipping capabilities), and still does the same style of synchronization as Fishbowl does. You’d think Intuit would just add the @#$#@ feature to QuickBooks itself!

No COTS to sleep in

The market seems to have determined that people in this segment have outgrown COTS software and need some consulting help. So any Web sites that advertise products will be full of pages and pages of impenetrable marketing bullshit that use obnoxious acronyms like ERP, CRM, MRP, and WMS, promise the moon, and coyly make no reference to pricing or contract requirements so you can’t even tell if you’re dealing with the right league of product, when the reality is at the end of the day you could look at two or three screenshots and the SDK’s API and immediately tell if the product fit your needs.

Instead, I notice a disturbing trend of “pretty Web site, crap product,” such as Sage’s Simply Accounting, which certainly appears to have an impressive array of features but in reality doesn’t even know the difference between a sales order and an invoice. You can try going to Microsoft’s Dynamics site, but good luck figuring out what the difference between Dynamics AX, Dynamics CRM, Dynamics NAV, and Dynamics GP are: you’ll be told to contact your “Microsoft Dynamics solutions representative” for help. At that point, you’re thinking “Microsoft solutions representative? Who said I committed to Microsoft?! I’m just trying to figure out what in the blue hell your product even does.”

If you do find a vendor that maybe sorta-kinda-hard-to-tell meets your solutions, then you can expect days of scheduling WebEx teleconferences and meetings and run-around with your “account rep” so that they can determine how much you’re worth and willing to pay so that they can charge you a completely different amount than what they charged Bob next door for the same services and bits. Trying to extract “$X/user” and “the login starts working on MM/DD/YYYY” and “the developer get a demo account so if you can know if this is feasible” answers from these people seems to require a hammer in one hand and their genitals in the other. We both know that to add a new account, they’re pressing a button that says “they really bought into that ‘enterprise’ crap” and poof! a new account is created. Let’s quit pretending that the world’s carbon footprint has increased ten-fold by us merely asking to be on the platform.

Trying to extract technical capabilities from these salespeople is nigh-impossible either. I think part of the problem is that they seem to actually believe that the features that they are promising really exist, when in reality I just need them to show me what the data dictionary looks like and how the session needs to be handled and then I can tell for myself whether or not my scenario is actually supported. Instead? I’m waiting on a “discovery session” teleconference with an “engineer” tomorrow.

Conclusions and Delusions

It has to be easier than this. No wonder there are so many not-invented-here software solutions in the world today–custom crap that barely works at home may yet indeed be better than generic crap that you have to waste hundreds of dollars on in productivity time and research before you even get it in your hands and realize that it is also crap, just with a maintenance contract.

If it takes a consultant to help people decide what software to buy, or which of your products is right for them, or whether or not your product even applies to their problem domain, then your marketing simply does not work.