The “Walmart-ization” of the eCommerce World: Making Mediocre Shopping Cart Sites the Norm

A number of very large companies have helped small businesses and individuals make their start selling online by providing hosted eCommerce solutions (websites with a shopping cart). These include Amazon, Yahoo, ProStores (eBay) and many others. In some ways, this has been very good, as many of their customers may not have ventured into online sales had they not run into an advertisement from one of these large internet companies.

Unfortunately, many of these hosted eCommerce platforms have created what I have decided to call the “Walmart-ization” of the eCommerce World. In short, some of these companies have are offering services that help to cause a general acceptance of mediocrity by too many online sellers.

Why the comparison to Walmart? Two reasons First, Walmart is everywhere and its huge and it has many customers. Second, the proliferation of Walmart goes hand in hand with buyers being comfortable with mediocre products. No, I’m not saying that Walmart doesn’t have some good “stuff”. But that isn’t why anyone shops at Walmart. People go to Walmart for the low price and in the process have learned by habit that quality isn’t a factor.

In the eCommerce world, many of the large companies offering online shopping cart websites (always for a monthly fee and sometimes with transaction fees on top of that) are not really providing high quality. But their customers often don’t know that because they haven’t used anything else - they have nothing to compare it too. So just like Walmart, these large companies are everywhere, picking up customers who don’t know that they aren’t getting a quality product and service.

I’ve commented on ProStores in the past, and I’ll use it as an example again. It is possible that a ProStores customer has never used any other eCommerce solution, he or she may think they’re getting a good deal. But that isn’t really the case. There are too many features that are standard (or should be standard) that ProStores doesn’t offer. To name just a few:

1) You can only have one image per product. Did you take the time to get several photos of an item, maybe from different angles? Too bad. You’re going to have to pick one because ProStores doesn’t support multiple product images.

2) Do you have upgrades or other product attributes that add to the price of an item? Great. That’s another simple and standard eCommerce feature. But with ProStores, you will have to bump up to their 2nd highest tier in the neighborhood of $70 a month to be able to do this.

3) Want a contact us page? You know, the simple webforms that lets a potential buyer send you a question? To my utter amazement, ProStores does not support this functionality.

I reference ProStores as an example, but this is just one of several major eCommerce hosting providers among others, and the story is generally the same. While these companies may be trying to make a simple for a small business to start selling online (especially for business owners without technical prowess), they leave too many features out - and they needlessly restrict what the website owner can do.

Some would say the big benefit is that these companies make it easy. Click, click, click, and you have a store. In my experience, it really isn’t as easy as I would have expected. Some of the built in templates are nice if I didn’t want to design or install my own template, but that’s about the only benefit that I’ve been able to find.

Another misconception that I’ve heard is that some people feel like they will get more sales by using a solution from one of these companies. This is inherently not true. That eBay owns ProStores does not mean you would have more sales by having your website hosted by ProStores. The same with Yahoo, Amazon, etc. Yes, an eBay seller with a ProStores website can direct the checkout flow to their site and possibly upsell. But that’s not the misconception that I’ve bumped into in the past.

In summary, while large internet companies like eBay, Yahoo, and Amazon have helped many people take their first step into the eCommerce world, it also goes hand in hand with an acceptance of mediocrity. And in most cases, the features offered (or the lack thereof) don’t even come close to justifying the high monthly fees that are charged.