First of all, you should think about dilemma to choose ecommerce product, of build ecommerce website internally or program it with software development partner firm. In our opinion, if your are small ecommerce channel reseller, then you should stick to your franchisor ecommerce recommendation: eBay, etc. However, if you are trying to start up new technology selling business with ecommerce emphasis, and you have backing capital – you may find that your eCommerce website development agency requirements are too unique and existing shopping cart/ecommerce products are too simple to fit your business – the you consider assemble ecommerce in Microsoft Visual Studio C# or VB.Net web project (purchasing ecommerce libraries or SDK from trusted ecommerce vendors). If you are large corporation, you should do your homework as the final answer depends on various factors. Again, in our opinion, ecommerce at this time is not ready to be considered as simple choice, it is rather painstaking process of selection, reselection, implementation and reimplementation:
1. Dynamics GP Business Portal with Order Management Module. Here you are working with existing Great Plains company Inventory items, and you create orders that end up in GP SOP tables: SOP10100 and SOP10200. You can have active catalog, which is outside of GP – in separate BP Catalog tables in your Company database. In B2B scenario, you have BP module Electronic Document Delivery which enables Sales and other types of documents emailing to your business partners. Outside of ecommerce, if you need to save on Payroll stub postage, you can implement HR employee self service (assuming that you are deploying GP Payroll module). You should definitely review Business Portal and if it fits your requirements, perfect, we are happy to sell and implement it for you. Some remarks we heard from our customers and prospects – Dynamics GP Business Portal is not very flexible in customizations, besides color schema and pictures or logos uploading. We may agree and disagree with these comments, as you should probably be more open to adopt the technology of the future, as Microsoft is likely very committed to its Dynamics products Business Portals. Good example is Microsoft CRM SDK, where in the initial versions 1.2 and 3.0 you had very slow customization interface and restricted programmability and now with CRM SDK 4.0 you can virtually do whatever you like as programmer. We believe that Business Portal for Great Plains Dynamics GP will improve dramatically in the short future and third party ecommerce add-ons will have hard time to compete with it, however for now you may decide to implement third parties, as they are several steps ahead of Dynamics Business Portal
2. OK, now to third party modules, such as Alba Spectrum Order Connector, Posting Sever or Autopost. At this time we are launching multiple ecommerce GP dedicated products, in fact by repackaging our former customizable solutions to become out of shelf type of products, plus we are expanding our Microsoft Dynamics GP ecommerce Software Development Factory. We assume that you already did research on the competition. In B2C scenarios, we recommend you to consider our Order Connector product – it is for simplified ecommerce integration to Dynamics GP SOP module: Quotes, Sales Orders, Invoices, Returns. We are writing these lines in August 2009, and we are in very rapid progress, so for current offering, please visit our website or call our office