Two eCommerce Solutions
What's the Difference?
If you want a fully-functional eCommerce Web Site, Broadstreet Consulting offers two alternatives. The chart below details the relative strengths and weaknesses of these two very different alternatives.
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| Ownership & Licensing | All Drupal and Ubercart software is free and licensed through a Creative Commons License agreement. All BSC-developed code is licensed in the same manner. You may take your Drupal / Ubercart site and database and migrate them to another host. | ProStores is proprietary software owned and manufactured by eBay. While the content of the site (product description, photos, & other content) is yours, this site will not easily migrate to another platform. |
| Maintenance & Support | Upgrades of Drupal and/or Ubercart software (as well as any other Drupal components used) will require the work of a Drupal technical resource. It's hard to estimate this work but typically one should expect 1 to 10 days effort depending on the complexity and testing required. From time to time, security patches are released which must be applied in a timely manner. | ProStores upgrades and security patches happen automatically and are included as part of your monthly fee. In the two years we have been using ProStores, we have seen very little disruption or problems caused by upgrades. |
| Blogs & User-generated content | Drupal supports user-generated content such as blogs, making it very easy for multiple users to create and organize content. | ProStores does not support blogging. It does allow a user to update static pages fairly esily through a WYSIWYG editor. Creating and integrating new pages is a bit more difficult. |
| Search Engine Optimization (SEO) | While SEO can be accomplished with Drupal/Ubercart sites, it requires a bit more attention and configuration than a ProStores site. Several add-on products exist to enhance the SEO capabilities of a Drupal site. | ProStores does an excellent job of SEO. It creates intelligent page names and takes full advantage of keywords and metatags. It also allows for custom keywords and metatags for individual products. In our experience, Google and the other search engines seem to love ProStores sites. There is also an active community of ProStores users focused on SEO. |
| Community | Both Drupal and Ubercart have very active communities of users and developers at drupal.org and ubercart.org | ProStores has a very active support forum at discussionboard.prostores.com. |
| Developer Network | Drupal developers are not hard to find. While there is currently no formal Drupal certification or Drupal Developer Network, you can find developer support at drupal.org, eLance.com, and guru.com. | eBay / ProStores has recently formed a ProStores Developer Network to help you find ProStores-certified developers. |
| Monthly Hosting Fees | $50 to Broadstreet Consulting | $39.99 to eBay/ProStores |
| Transaction fees | No transaction fees. A Drupal/Ubercart site will cost the same regardless of the number or amount of transactions. | .5% fee on all purchases ($5 per $1000 of sales) |
