AdultSexAids4u.co.uk is an online sex shop. Be aware, then, if you click to see this site or the image of its front page, that it does contain images or plastic models of intimate bits and pieces .. ladies front bottoms and gentlemen's winkles, for example. It's not a porn site though, so it's fairly safe, and as far as I'm aware there's nothing furtive going on with traffic monitoring, malware, or popups. It's basically a straightforward osCommerce shop. Bearing that in mind, if you want to see what the main page looks like as an image, click here, the image will load and display, then click your 'back' button to come back here. If you are comfortable seeing the site itself, here's the link: AdultSexAids4u.co.uk. It does have an appropriate ICRA rating, so for those who wish to set blockers or parental controls for this sort of thing the site should be blocked.
At university they used to say that the sex industry leads the way in the adoption of new technology, in fact one student a year above me did his dissertation on that. It's certainly true to say that it was one of the early adopters of the Internet. This seemed to be supported when this client pointed me to a supplier that not only had a big warehouse of sex products but was set up to ship them on our behalf, and to process returns. But it really came home to me when I saw the technical support that was provided .. a whole part of their website set up to provide what people like me need: XML feeds, PHP programs to link my database to theirs .. I'd never seen support like this in any industry.
It's a pity it didn't really work out that way. My client had spoken with this supplier at length and thought about it a lot and was convinced the software would work and everything would be great. It took a lot for me to trust this, but in the end, we went for it. After all, I've worked with osCommerce before (there are two more case studies in the pipeline) but not the CRELoaded variant the supplier was pushing for. osCommerce, incidentally, is an open source e-commerce package (which to you means it's free to buy and use), and the CRELoaded variant is osCommerce plus a load of additional contributions which you get optionally anyway with osCommerce and most of which you don't want. I'm a minimalist when it comes to computers: include what you want, discard the rest (because the more there is, the more confusing it is for users, and the more there is to maintain and go wrong).
Anyway, off we went and £300 later we had CRELoaded osCommerce, a template to cover the look and feel of the site, and some PHP code to synchronise our database with the suppliers'.
The version of osCommerce required was older than that provided by my host, so I had to do a manual installation, but the template installed nicely.
Our problems came from two places. Firstly, it's very easy to get the impression that the software that you're buying provides everything you need, perhaps with just a few changes here and there. So I think my client imagined we'd maybe just change our name and address and a few other easy bits and pieces and we'd be done. My experience told me there would be much more to it than that. It's not even the work that has to go into implementing and changing the software, it's also me working out the questions that need to be asked (no, I don't keep them all in my head) and then prompting the client about policy issues he's not thought about or made a decision on yet. We spent six hours sat together in my office working together on this stuff.
On the page, there are terms and conditions, shipping and returns, and privacy documents to create. What is the policy on postage and packing? What about international clients and postal insurance? What currencies will you offer? How are you going to receive/take payment? What sort of data do you want to store from customers? Do you want to send a regular newsletter? Are you going to allow people to review products? Do you have any special offers?
There are also the things the client wants to change about the way the site looks once they see what it looks like out of the box. There's text to change too. Here we've created six themed graphics to help direct traffic because, in truth, we tried to find vibrators and couldn't. You'd think that would be a major thing in a sex aids shop wouldn't you? So there's an issue with information architecture here .. a problem with how the product information is organised and presented. And since we've purchased a database linking tool we're not currently sure how much we can mess with that.
Our other source of problems was the database linking software. Personally, sorry guys, but I think it was a really shoddy piece of programming. It didn't work, first of all, and it didn't fail nicely with a message you could understand, it just crashed and gave up a load of programmer's error messages. It turned out that in order to work, my hosts had to turn on a feature that they said most hosts have now turned off because it's a security risk. That doesn't sound right to me. The software provider thought my hosts were being prissy. But I've used my hosts for years for all my work and if they say it's a security risk, I'm inclined to believe them. Plus, in this industry, trust is even more important than usual, so I'd err on the side of caution. Finally, this requirement seemed to be more about ensuring the authors security of income (riding on the back of an open source product) than about functionality.
The software is supposed to be able to populate the whole database from scratch, but couldn't. They blame that on the initial image download and a server timeout .. but if they know that's there they should program a workaround. I had to do it in two halves, but I didn't discover that until I'd waited about two days for it to not work. I had no idea whether it had hung or was still working because there's no progress chart. I set this up on a Friday. There was no technical support from the supplier until Monday.
It turned out, too, that the software didn't populate our database with clothes sizes, something we noticed later and needed them to fix. Is there anything else we should be getting but haven't? Who knows?
All of that should be set against the company's support which, when they are working, is good, if not very good. And I have some sympathy for the developers who may well be in the stage of working out what the bugs are and fixing them, each fix making the software more robust, so subsequent customers won't have the same problems. The more I experience their good support, the more I'm inclined to forgive and like them.
It takes me back to a Tom Peters story about the copier salesman who had a perfectly reliable photocopier to sell which people weren't buying because they didn't trust the service. They were buying inferior products because they'd experienced the service engineers and could see that, when it went wrong, it got fixed. He had to create a fictitious fault which the engineers would come out and fix in order to prove his service engineers existed so he could sell his copiers. So which is best? A dodgy product with great service, or a perfect product with invisible service engineers? These people might be on to something. The software industry has always been able to get away with products that fall over and don't do what they promise because, the companies will say, software is complicated so you can't have affordable and perfect. Oh hang on, here comes open source. Isn't business beautiful?
Everything in this situation has its justification, but who takes the hit at this end? Ideally, the client would because I didn't recommend this route or this supplier. If I had, that would be my problem to shoulder. However, it's a rare client that would be happy with that. I'm in the business of making people happy and giving them a stepping stone to help them on their journey. There's also an expectation that, since I agreed to use the software I should somehow share the responsibility of getting it working. Anyway, this project took longer and cost more than we originally hoped for, however it was still much cheaper than developing the solution for ourselves, so it's really all about managing expectation (and people writing half decent software, obviously).
Now, it works. The problems were all developmental .. there's no reason anyone should shy away from using the shop, barring bashfulness, obviously. For what it is .. a fully working online sex shop .. it really didn't cost that much: £1,508 plus the cost of the software, hosting and domain name, so about £1,850 with everything included.
The client said "I must say I appreciate all of the hard work you have put into developing my site, I appreciate your patience with working with software that did not work as it should have done. Finally its been a pleasure to work with such a nice knowledgable web developer who understands what his client needs and understands how to implement his ideas, thank you very much". No, thank-you.
