Choosing the right Yahoo! Store development agency isn’t a simple matter of pushing a shopping cart through the Yahoo! Merchant Solutions Developer Network aisles, leaning into the refrigerated racks of choice-picked goods and squeeze testing five or six for freshness.
The Yahoo! Store developer shopping process needs to start with an understanding of what’s beneath the peeling of an artistic company name.
Price
We’re not comparing apples to apples here. Yahoo Store! developers should never be selected based on price alone. Rates can vary; from $70-$150 an hour. In the case of the cheaper alternative, it goes back to the adage of “you get what you pay for.” The $70 an hour developer might not even specialize in RTML, have an incomplete portfolio, or simply have a limited skill set. Also, price per hour doesn’t say anything about total project estimate. A while back we met with an oversea-based Yahoo! Store development agency who told us their Yahoo! Store developers were working at $20 an hour—it wasn’t until several hours of discussions that we learned the total project estimate (for a low-level custom Yahoo! Store) was around 100 hours!! Top developers who are charging upwards of $150 an hour should have a solid, multi-year portfolio in place, along with a long list of world class RTML achievements.
Company Structure & Personality
The type of internal structure tells you a lot about the kind of service you’ll get. If you’re talking with a one-guy shop type, then you might get a great developer for cheaper (as there aren’t admin hours padding the estimate), but we’ve talked with countless prospects who have relayed to us nightmare experiences with a single shot operation. Programming and design are not clear-cut processes as many might think. Even “cloning” a store isn’t a copy and paste function Many times personality conflicts arise during the design and development process that become irreconcilable. If you’re working with a one-man shop and that happens, it could mean an instant project halt, with no recourse on getting it started again–usually other developers are reluctant to fix or pick up where a previous developer left off. With a full-service agency, complete with a multitude of developers and designers, talent redundancies (and diversity) and administrative processes usually work in the client’s favor. Even when there’s no fault at play in one man development agencies, these sole proprietors still have vacations, sickness, or career changes that often arise randomly.
Getting Started
For low-budget jobs, the best way to begin the custom Yahoo! Store shopping experience is to assess the budget you have. Talk with different developers to see what you can get within your range. You might think this reduces your negotiation abilities, but in fact it will speed the process along and allow you to compare by finished products vs. rates. If you’ve got a 5k budget or more and already know what kind of store or custom feature you want, ask developers for a full estimate range and project completion time line, and go from there.
At FastPivot, we’ve always seen ourselves as a high-performance race car crew. Amateur pit crews might be able to get down to the track in an hour’s notice to change flats on anyone’s cars, but Fastpivot prides itself on servicing the best engines. We meticulously plan our race dates, and usually only work on the cars we’ve built or the ones we can bring into the fold with a re-build…then contract with drivers to ensure they stay at the top of their game for the life of the car. We have a showcase of top shelf custom features we’ve innovated (advanced search, configurators, etc.) over the years and a list of deep level mechanics we’ve mastered that goes way beyond just changing tires.
