There’s an administrative front-end, which (I hope) will soon be white-label friendly, though. Yes – essentially the “client” has to build something on their end to interact, but from our point of view the “something” which they build tends to vary a lot so we can only provide examples, really!

It’s a bit of a funny example and we’ve never actually been sure if we should classify them as “SaaS” or not, however, they’re software and provided on a service basis 😉

I can’t wait for 6-8 weeks time when I can stop being so vague about it, too!

However, I do think that, ultimately, it does come down to usability and features. Whilst a superb looking application will attract users to begin with (I recently downloaded a trial of an application that, from the screenshots looked stunning, one of the best UI’s I’ve ever seen), in use the program was awful and the screen constantly flickered and refreshed making it all but unusable over a period of time.

On the other hand, I’ll use the example of Sage Line 100 which, as a DOS based application looked awful compared to a lot of software but, was easy and very fast for the end user and still sold way beyond the time it should have been pensioned off.

John

Possibly you need pretty stuff up front to attract new users but the key is can a user do what they need reasonably effectively.

Pragmatically you beat the living daylights out of the payroll system I’m using but you’re some distance from the way quicken was on my desktop. More challenging is that to make some things better you’re also going to have to make them different – possibly subtly different (which is actually worse but that’s life as a developer…)

@Matt, an API isn’t a substitute for having your system white-label-able. wouldn’t your potential partners still have to write their own front-end?

All they are really pending in the control panel allowing user signups for the trial and we’ll be away. Our eCommerce platform is currently being re-released as part of this work, including changes under the hood to permit it to be used via API as an “engine” which can be brought into existing sites.

I think #4 is probably more of a general comment these days – we are so used to the web, that it is getting harder and harder to impress, but pure usability normally surpasses impressive looks in the end.

White-labelling is an important aspect, often overlooked – and was the main force behind driving us to build APIs – at the end of the day, we are techies, and we’d much rather provide solutions to others who are better placed to resell them to a wider market!

Keep up the good work!

p.s. Like your honesty re the Interface – function over form huh?