The modification of e-commerce platforms often depends on a company’s skill with the technology’s programming language and access to open source code.

Business-to-business e-commerce is complicated. Don’t believe any vendor, analyst or over-enthusiastic user who says differently.

Fortunately, the rise of specialized technology designed for manufacturers, distributors and wholesalers selling online has slightly eased B2B companies’ digital transformation—but only slightly. One factor B2B customers should consider when choosing an e-commerce platform, is how easy the platform will be to customize, modify and change as their business (hopefully!) grows and the market changes. Speed of modification is often dependent on the technology’s programming language and if the platform is built with open source code.

Take, for example, Everlast Worldwide Inc., a manufacturer, distributor and wholesaler of boxing and fitness products. When considering its options to upgrade its e-commerce technology to handle its growth—including upgrading Yahoo Stores or installing packaged software from another vendor—it chose to go with open-source software for the ability it offers to modify software to its liking. Although open source is not as common as packaged software from vendors who may also customize software according to their clients’ needs, it can be the right fit for a company like Everlast that wants more direct control over how its e-commerce site will appear and function.

This B2B company wanted to get in the ring and fight for a bigger share of e-commerce sales. But that meant rebuilding its e-commerce site, Everlast.com, which since 2012 had operated on the Yahoo Stores platform from the Yahoo Small Business unit of Yahoo Inc. While online sales at Everlast grew, its site didn’t scale up to handle demand from major new customers like Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and Sears Holdings Corp., says Mike Ebert, director of e-commerce at Everlast. Nor, he adds, did it offer the features Everlast sought to expand internationally and to increase sales through a growing base of business customers, including mom-and-pop gyms and amateur fighters shopping on their iPads.

Ebert wanted to punch up Everlast’s online sales, but that meant completely knocking out the Yahoo Stores platform. Why not, you might ask, just update the current platform, and save the time, in-house training and high investment cost of deploying a new system? The lack of access to the underlying programming code, which would allow the user to make site modifications, is the answer.

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Yahoo, like most vendors of commercial e-commerce technology, limits access to its source code, which means that changes have to be requested to the platform vendor and could only be made by a few designated users. Developers had to be experienced in working with RTML, a programming language used only by Yahoo Inc. This narrowed the pool of qualified applicants. 

“It wasn’t open source, the development community wasn’t robust and it was very labor-intensive in terms of development,” Ebert says, adding: “To update the template for the front end of the web site would have been a huge investment. We decided to just jump ship and go to Magento.”

The new Everlast.com is built using Magento Enterprise, the open source software from Magento Inc. that Ebert says offers greater customization options. Open source software provides web developers with the core software code so that they can add the features they want. Moreover, Magento is written in the widely used PHP and HTML programming languages.

Yahoo has also since updated its e-commerce platform offering so that new features to the e-commerce platform can now be added in the HTML programming language, says Scott Sanfilippo, merchant development consultant and co-founder of web developer firm Solid Cactus. Solid Cactus, a firm that specializes in developing e-commerce sites on the Yahoo Stores platform, operates as a unit of Web.com Group, a provider of web site design and online marketing services.

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But the point is that Yahoo clearly recognized B2B companies’ need to constantly modify their e-commerce platforms to keep up with business buyers changing expectations and shopping requirements. Forrester Research Inc. estimates that B2B e-commerce sales in the United States alone will hit $780 billion this year, and surpass $1.13 trillion in just five years. Having the flexibility through open source software to modify e-commerce sites to let them shine in this growing market is something both users like Everlast and vendors such as Yahoo must consider.  

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