General

Nowadays, the competition in the foreign trade industry is fierce, and improving internal management performance and reducing costs have become practical interests pursued by foreign trade enterprises. Many enterprises choose to use foreign trade software to improve efficiency, but how to choose foreign trade management software?

1、 Would you like to choose the standard version or a secondary development based on the standard version?

The standard version is a mature solution version developed by software development companies in advance based on the needs of most enterprises in the market. Secondary development, in simple terms, involves customizing and modifying existing standard versions, expanding functions, and meeting enterprise requirements. Generally speaking, it does not change the original system core (software design concept). If the company's business and standard version processes are very consistent, choose standard.

Based on my years of experience in developing foreign trade software, there are very few reasons why the Standard Edition is completely suitable for enterprises. As will be explained in detail in the following text, when choosing the Standard Edition, you should at least consider whether you can develop it again on the Standard Edition in the future. Nowadays, many markets are boasting about the SaaS (Software as a Service) platform, but I tell you here that you should not choose the SaaS platform in business management software, The biggest drawback of the SaaS platform is insufficient personalized requirements, rigid software, and extremely high secondary development costs.

2、 Understand the main business directions of software developers

Each software developer's main business direction is different, and the distribution of profit sections is different, such as business management, customer relationship management, email management, etc. Before purchasing software, it is necessary to distinguish their main business direction. This can be directly learned from their official website. Taking our foreign trade software as an example, our main business is the development of business management software and customization of secondary development on the standard version. If other enterprise websites extensively introduce customer relationship management, customer discovery, and email management on their homepage, it indicates that their focus is on customer relationship management. Business management may be developed as an additional component, which may make business management software very simple and not achieve ideal management results.

At present, there are many customer relationship management (CRM) systems developed by Shiyang, and the company is relatively large due to the standardization and single functionality of the customer relationship management system.

3、 Don't blindly believe in internet search rankings

Search rankings no longer have practical significance. Most of them are spent on attracting traffic and advertising, and people are more likely to read a few more pages.

4、 Post service

This is very important, as post service is the basic guarantee for providing software. Generally, software developers will give away one year of service, and after one year, they will provide paid services. The specific service fees vary from company to company, and most of them are calculated based on the ratio of software sales amount.

5、 Telephone communication, listening to the professionalism of foreign trade knowledge

Nowadays, with the development of the internet, it is not necessary to have registered a local developer for foreign trade software. Relatively speaking, finding a professional foreign trade developer is more important than finding a local developer.

6、 Security of data

Before collaborating, carefully identify and after working with a software developer, don't worry that the developer will steal your data. If you are worried, don't cooperate. Software and networks are everywhere. If the developer intends to steal your business data, whether it is a standalone version or a network version, as long as you open the software in a network environment, you can steal it. So before collaborating, it's important to carefully identify and trust software developers unconditionally!

7、 Is it better to choose traditional ERP mode or SaaS mode?

Some people say that the rise of SaaS (Software as a Service) is a revolution in the IT industry, as its emergence has promoted significant changes in the entire traditional software industry. In other words, the emergence of SaaS is an inevitable product of ERP development to this day. Combining traditional ERP with the trendy cloud computing is itself a major innovation. Therefore, we can explore several advantages of SaaS over traditional ERP through cloud computing:

1. Low implementation threshold: In traditional software models, many enterprises, especially small and medium-sized enterprises, often shy away from paying high fees for software at once and find it difficult to bear the responsibility of customers managing and maintaining software themselves. SaaS only needs to pay according to demand, so customers will focus more on their core business.

2. Large market space: SaaS accelerates product updates and can be used anytime, anywhere.

3. Low risk: The charging method of SaaS services has low risk, and flexible selection of modules, backup, maintenance, security, and upgrades can help customers focus more on their core business.

SaaS has so many advantages compared to traditional models, but it has a fatal weakness for enterprise management software that it cannot provide enterprise specific services. If you want to add a new feature to the software, modify the software according to customer requirements, give a reminder to the salesperson after the event is completed, and SaaS mode will not work.

The rise of China's entrepreneurial trend has made China's economic development better and better. The rapid development has also led to the lack of a relatively fixed business model among Chinese enterprises.

Why is Salesforce worth billions of dollars? Why did the "American version nail" Slack successfully go public? Why can the ToB industry in developed countries such as Europe and America compete with the ToC industry?

One important reason is that developed countries in Europe and America have sufficient standards in business processes. A sufficiently standardized business process can better help SaaS expand and apply in more enterprises. However, Chinese enterprises have developed too quickly and have too many paths, making it difficult for standardized products to fully market. Often, it is this enterprise that needs this demand, and that enterprise needs that demand. This directly leads to SaaS vendors losing customers if they do not follow up on these requirements. If we follow up on demand, we will become a traditional software customization provider, unable to take advantage of the rapid replication characteristics of SaaS systems and achieve rapid expansion.

8、 Compare from deposit ratio and final payment date

Most of the two parties are cooperating for the first time. In order to increase mutual trust and cooperate in later testing, foreign trade software developers usually require customers to pay a partial deposit after signing the contract. However, each developer requires a slightly different payment ratio. Relatively speaking, the party with a smaller deposit is more trustworthy, Because a mature business management software needs to go through two processes: software engineers' "detail optimization" and "printing template development", it is impossible to waste a lot of time on it for a small deposit! The final payment date should not be too early, as most software developers require payment of the final payment within a week of the software's official use. This cycle is too short, and it doesn't matter if the reputation is very good and the after-sales service is done very well. Because multiple departments work together to continuously input several complete sets of business documents to discover the details of the software. Of course, enterprises should strengthen software testing during formal software testing to avoid unnecessary trouble in the future.