General

Now the competition in the foreign trade industry is fierce. Improving internal management performance and reducing costs have become the 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、 Choose the standard version, or choose the secondary development based on the standard version?

The standard version is developed by the software development company in advance according to the needs of most enterprises in the market into a set of mature solution versions, while the secondary development is simply to customize and modify the existing standard version, expand the functions, and then meet the needs of enterprises. Generally speaking, it will not change the core of the original system (software design ideas). If the company's business and the standard version process are very consistent, select the standard.

According to my years of experience in foreign trade software development, the standard version is very suitable for enterprises. There are many reasons. When choosing the standard version, you should at least consider whether it can be developed on the standard version in the future. Now many markets are boasting about the SaaS (software as a service) platform, but I tell you here, never choose the SaaS platform in business management software, The biggest disadvantage of SaaS platform is that the personalized demand is insufficient, the software is too rigid, and the secondary development cost is very high.

2、 Understand the main business direction 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, mail management, etc. Before purchasing software, they must distinguish their main business direction. This can be learned directly from their official website. Taking our foreign trade software as an example, our main business is business management software development and customization secondary development on the standard version. If the home page of other enterprise websites introduces a large number of customer relationship management, customer discovery, and mail management, it means that they focus on customer relationship, and business management may be incidental development, so business management software may be very simple and not achieve ideal management results.

At present, Shiyang has developed more customer relationship management (CRM), and the company has a large scale, because the customer relationship management system is standardized and has a single function.

3、 Don't blindly believe in Internet search rankings

Search rankings have no practical significance. Most of them are spent on drainage and advertising. People are more likely to read more pages.

4、 Post service

This is very important. 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 are different from each company, and most of them are calculated based on the ratio of software sales amount.

5、 Telephone communication and listen to the professionalism of foreign trade knowledge

Now that the Internet is so developed, it is not necessary to find foreign trade software developers locally. Relatively speaking, it is more important to find professional foreign trade developers locally.

6、 Data security

Before cooperation, identify carefully. After cooperation with software developers, don't worry about developers stealing your data. Don't worry about cooperation. Software and networks are everywhere. If developers intend to steal your business data, whether stand-alone or online, you can steal it if you open the software in a network environment. So before cooperation, we should carefully identify and trust software developers unconditionally after cooperation!

7、 Is it traditional ERP or SaaS mode?

Some people say that the rise of SaaS (software as a service) is a revolution in the IT industry, because its emergence has promoted the major changes in the entire traditional software industry. In other words, the emergence of SaaS is an inevitable product of the development of ERP so far. Combining traditional ERP with the current cloud computing is a major innovation in itself. Therefore, we can explore several points that SaaS is better than traditional ERP through cloud computing:

1. Low implementation threshold: In the traditional software model, many enterprises, especially small and medium-sized enterprises, are often deterred by the threshold that software needs to pay high fees at one time, and are also difficult to assume the responsibility of customer management and maintenance of software under the traditional software model. SaaS only needs to pay according to demand, so customers will focus more on core business.

2. Large market space: SaaS makes the product update faster and can be used anytime and anywhere.

3. Low risk: The charging method of SaaS service is low risk. Flexible selection of modules, backup, maintenance, security and upgrade can make customers focus more on core business.

Compared with the traditional model, SaaS has so many advantages, but it has a fatal weakness for enterprise management software that it is unable to provide enterprise characteristic services. If you want to add a new function to the software, modify the software according to the customer's requirements, and give a reminder to the salesperson after the event is completed, SaaS mode will not work.

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

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

One important reason is that the developed countries in Europe and the United States have sufficient standards in business processes. Sufficient standard business processes can better help SaaS expand and apply in more enterprises. However, due to the rapid development of Chinese enterprises and too many ways, standardized products are difficult to eat the market. It is often this enterprise that needs this demand, and that enterprise needs that demand. This directly leads to the loss of customers if SaaS manufacturers do not follow up on these requirements. If you follow up on the demand, you will become a traditional software customization provider, and you can't take advantage of the characteristics of rapid replication of SaaS system to achieve rapid expansion.

8、 Compare from the deposit ratio and balance payment date

Most of the two parties are cooperating for the first time. In order to increase mutual trust and post-test cooperation, foreign trade software developers usually require customers to pay part of the deposit after signing the contract, but each developer requires a slightly different payment rate. Relatively speaking, the less the deposit, the more valuable the trust, Because a set of mature business management software needs to go through the two processes of "detail optimization" and "print template development" by software engineers, it is impossible to waste a lot of time on it for a small amount of deposit! The balance payment date should not be too early. Most software developers require the balance payment after the software is officially used for a week. This cycle is too short. It doesn't matter if the public praise is very good and the after-sales service is very good. Because the software details can only be found when multiple departments enter several complete sets of business documents continuously. Of course, enterprises should strengthen software testing during the formal software testing to avoid unnecessary trouble later.