E-Commerce Development: Contracting with a talented developer vs. expensive larger company.

Question

I'd like this post to evolve in to a general pros and cons list for contracting to upgrade a significant e-commerce site. (Let's say, 400-1200 hours of work depending on the talent and organization).

What are the pros and cons of contracting with a small talented and experienced company or single developer?

What are the pros and cons of contracting with a larger company for the same work? (30+ employee operation)

I could definitely use some help cleaning this question up, but I think the post can end up being a pretty good resource on stackoverflow. This is a question that has to be answered time and time again for small businesses.

Answer 1

Here are a few considerations i've come up with so far:

                 Stability  Reliability   Cost  Brain Drain
                 ---------  -----------   ----  -----------
Large Company:     High        High       High     Risky
Small Company:     Med         Med        Med      Med
Individual:        Risky       Risky      Low      None

• Stability: Will the company/person be around months and years from now to support and extend the application?
• Reliability: What's the track record of delivery of product for the organization or individual? This is probably the most difficult parameter to gauge.
• Cost: This should probably be a secondary concern compared to the rest since the rest are multipliers. For example: a cheap developer could turn expensive when there's trouble.
• Brain Drain: Will knowledge workers on the project team be shuffled around causing loss of undocumented information and domain knowledge?

After laying all this out, i think i realize that it's up to the customer to do its homework and hire an individual or organization that has a high track record of quality and stability and that cost per hour/man month what have you will change over the long term. And let's not forget that an individual or a key member of a small team can get hit by a bus, or suffer a debilitating health event. Bottom line: software development is a risky business!

Answer 2

One question you need to ask yourself is: Is the eCommerce portion central to my business?

If so, the one answer you don't have there is, hire a developer. If this site is critical to your company, you need to get the knowledge in house as much as possible.

Don't outsource/offshore core pieces of your business.

However, if the eCommerce site is peripheral to your business (it's the web side of a Brick and Mortar shop for example), then you can probably get away with outsourcing it.

I know this probably doesn't help a lot for your original question, but it's something to consider.