One of the most difficult conversations that I have on a regular basis is the discussion about a prospect's current web site and how they are going to use it in NetSuite. Of course most businesses today have a website and many have spent a pretty penny making it look great and function well as an e-commerce site. So then I show up and very carefully start the conversation about how they plan to use the current site in conjunction with their NetSuite account. The first impulse of the business manager/owner is to use the current site, not touch it, keep it out of the implementation fray. I can understand their thinking; for many businesses, the website represents a huge investment, and something of which they are very proud. In some cases this is ok. Companies who have an informational site may choose to keep their site outside of NetSuite. No problem, we can still set up the custom lead capture and support case capture forms and put them on their site. So at the very least we can capture leads and support cases from the current site and have the data instantly reflected in NetSuite, ready to be acted on. It also works fine to keep the website external if you have only a few items that you sell. In this case then we can tag the items with code that feeds the data to and from NetSuite. With a little more effort we can also link in NetSuite's shopping cart to help the client capture the the customer record and the sales transaction in NetSuite, taking care of Inventory and Accounting. But the difficulty arises when you have more than a handful of items. To maintain a large catalog via tags is very difficult to support. Changes in prices, additions and deletions to the catalog, all of these cause a lot of effort for the administrator. And a lot of room for error. So when a company gets over 20 or 30 items in the online catalog it's time to have the difficult conversation that I mentioned above. I don't hesitate to be honest with people because they need to hear the truth at some point. It has cost us some clients along the way, too. But frankly I would rather have a difficult conversation now rather than go through the entire sales and implementation process only to see the customer get fed up with time consuming system maintenance after a year and drop NetSuite, as a result. The best answer for a company with a large catalog that wants to sell over the web is to rebuild the site in NetSuite. We can recreate the look and feel very closely, though perhaps not perfectly. But more importantly they now have a NetSuite e-commerce platform that they can easily manage from within NetSuite; their e-commerce is completely integrated with Accounting, Inventory, Customers, etc.. They have a platform for growth. No matter what else may happen, their NetSuite site will never prevent their growth. This is the problem solving part of the brain overcoming the sales part of the brain. Fortunately I don't have to answer to a Sales Manager. | 
