One thing we always tell our clients to look for when they are considering an eCommerce provider is partner support. If a company is open, willing and able to bring partners to the table with additional value and tools for their clients, they have a better chance of survival and a greater offering to their customers. When a company is "closed", not only with their code but with the customers data, and external relationships, it usually is a bad sign.

Over the past 5 years of my experience, I have seen meteoric growth of open access to web based applications with API's, Web Services, Mash Ups and more. It was one of the reasons we wrote our Store API in tandem with its feature set - so it was always open for partners to use, clients to use, and more importantly - other systems to use. It troubles me in this day and age when a company still traps you into a proprietary system, in my opionion it means they are getting lazy and rather than compete on a level playing field with further innovation they prefer to trap customers. We have now seen this on both the smaller point of sale company level, and the large scale ERP management systems.

Businesses have to stay flexible, and provide the best value to their customers to make sure that the relationship is mutual, and not one sided.