By:Vishal Godhani
February 1st , 2016

Why Is It Important To Select Right Ecommerce Platform

 Ecommerce

Some Pain Points of Ecommerce Users with Ecommerce Platforms

Last year, one of the college classmates had approached me for technical help in his ecommerce website running for traditionally designed clothes famous for a particular region. After the thorough examination of his online storefront, I realized that it was a custom build estore, but with inferior technologies and inadequate tools. I have immediately counted the SKUs, hosting supports, ongoing support, setup cost, and financial features of the estore. Based on his present and future needs as well as plans for expansions, I have advised him to change the platform and migrate to the Magento ecommerce development. After several thoughts, arguments, and presentations he agreed and today, he is happy with the experiences of Magento and its scalability as well as double profit. No doubt, at Addon Solutions, we treat each client with equal zeal and affections. After all, clients are our bread-and-butter so more than friends and relatives for our families! How can we ignore them and refrain from providing righteous consultations? How can we deprive them obtaining the appropriate guidance to get right solutions for their business to meet bespoke needs along with considerations for the futuristic requirements? Therefore, today I have got inspirations to write something that depicts how it is important to make the right selection of the ecommerce platform before investing a small to big fortune on it.

Different Categories of Ecommerce Platforms

Businesses are growing tendency toward online presence and the growth of pure online businesses to brick-to-click, and web presence for pure brick-and-mortar stores are increasing rapidly. Therefore, diversities in the needs and operations are expected. Against these, the offerings for ecommerce platforms are also increasing, and it confuses the business to select the most appropriate one for them. We used to classify the presently available ecommerce platforms into two categories based on the hosting and controls: managed ecommerce, and CMS ecommerce.

Managed Ecommerce Platforms

As its name implies, the hosted ecommerce platform is managed by the service providers, so businesses never have direct access to source code on the servers. Many have decent frontend and backend interfaces that enable you to give enough options to customize some of the features and functionality as well as accommodate numbers of SKUs around 100. For instance, Shopify, BigCommerce, Volusion, Zepo, Kartrocket, etc. Managed ecommerce platforms are appropriate only

“When you have limited products and no ultimate expansion plan.”

Or

“You are just startups with a limited budget, but with a great idea and zeal.”

The ultimate benefits of hosted ecommerce platforms are:
  1. Almost zero to thin development and maintenance costs
  2. No need to go to developers frequently and need to have any coding expertise for minor tweaks
  3. Low hosting cost as it is shared hosting type
  4. Platform providers offer strong technical supports and offer quick response for any query
  5. Easy to use and modify interfaces in backend so it is client-friendly
  6. Templates, features, and functionality are same for most of the stores on a single hosted ecommerce platforms so you can get big user community for immediate and minor/common help for the same users

Self-Hosted Ecommerce Platforms

The majority of PHP-based open source platforms are the best ecommerce solutions today and have huge adaptability in businesses across the globe. These open source ecommerce platforms are based on CMS functionality and features, and its source code is available for the free of charge or license fees. Therefore, businesses have to hire appropriate developers or ecommerce development companies for custom solutions. Moreover, businesses have to bear the hosting expenses and other maintenance as well as support expenditures. Although CMS ecommerce platforms are costly to set up and run, they have several undeniable advantages for that we can’t ignore them in several instances. Remember that:

“CMS ecommerce platforms offer extensive customization capacity to address large SKUs and futuristic expansion plans.”

Therefore, their ultimate benefits of self-hosted ecommerce platforms are: A. Include unlimited products or services B. Multitude of plugins to address bespoke and unique needs C. Numerous themes available for quick start and possibilities to create custom themes for effective branding D. CMS features and functionality allow introduction of advanced features and functionality for personalization and contemporary mobility needs E. Freedom to select hosting options for better performance like dedicated, VPN, and private cloud hosting F. Great opportunities for branding and online optimizations including SEO, SMO, Conversion Optimization, performance optimization, etc. G. Integration of global and regional payment gateways and payment methods with the latest security technologies and certificates are possible with these platforms H. Greater degree of sophistication and intricate functions are possible The best CMS ecommerce platforms in contemporary time are Magento, WooCommerce, OpenCart, OsCommerce, Drupal Commerce/Ubercart, Joomla VirtueMart, etc. Each open source ecommerce platform has its pros and cons so explore all well in advance and only lean towards the fit one for you and your business for short to long-term strategies. After getting accustomed to ecommerce platform types and their advantages, we can decide that which platform is suitable for which kinds of ecommerce needs and on which stage of growth. Now, I would like to describe some parameters that we should consider while making the decision for ecommerce platform and how they can leave profound impacts on our online business for a prolonged period. Of course, you don’t need to be much tech-savvy to comprehend them, just curiosity and some extensive search on the web are enough.

Scalability of Ecommerce Platform

Perhaps scalability of the platform is the most vital factor in any decision made for the ecommerce development. It is because:
  • Based on your future expansion plans you can select the hosted or self-hosted ecommerce platforms described earlier.
  • You can make financial plans accordingly for provisions of hosting and further development or integrations of third party services, extensions, and components.
  • You can define your real world marketing and online marketing strategies.

Setup Cost of Ecommerce Platform

Setup cost of managed ecommerce platforms is comparatively low and quick due to the built-in support and scanty needs of developers. Some tech-savvy habits and knowledge are enough to do so. For CMS ecommerce options, you must consult the ecommerce development company with a good reputation and hire the ecommerce developers to download, modify, and develop the estore of your needs and wishes. Albeit, it is costly affairs to hire Magento developers and time to consume too. Cost and time factors are depending on the complexities of your platform and your business needs and keep note specially for magento custom module development you may need experts teams to fit your custom requirements For third party software and services like web services or cloud services, you have to some extra miles, but it proves worth the investment when your business scale larger than imaginations/expectations

Support & Maintenance of Ecommerce Platform

Today nobody like vendor lock and proprietary platforms like things. Therefore, we have open source platforms to save cost and harassments. Thus, if you think better performance with freedom, you have enough options to select where you need not pay any penny as an ongoing cost. You just invest on the support and maintenance cost that need small investment seldom. Open source ecommerce platforms have big developer community and intensive documentations. Thus, support and maintenance, as well as upgrade costs, would be quite low due to stiff competitions among the ecommerce developers or companies providing services. What you have to spend is domain and hosting charges for self-hosted platforms otherwise, managed platforms offer enough options to save on it if you select the right packages.

Learning Curve

If your ecommerce store has an intricate backend, and tough to operate without intensive training, it is natural you may avoid that platform and never recommend to others. Only select the platform that offers easy to use and comprehensive backend that non-tech users/owners can manage easily without any frustration. In due course, both managed, and CMS platforms are offering good options, but you have to select the most appropriate one for you. We have seen that each platform is either good or bad for your business in your contexts, your strategies, and nature of your business. Therefore, be choosy and take help of experienced as well as expert consultants by opening you’re all cards on the table. Addon Solutions like right Ecommerce Consulting Company can guide you properly and can save tons of dollars from going to waste, resources, and time spent on the project development. If you like, our portfolio of ecommerce projects and love to stay with us lets’ begin some initial conversations in the virtual spaces.