Starting or Modernising an Online Store?
Choosing the right platform is crucial, but how do you cut through the jargon and find the right solution for you?
The first thing to say here is that although re-platforming is a daunting task, it is not impossible and its important to work with the resources you have available now, not what you aspire to be.
Every seller and brand want to take their place next to the Gym sharks and Apples of the world, but investing all important time and money in a system that takes too long to set up and is difficult to manage is sure to lead to your downfall. It is much easier to scale up than it is to scale down and eCommerce is a fast-paced, ever evolving industry. Trends tend to have a bigger impact, and change more quickly than in bricks and mortar stores so you need to have the capabilities to respond just as quickly.
Fortunately with eCommerce platforms there are a range of solutions allowing you to outsource unnecessary complications so you can focus on generating sales.
Best eCommerce platforms for small and medium businesses
If you have already begun your research you will likely have come across terms like SaaS, CaaS, Cloud-based, Open-source and Headless commerce but if you don’t have internal developers and experts its likely a lot of the solutions they are suggesting are simply going to be too expensive and labour intensive for you to maintain.
If you want to focus on marketing and product development that can grow your sales its best to go for a SaaS platform such as Shopify. SaaS platforms have all the security, licensing and maintenance fees included in a monthly subscription cost. This gives you a single transparent cost with a lot of the heavy lifting taken off your hands.
The other benefit of Saas eCommerce platforms is that they are easy to use and update with pre-built themes and user-friendly editors requiring little to no technical development. Saas platforms also have app stores where you can easily add additional features at low cost and join communities to discover new possibilities for your storefront.
The drawbacks of these platforms are that as you grow your product range and brand they can become limiting as you don’t have access to these more complex tools in order to further customise your website, and subscription fees are often based on volume which can become expensive as you grow.
Best eCommerce platforms for large and enterprise sized businesses
Larger eCommerce business prioritising flexibility to operate at scale and personalise their online presence are where these alternative solutions such as open source or headless commerce come into play.
With open-source platforms, all aspects of the code can be modified and the brand is responsible for all aspects of compliance, hosting, security and everything else required to run the site. It gives complete freedom but requires a lot of IT and development work and therefore the costs and timescales can quickly escalate.
Headless commerce or CaaS platforms balance between SaaS and open source by separating the shopping cart from the content management system allowing you to build complex, experiential websites in order to avoid out of the box themes and limitations of drag and drop editors.