The Difference Between Custom E-commerce Solutions & Hosted E-commerce Solutions

In this article we will discuss the difference between custom e-commerce solutions and hosted e-commerce solutions.

What Does Hosted E-commerce Mean?

A hosted e-commerce solution enables merchants to sell their products online. The merchant is provided with access to a standard software package such as a shopping cart and is normally billed monthly for using the software and space on the hosting company’s server.  Hosted e-commerce solutions are typically the cheapest and quickest way for people who want to get up and running in few days. Most hosted services are on month-to-month contracts and have no setup or cancellation fees. This solution is best for newbies to e-commerce because of its simplicity.
However, the downsides of hosted e-commerce solutions are:

• Hosted ecommerce website clients don’t have the ability to add, modify or even remove features.
• Clients are getting a canned solution that is the same as tens of thousands of others using the same code.
• Your support options are very limited so if there is an issue or a bug you have to wait for a fix like everyone else.

Advantages Of Custom E-commerce Solutions

Custom e-commerce solutions on the other hand, mean that you have control over how your e-commerce store works and can make any changes you wish. This means that your e-commerce store can be customized for your market sector. The benefit of this is you will make more sales. You can also add specific features that will draw in and keep your customers coming back and your product pages can be optimized to rank highly on search engines. With a custom ecommerce store, the owner can configure the site and data feeds the way he/she wishes. Custom e-commerce is sophisticated and flexible for online businesses and can handle many tens of thousands of items as well as many visitors at same time. It can also be integrated with other solutions such as CRMs, and gateways. This is a solution that is suitable for businesses that want to ramp up their online sales. While custom e-commerce solutions are often more expensive to implement at the start, over the long run they can be more cost effective because your sales are likely to be many times higher.
Its disadvantages from traditional custom software developers are:

 

• Compared with hosted e-commerce solutions this is expensive and generally means a large upfront investment
• As with hosted e-commerce solutions the client does not own the code

These issue are precisely what we have addressed when providing our leased custom solutions.

By Dr. Ataollah Etemadi