Enterprises need ecommerce solutions that can scale to their business’ needs. When a business grows, a platform needs to be able to handle more transactions and simultaneous connections without impacting the user’s experience.
When choosing enterprise ecommerce platforms, you need to consider:
1. Scalability and Growth
Scaling should be your first consideration if your business has been steadily growing. Your site might still crash even if you’re selling billions of dollars of products. Walmart, for example, had their site crash last year on Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
The retailer sold $2.4 billion in one day, but this figure may have been higher if users didn’t suffer from technical difficulties.
Users complained about site outages and functions not working properly.
First-time buyers to your site may never come back if your site suffers the same issues that Walmart’s site suffered. You need to find a platform that can scale to the needs of an enterprise.
2. SaaS Versus Self-hosted Solutions
Your store’s server will need to be able to handle an increase in traffic, but when you offload a lot of the processing to a SaaS solution, you increase the scalability of your site. Ecommerce platforms that are hosted on your own servers will use your server power to run key operations, such as processing database transactions.
You’ll need to have someone handle all of your enterprise’s hardware upgrades, security issues and caching.
SaaS solutions, when choosing the right platform, will be able to scale for you hands-off. You worry about the site’s products and traffic, but the SaaS company worries about scaling to the needs of your business.
You will still have to focus on your site’s server optimization and scaling, but with a SaaS solution, you have far less worries than with a self-hosted ecommerce platform.
3. Security and Payment Options
The right ecommerce solution will focus on security and payment options. Security is vital, and this will keep your site from a costly data breach. Self-hosted solutions, that are updated frequently, may be secure, but you will have to focus on updates yourself.
SaaS solutions will offer PCI compliance.
Payment options are also important.
What payment options will you offer? Will your site accept credit and debit cards only? How about PayPal or Bitcoin?
You need to choose a platform that offers an array of payment options to meet the needs of your customers.
Plenty of Factors to Think About
Once you’ve checked all of these criteria off of your list, you’ll want to consider pricing, performance and optimization. The solution you choose needs to be fast and efficient, and it needs to run well on mobile devices.
If you’re moving to a new solution, you’ll want to consider migration costs and difficulties, too.
The world is shopping on their smartphone more often, and if your site isn’t mobile friendly, customers will abandon their shopping carts.
Read through reviews and complaints, too. You will want to see what actual consumers are saying to better understand what you can expect from your ecommerce solution. Support should be available to answer any questions you have before using the ecommerce solution.
