How to Choose a Platform for your eCommerce Venture

In today’s eCommerce environment, customers have higher expectations than ever before.

If a great website experience and fast, efficient order fulfilment are important to you, you’ll be keen to choose your eCommerce platform wisely.

We’ve outlined the steps of the thought process for you, to give you a clear idea of how the process might look.

Assess your digital commerce objectives

Before you start researching the platforms available to you, it’s a good idea to create a roadmap. What capabilities does your site currently offer, and which ones would you like it to offer in the future?

Categorize this into front-end and back-end needs. Are site navigation and search facilities among the front-end features you want to improve, for example?

A live chat feature is valuable to any eCommerce site, and you may wish to create or improve yours. Trustpilot reports this as the customer support feature with the highest customer satisfaction (92%). Customers who chat online before making a purchase even have a 40% higher conversion rate.

If your employees are struggling with the picking, packing or delivery process, back-end operations may be more of a focus for you.

Decide on a budget

The most obvious cost you will face is the cost of the eCommerce platform itself. You are likely to pay either a monthly or yearly subscription fee to the hosting platform.

But don’t forget to factor in the other less obvious costs when you are drawing up your budget. The cost of licences, development, maintenance, consultation and set-up all need to be accounted for.

The scope of your budget will really depend on the size of your business and its site.

Decide between a hosted or unhosted platform

Think about your needs and decide whether you’re looking for a hosted or unhosted platform.

With a hosted platform, updates are rolled out automatically and applied to your site. If you don’t want to make changes manually, this could be the route for you.

However, you may not be aware of when these updates have been applied to your site. This makes it hard to monitor the effect each one has on your website’s performance. Unhosted eCommerce platforms let you take control of the update process. This means that if an update has any negative effects on your site, you can regression test to quickly sort out any issues.

If you decide on an unhosted platform but you want maintenance assistance, you could find a hosting partner and pay them to handle this.

Consider security and scalability

Bear in mind the fact that you’ll need a platform that can handle the volume of traffic you expect to generate.

Even if your business is small right now, make sure your platform can accommodate future growth in traffic.

Some platforms don’t deliver on scalability because they may not support multi-tenancy and multi-site. If they rely on local servers, they may not offer you the scalability you need.

Site security should also be a priority, as retail cybersecurity is a pressing issue. Compare each platform’s certifications and encryptions before you choose.

Some top security features to look for are:

• SSL certification
• Fraud prevention
• Data back-ups
• PCI compliance
• Firewalls
• Encryption
• Centralised audit logging

Choosing an eCommerce platform is an important decision for your business. Take the time to compare the pros and cons of each platform. With the right choice, you can watch as your eCommerce venture goes from strength to strength.