Pros and Cons of Hosted Ecommerce Platforms
I’ve addressed different options to host the code for your ecommerce site. In “Don’t Self-host an Ecommerce Store,” I addressed the risk and expense of owning and managing web servers. In “Cloud Hosting the Best Option for Stores That Own Code,” I reviewed the advantages, including flexibility and low cost, of metered outsourcing. There’s one negative aspect of those options, however: They require you to own the code that runs your ecommerce site. That can be a distraction from your core business of selling products and services, especially for smaller organizations. Thus another option is to outsource not just your hosting but also the code. This is what an ecommerce platform does. It runs, updates, and improves the software that powers your store — typically in a software-as-a-service environment, wherein the provider charges a monthly fee to use its platform. The rest of this article will not advocate one platform over another. There are hundreds of them. I have my favorites and if ...