When it’s time for you to bring your business online you need to ask yourself, should you choose hosted shopping carts or host your own shopping cart yourself? It’s a never ending battle among small business owners. However, most small business owners don’t have the technological skills to build themselves a website from scratch. If you fall into that category, you might find yourself trying to choose between self hosting software and a package from a hosting service. When you’re making that choice, you should keep in mind these four key advantages that hosted shopping carts have over self hosting.
Quick Startup Time
Hosted services have packages. You can buy your shop, unpack the widgets, and set up your account in a matter of minutes to hours. These worldwide shopping cart hosting services have detailed instructions and often offer customer service to help steer you through these waters. Since the services are built for mass access, they’ve already been tested out to be simple, efficient and highly functional. You can have your online shopping cart up and running in less than one business day. Time is money, and saving time at the start of a business can pay off big. The sooner your business gets off the ground, the sooner you’ll have money to pay off investors and reinvest back into your business.
Letting Tech Guys Handle Tech
When you have technical people to handle the tech side of your online shopping cart, you can focus on your actual business. If you choose to go the route of self-hosting there’s a lot more on your plate. You have to make sure that all your plug-ins work together, not against each other. You have to buy new software licenses every time a new upgrade comes out. If something goes wrong on a server, it’s up to you to track down the error and find someone who can fix it. This isn’t the case when you work with a hosting service. These companies have technical associates monitoring their servers constantly. When a site goes down, they’re already looking into it. While you’re getting your eight hours of shut-eye at home, customers on the other side of the world are trying to buy your products. If you choose to self-you’re your eCommerce site, your site could be down for six, eight, or twelve hours before you even know there’s a problem. A hosting service would notice any problems on your site a lot sooner. If it’s a server wide error, you can be sure the experts are on top of it.
You also have limited liability when you are using a worldwide shopping cart hosting service. The burden of information safety will lie primarily with your hosting company. You should check over the terms of service, but letting someone else foot the legal liability brings priceless peace of mind. With a worldwide shopping cart hosting service backing you up, you also gain your customers trust, knowing that the information that they enter into your business’ site is secure.
Scalability
Scalability is the single biggest advantage of using a web hosting service, according to eCommerce expert Andrew Minalto. If you find that your cart is becoming more and more popular on the global market, you can buy packages that reflect the amount of traffic you’re getting. You don’t have to spend your cash right away on the chance that you’re going to be a sensation, and you don’t have to worry about configuring your site when you’re ready to increase your store. You can customize your cart to your needs when you need it. You have everything right at your fingertips for ease of use.
Low Upfront Costs
Getting a business off the ground can be tough. The various costs of doing all of the web hosting services yourself really adds up, according to Velvet Blues, Inc. With a good web hosting service you pay one price to have all of that taken care of for you. You can put your money towards branding, marketing, and building up your customer base rather than building and hosting your website. When you have a steady and predictable revenue stream, you can see where saving money early allowed you to focus on the product and the marketing.
These four advantages simply cannot be beat by self-hosting. Unless you have the technical know how and the time to spend not only getting your site up and running but maintaining your site, it would benefit you and your business to look into the hosted shopping cart solutions. If you want to reach out to a global market, let people with technical experience handle that side of things. You worry about your business; they worry about your online shopping cart.