An eCommerce platform is fundamental to the success of a retail business. It is the foundation of your online channel and needs to complement the bricks and mortar side of the business instead of competing with it.
Whether choosing a platform to start your online channel or looking to migrate to a new system, it is appealing to go for open source options with little to no licensing fees.
However, unexpected development costs and other previously unconsidered fees can add up to a substantial amount and eat away at the retailer’s margins. Expenditures such as maintaining hardware, hosting, developers’ staffing costs, limited scalability potential of the platform – all contribute to cost overruns and loss of business. Very often online retailers report ownership costs for their eCommerce technology to be much higher than initially anticipated.
As online retailers tackle an ever-changing business landscape requiring frequent platform upgrades, hardware upgrades and technical team overheads, moving to a fully supported, cloud-based, end-to-end ecommerce solution makes more and more business sense.
The failure to develop a robust total cost of ownership (TCO) model, that encapsulates downstream costs, when comparing eCommerce platforms leads to incorrect decision making. There is often nothing more expensive for an online retailer than ‘free’ software.
As users of the open-source Magento platform consider their options when official support for Magento 1.x version ends in June 2020, they face the potential scenario of being on an unsupported platform. The other alternatives are to move to Magento 2.0 which is akin to a complete replatform or to consider other eCommerce platforms such as eStar.
The eStar guide – ‘eCommerce platform strategies: a credible alternative for retailers using Magento’ helps support the evaluation process and identify the set of factors that affect the total cost of deploying and managing an eCommerce platform.
Download the guide now to learn about true platform ownership costs, maximising online sales opportunities and optimising your online customer experience.