Background

With the advent of advancements and technologies, online shopping malls have become extremely popular. In the present day it has become the most lucrative business that is growing with leaps and bounds. There are many factors that have made significant contribution the growth of such malls. Some of the key factors are tiring work hours, and increased stress level in this highly busy and hectic life. After long working hours people get tired and don’t feel like moving out for shopping. They take advantage of online malls to buy their requirements with ease and convenience.

Whilst the advantages of Internet shopping malls are quite obvious for the consumer, it is less obvious for a small and medium sized business to take advantage of this consumer trend. There are hundreds of different E-commerce technologies around, most of them complex and costly to manage. And there are even more so called Free open source E-commerce technologies, unfortunately even complexer to manage and at the end even more expensive to maintain. The lack of qualified internal resources within an SMB makes the choice of the right E-commerce partner even harder.

What are the criteria for making a choice

First and foremost, is the choice between a service and a software product to run your E-commerce application. The product model is a buy model, whereas the customer is actually buying an e-commerce software and buying the licensed software that goes with it. The service model has the most appeal and traction lately, whereby the E-commerce application is sold as a service and whereby the software is provided to the customer as a fit-all solution.

Then comes the question of should the customer buy in to a full service concept or should he be doing a lot of the configuration and business logic of the E-commerce service itself. All small and medium sized businesses have limited human and capital resources available, so looking for an all encompassing service to help built an E-commerce WebPresence is always going to be a better choice. The costs are known beforehand, the customer only needs to communicate what, at what price and how he wants to sell products on-line. The entire E-commerce application comes preloaded with products, pricing, business logic, shipping logic and different payment gateways. So the service provider delivers an entire service. Choosing for a full service service concept will further shorten the delivery of your E-commerce application. Read the rest of this entry »