Hosted Shopping Carts vs. Purchased

One of the first decisions you’ll have to make when you want to launch an e-commerce site is whether you should buy a shopping cart script that you install on your own server, or go with a hosted solution where the cart and code are handled automatically by the host.

Most of the web developers you come across will say that you should “always own the code”, because if you want to switch web hosts later or make modifications, you own it and can change it however you need to, and you’ll never be “locked in” to your current web host.  And that’s a good point – if you’re new to e-commerce, you don’t know what your needs are going to be in five years and having a platform you own and can expand upon or move to a faster host might seem like it makes a lot of sense.

The problem is, it only makes sense if you’re the developer.  As a developer you know how to make those modifications and how to switch hosts.  As new social networks emerge, shipping providers make changes to their rate calculators, or you switch your merchant account to a new payment gateway, you the developer can jump right in and modify the code to make sure it continues to work as expected.  If the store grows and the database as it was originally designed is no longer efficient, you can re-tune the indexes.  Developers have that ability, but often forget the typical store owner doesn’t.  So when a developer tells you to “always own the code”, take it with a grain of salt, because if you aren’t capable of doing all of the things I just described yourself, you’re going to be paying them to do it.  Suddenly “owning the code” is a lot more expensive, and can really restrict your business in ways you haven’t even thought of yet.

The Web is Constantly Evolving
Think back to what the web looked like a mere five years ago.  No one had heard of Facebook, MySpace was something relatively new and wasn’t wildly popular yet, and e-mail was the most prevalent form of communication.  If you had bought the most advanced shopping cart in 2006, with all the bells and whistles, your site would be due for a major upgrade.  But you wouldn’t just be starting over, you’re towing the anchor of your existing cart and trying to find a developer who can migrate you to something new without losing your existing customization and search engine ranking.  All of the money you spent in 2006 on that now-obsolete cart is gone – you’re starting over from scratch, plus adding the cost of matching your previous configuration.  Meanwhile, if you had gone with a hosted solution like Cartooga, ProStores, or Volusion, those upgrades would have been added automatically as time went on, costing you nothing, and you could already be taking advantage of them.

Database Efficiency
Since hosted e-commerce platforms are designed to handle thousands of stores, their databases are already scalable and efficient, usually capable of handling millions of products.  If your store grows to become the next Overstock.com or equivalent Internet giant, you can relax knowing that your shopping cart will always be adequate.  Speaking of which, Overstock.com doesn’t own their own cart, they’re using a hosted solution too.

Portability & Switching Hosts
I can hear the developers pushing the question “but what about if your host is total crap and you want to switch?” – and that’s a valid point, but we can ask the same question about a purchased shopping cart.  What if the cart you buy today doesn’t match the needs of your store tomorrow and you have to switch to another one?   Most of the hosted shopping carts have the ability to import and export your products and pages – this actually makes it easier to switch providers than if you were locked in to a cart you purchased.  If you signed up originally with Volusion, for example, and wanted to switch to Cartooga you could export your products to Excel and import them into Cartooga, and vice versa.

Ongoing Maintenance
Having a hosted shopping cart is like having a full time development team dedicated to keeping your store up and running, and always adding the latest enhancements and internet trends.  Usually it’s about the same price as a regular hosting account, I know Cartooga starts around $30 per month, and is a cloud-hosted solution.  That means your store is hosted on multiple servers simultaneously, so if one crashes the others keep working.  Traditional hosting companies don’t offer this level of service – and the hosting companies that do certainly aren’t doing it for $30 per month.  If your store isn’t hosted in a redundant environment and your host’s server goes down, your site goes with it.

Having this level of technology and expertise behind your store lets you focus on running your business, instead of wondering whether your cart can handle the traffic you’re going to throw at it.  And if you do need something that falls outside of the traditional scope, just ask tech support.  Hosted shopping carts are constantly evolving, and are typically designed to be fully customizable, right down to the HTML and CSS powering the site, and almost always come with more features and shipping/payment gateway support than individual scripts.  The providers of these carts want to continue to expand their platforms and usually add requested features for free if they believe it’s something other customers will benefit from too.  That level of service just isn’t possible with an over-the-counter shopping cart script.

Conclusion
Nearly all of the big companies that are selling online are using a hosted solution for all of the reasons I mentioned above.  Now, when you’re ready to jump in, do what the smart retailers are doing and worry about marketing your business, not the code that runs it.

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