Over the last two decades, the rise of the ecommerce industry has greatly altered global commerce. Every business that is engaged in successful selling of products and services online depends greatly on its ecommerce platform. The primary decision for various new companies today is to whether select an on-premise or a cloud-based solution as an ecommerce platform. On the other hand, established companies having on-premise platforms must decide for moving to the cloud. This choice doesn’t only dictate a company’s capital and operating budgets, but also determine its ability to respond well to the market opportunities and growth. Take a look at different aspects of costs, scalability and time to value of on-premise and cloud-based ecommerce solutions.
Total Cost of Ownership
On-premise ecommerce solutions are either locally installed on a company’s hardware systems or managed by IT staff. They typically involve huge upfront investments to purchase the infrastructure like servers and facilities. These are further required to manage as well as maintain software and its licenses. Also, its ongoing costs cover everything from hardware maintenance, backups, security, power & cooling to software upgrades. In addition to this, companies may change associated costs with PCI DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard) compliance and meeting different other regulatory standards to guard personal data and credit card. For this, companies may have to hire or even train additional IT staff as well.
On the contrary, cloud ecommerce software is offered as a service, for which it is also called SaaS (Software-as-a-Service). The service providing vendor hosts as well as manages customers’ data in the Internet Cloud and maintains complete IT infrastructure. It is also responsible for complete data security, bug fixes and distributing upgrades. For customers, initial costs are much lower since you just simply implement the software to your needs and users access it via a web browser.
Ultimately, a cloud ecommerce solution enables your IT staff to primarily focus on driving strategic initiatives, rather than just spending time on maintaining and managing the on-premise systems.
Upgrades and Enhancements
On-premise systems work quite reliably—until the provider releases a further update. At this time, IT must redeploy the software across servers, since the issue is that any integrations or customizations are tied to the existing software deployment, which will be vanish away during an upgrade. This can lead your team to re-implementation or start again from scratch and would take a lot of resources in every manner.
On the other hand, cloud ecommerce providers consistently enhance their solution to ensure you always use most advanced version. Various cloud solution providers like NetSuite offer a multitenant architecture to serve all customers through single application.
Growth and Agility
Since it’s difficult to customize or extend the on-premise ecommerce solution, system upgrade comes as a challenge. Due to upgrade difficulties in traditional or on-premise solutions, it can even constraint your efforts to pursue with new market opportunities and increase the revenue.
Besides, cloud ecommerce software offers clear advantages for it takes smaller duration to deploy and start returning value. Business doesn’t have to worry about the IT infrastructure supporting new initiatives or not and you can quickly respond to existing market opportunities for different brands and countries at same platform. Cloud-based ecommerce software platforms are comparatively easier to scale and give flexibility to handle huge customer base with the growing business. For, your business is unique, NetSuite Expert lets you deploy best ecommerce software to return best results. Our experts provide ecommerce software to automatically adjust and handle the business surge.