In this guest post, SkuVault’s integration partner Bigcommerce goes into why your brand needs to start utilizing SaaS eCommerce platforms.
It’s no coincidence that marketplaces like Amazon and eBay became online shopping behemoths in the earlier days of the internet. If you wanted to sell something online, your options were limited to creating your own shopping cart solution, which cost serious time and money, or using the infrastructure built by other entities.
In the past, only legacy brands could afford to build their own solution, which is why smaller businesses sought out marketplaces to diversify their online offering without shelling out big bucks. The accounting here is simple: on-premise eCommerce solutions certainly have the capabilities to be robust in nature, but optimizing that opportunity depends entirely on who you hire to build the infrastructure and maintain security and hosting capabilities. You’re talking about building out an entire team of people dedicated to supporting your custom-built solution. Only brands with established presence and high YoY revenue could afford to make that work.
These days, though, cloud-hosted solutions have allowed for those small businesses to own and control their own sites akin to legacy brands, all with a low cost to entry. In the meantime, however, few legacy brands have shifted from their on-premise solution to a SaaS model, typically spending upward of $50,000 on maintenance a year.
This drastic difference in eCommerce solution spend is contrary to the benefits of the internet, on which information democratization has been a long-standing theme. For enterprise-level brands looking to decrease spend and increase revenue, migrating from an on-premise to a cloud-based solution is no longer a novel idea: it’s low-hanging fruit.
Below, four reasons your brand needs to change its tune on SaaS eCommerce platforms and take advantage of how these cloud companies are redefining eCommerce.
Low Cost of Entry + Improved Site Performance
For enterprise-level brands, the price tag for a good solution is less of a concern than not getting your expected ROI out of a platform. That said, SaaS platforms don’t just reduce the cost of your eCommerce solution, they do the work of your on-site IT team. This is because the SaaS business model allows for its parent company to build out a cloud-based solution and then hire expert engineers to ensure that the solution works, 99.99% of the time.
Your company, then, isn’t tasked with doing so. A SaaS platform will not only ensure that your site is online as often as possible -- even with high traffic numbers -- but because a SaaS solution relies on referrals and customer satisfaction, your site speed, security, hosting and costs will all be optimized.
Reduced Time to Benefit
Beyond allowing for less expensive maintenance, cloud-based solutions also provide “baked in house” services. In other words, these solutions don’t just provide you a shopping cart. They provide a whole digital suite to optimize your eCommerce performance, without much work on your part.
SEO, for instance, is a common feature baked into cloud-based solutions. After all, why have an eCommerce site that isn’t optimized for the web it lives on? This means these services provide proper redirects and site hierarchies that make sense to Google and Bing’s crawling bots. And the service does this all in the background, constantly organizing and updating your site in real-time.
Integrations + Networking
Some SaaS platforms like Bigcommerce have teamed up with best-in-breed companies to build an eCommerce ecosystem that offers merchants great depth and breadth in terms of features. Features offered include everything from point of sale to shipping and delivery to xx and yy.
SaaS platforms have created open and easy-to-integrate APIs that allow for the likes of Avalara, AMEX and Adobe, to name those only at the beginning of the alphabet, to put their best eCommerce foot forward and work directly with your solution in the exact manner you need.
In other words, a SaaS solution’s ecosystem is akin to networking. Meet and impress the right people, and doors begin to open in all directions. Your SaaS platform is that person.
Flexibility + Scalability
For enterprise brands, flexibility and scalability are often synonymous with on-premise solutions. After all, if you can hire your own team to build and maintain an eCommerce platform, then you own and control your site infrastructure. If you need to scale, you give direction to your employees to improve the infrastructure to allow for that. If you need a new integration, you give direction to your team to integrate the API that allows for your needed functionality.
That’s all well and good, but maintaining your infrastructure isn’t the goal of your eCommerce offering. Increasing revenue year-over-year is your goal. When focused on the technology, and when paying for all needed updates, growth and integrations both on a partner and employee level, you are simply losing money. The ROI isn’t there.
To increase revenue year-over-year, you need more customers converting. To do that, you need to focus on your brand positioning, build a loyal customer base, improve your referral rate and optimize your product offering. A SaaS solution takes care of the technology aspect. It puts experts at the helm, and lowers the price you pay for them, allowing you to redistribute those dollars to the departments that can amplify your brand name and customer service.
In all, migrating your legacy brand to a SaaS solution isn’t rocket science. The decision is simple. You run your eCommerce operations online, its time to utilize the democratizing capabilities of the internet to increase ROI and grow your bottom line. That’s what cloud-based solutions are all about.
Bigcommerce is the #1 eCommerce software solution that gives you everything you need to sell online. Bigcommerce stores span 25 industries and over 65 countries, earning thousands in annual revenue all the way to $30 million plus. Try it free and see how we’ve helped thousands sell more, online!