Why should you pay for a remotely hosted shopping cart for your
small business website, rather than just install a free
OpenSource shopping cart on your site?
There are a lot of reasons:
1) Focus. Your business is selling stuff, not installing and
managing a complicated script. You'll have enough issues running
a business that you won't be able to outsource to someone else
the way you can with a shopping cart script.
2) Price. Paid hosted shopping cart software's price is
inconsequential: $10-$100/month. If that's a significant expense
for your business, you need to look into improving your profit
margin.
3) Support. While support for "paid" business software is
included in the cheap price, support for "free" business
software is pretty expensive. OpenSource and other free software
come without any support except forums for do-it-yourself-ers to
share ideas. So, you'll end up paying someone to install and
maintain it. Or you do it yourself, which costs so much time
it's more expensive than paying someone if your time is worth
anything.
4) Installation. When you buy hosted software on a subscription
plan, installation is already done and support is included. When
you have an issue-and have you ever had software that you didn't
have an issue with at least once?-you don't have to pay a
developer $150/hour to make it go away.
5) Security. Security issues are taken care of for you by the
provider-no patching software.
6) Speed. Hosted online shopping carts really do work now, out
of the box. You just input your inventory and go. OpenSource
shopping carts come with dozens of customization options that
will take you hours just to decide you don't need most of them.
7) Peace of mind. The shopping cart is the jugular vein of an
online business. If anything makes the blood stop flowing,
however minor the cause, you'll feel it fast. If you are the one
who has to make sure the blood stays flowing, or if you have to
rely on the availability of a freelance programmer, you won't be
getting the soundest sleep. Let a specialist do that worrying
for you, 24 hours a day.
About the author:
Joel Walsh is a business writer. Try EasyStoreCreator for an
easy hosted
shopping
cart">http://www.easystorecreator.com">shopping
cart software
http://www.easystorecreator.com
