5 Common eCommerce Myths & Why You Need to Dispel Them

When businesses consider starting a significant new commerce project, they are immediately confronted with the choice of a complex and expensive deployment processes or doing nothing.  Every business has unique business needs and the frameworks and requirements of commerce legacy platforms often lead to bloated budgets and complex project deployments. It is time to dispel the most common ecommerce platform myths: 

1. Commerce development must be difficult and complex: That myth is stuck in the tools of the 90s. Technology has advanced significantly since then. There is a new type of ecommerce platform called Commerce as a Service that helps to simplify the effort involved for both the technology team and the business team and still allows companies to take advantage of scalable commerce functionality.
2. It requires a significant budget: With modern Commerce as a Service platforms, there is less money up-front because there are zero licensing fees and businesses pay for only what is used, not for bloated implementations they won’t use. Most of these platforms enable users to use any or all of the commerce functionality and move forward on a pay- per usage basis, which significantly reduces overall cost.

3. A lot of extra time is required to implement changes: Instead of legacy approaches, an on-demand and API strategy gives instant access to shared innovation.  What that means is that in modern platforms, enhancements and upgrades are made available sometimes on a daily basis. The customers rarely or never have to change their solution to adapt to these enhancements yet can quickly take advantage of them.  When legacy platforms release a new version, it is often weeks to upgrade the system even if the clients don’t take advantage of any of the new functionality. Commerce as a Service does away with costly upgrades and lengthy implementation for incremental enhancements.

4. Optimization trumps everything: The truth that no one talks about with the implementation of legacy commerce platforms is that while the business is focused on leveraging all of the cool features, the implementations become so expensive and complex that the features are often never available. Commerce as a Service allows companies to reduce the technology and implementation complexity so that they can concentrate on building a great user experience that represents their brand across every channel.

5. Omnichannel is nice to have but not required: Cconsumers, whether B2B or B2C, expect a seamless brand experience. It takes many great experiences to build customer loyalty but only one bad one to drive that customer away.  Modern Commerce as a Service platforms, because they do not incorporate any front end development technology, allow companies to build native apps and solutions across every channel and still access the same core commerce platform through a single API.  This reduces the complexity of deploying a seamless brand solution across every channel while still providing a single customer centric view to the business.

There is little wonder that these commerce myths remain in people’s minds today because they are invariably true in the world of legacy ecommerce platforms. They are only able to be eliminated because there are new affordable cloud-based enterprise ecommerce platforms that enable unlimited creativity on the front-end and supports the most complex integrations on the back-end. It is an immense step forward in providing companies with the right tools they need to focus on brand experience, user experience and building lasting relationships with the customers across every channel.

Contributed by Arthur Lawida, General Manager of commercetools U.S.

Photo Credit: Image provided by Shutterfly via Social Monsters with permission to use.