Tips to Set Up Enterprise Ecommerce Solutions: Ecommerce Diary

Considering the fact that there are so many ecommerce solutions available, it is difficult to choose the right one. Given in this article are some tips to choose an enterprise ecommerce solution.

A right ecommerce solution is the key factor for your business to grow. However, it is not so easy to make the right choice in finding the right enterprise ecommerce solutions, considering the fact that there are so many options available.

The basic question: You want a hosted solution or a self-hosted ecommerce solution?

While the hosted ecommerce solution is more user-friendly, the self-hosted ecommerce solutions are more advanced and flexible. To determine which one is more suitable for you, ask yourself the following questions:

• Are you a technical person? Do you know the codes or willing to learn?
• Can you manage the technical back end of your website?

According to ecommerce specialists, if your answer is "No" for the above questions, you are best suited to a hosted enterprise ecommerce implementation. And if your answer is "Yes", opt for a self-hosted solution.

Hosted ecommerce solution

Hosted ecommerce solution helps you to build an online store that becomes up and running immediately. The service provider manages all the technical aspects of running the online store for you while you can concentrate on the core aspects of your business. No technical knowledge is required on your part. Just with few product pages and a shopping cart, you can start your ecommerce store within a day and gradually start adding more products, features and functionalities. Ecommerce consultants also recommend hybris implementation on the hosted ecommerce platform. A dedicated 24 hours service support is provided by the hosted solution provider. The main advantage is that you can actually start selling products on day 1 itself.

Self-hosted ecommerce solution

With self-hosted ecommerce solutions, it takes a lot of time to set up an online store and you cannot start selling products on the first day itself. But here the main advantage is that you can create a customised site and you can build custom tools that are very specific for your unique needs. The decision to choose a self-hosted ecommerce solution depends on your capabilities to work with and manage the enterprise solution on your own.

Use an existing service

You can also list your products in an already well-known ecommerce solution provider like as ebay or Amazon. Here, you need to pay some money to list your products as well as a "Final Value Fee", which is a percentage of the sale price. Sometimes, the costs can get high and there are limitations too.

Purchase open source online shop software

You can also use open source online shop software, where a developer builds a store for you and hosting is done somewhere else. However, unlike the popular belief, it is not always free. The initial costs may be lower but in due course of time, you have to bear the long term costs of maintenance and management.

Functionality

For successful enterprise ecommerce solutions, the functionality of the site is really important. Some functionality aspects that need to be taken care of are as follows:

• Support for multiple languages, multiple countries and currencies
• Support for B2B or B2C
• Easy payment and check out
• Rich content
• Business reporting for orders, shopping carts, content
• Search in store content by category and price
• Image processing

Ability to add attributes to products when needed etc.

Sonal is an a href=http://www.eperiumindia.com/ecommerce specialist, helps ecommerce websites in software development, content management and shoring services.