Introduction
Custom E-commerce solutions are great tools for growing your business, but they also come with some significant drawbacks. Before you dive into a new custom ecommerce solution, make sure you weigh the pros and cons carefully.
Custom E-Commerce Solutions: Pros
Custom e-commerce solutions are created for specific businesses to meet their unique needs. With a custom solution, you can create an online store that is unique to both your business and your customers. The benefits of this include:
It allows you to build an e-commerce website that fits perfectly into your existing brand.
You have the ability to easily integrate it with other programs and systems already in place at your company (such as accounting software).
It allows you to add extra features that wouldn't be available with off-the-shelf solutions.
Custom E-Commerce Solutions: Cons
Custom E-Commerce Solutions: Cons
Customization is not without its drawbacks, however. Among the most common cons of custom e-commerce solutions are:
Cost – Customized software is expensive and time consuming to build and maintain. In addition to the initial development costs, a company needs to factor in ongoing maintenance fees over the life of the solution as well as any updates that may be required as new technologies emerge or customer expectations change.
Time – Building a custom solution can take months or even years depending on how much customization needs to be done and whether there are specialized resources involved in its development. This can cause delays in getting products live on your website which could ultimately cost you sales if customers aren't able to purchase from you easily enough during this period of time when they're actively searching for options online.* Resources - Building an eCommerce website requires considerable technical expertise which means hiring developers who know what they're doing (and don't come cheap!). It's also important that these developers work closely with other teams such as product management, marketing and design so that everyone's ideas are incorporated into whatever features get built into your store.* Complexity - Even if it's something simple like adding buttons onto existing page templates (like "Checkout Now" or "Sale"), there can be unexpected issues when integrating new code into existing systems due to incompatibilities between different software versions running at once within different departments within an organization; these problems often require fixing before being able to move forward with other parts of development such as adding items/categories etcetera.* Customer Support - If there aren’t enough support personnel available then issues arising from problems introduced by customizations won’t get fixed quickly enough; this leads directly into security concerns because hacked websites need immediate attention before damage goes beyond repairable levels.* Integration - Integrating everything together takes time; especially considering how complex modern websites have become thanks largely due their reliance upon external APIs
You need to weigh the pros and cons of a custom ecommerce solution.
Custom ecommerce solutions are more expensive than hosted solutions.
Custom ecommerce solutions may be more difficult to manage than hosted solutions.
Custom ecommerce solutions may not be as flexible as hosted solutions.
Custom ecommerce solutions are not as scalable as hosted solutions.