Published on May 05, 2011 Hosted shopping cart software: just for beginners? Or for the serious ecommerce professional
Many people believe that a hosted shopping cart software solution is just something that you’ll purchase to get yourself started, and that once you have the skills and competencies, this is something that should be taken in house. Some people worry excessively about code control and believe that renting their shopping cart software is just a necessarily evil of opening an online shop.
The reality is far from this. Search for shopping cart software on Google and most of the results you’ll see on the first page of Google are hosted shopping cart solutions. Look even further and you’ll realise that a hosted shopping cart solution is not only a good way to start an ecommerce site with minimum capital outlay, it’s a smart business decision in the long run – if you have the right provider.
We believe that most of the reasons that people outgrow their hosted shopping cart solutions are that the providers are not flexible enough. A hosted solution has to be a lot of things to a lot of different businesses, so how can it be flexible enough for your growing needs? Flexibility is important and it’s something we strive really hard to achieve with Ozcart. How? We are prepared to quote on custom modifications to the cart either prior to the initial build (in which case they can be quoted with the setup cost of your site) or at any stage down the track.
Not everything requested is feasible and we are the first to admit that we do get a lot of wish list items that we just cannot implement straight away. But one thing that sets us apart is that we always have an open mind and we do listen to customers. We take every feature quote request seriously and consider if we can quote for a custom component for a customer, no matter what the size of their business is or the nature of their request. You don’t have to be big or have a big chequebook to request custom modifications. Even though Ozcart is a hosted solution and custom mods makes it harder for us to manage our websites behind the scenes, that’s how we choose to run our business – ethically and with a real focus on your success as a business.
We can’t do everything straight away and don’t have every possible feature that is humanly conceivable, but we are always looking for new ways to impress and take every request seriously.
By taking things like custom requests seriously, we have a high customer retention rate, high customer satisfaction rate, and can help businesses focus on their business rather than on the technology of their cart. They don’t have to invest in expensive ecommerce servers or data centre space, in full time IT managers to manage the security of their servers and to keep it up to date with Visa and MasterCard’s PCI DSS security standards and don’t have to monitor and manage bug fixes, security updates and feature improvements. That’s all taken care of by the shopping cart software provider – like Ozcart.
This means that a hosted shopping cart solution need not be something just to get you started, it could be the long term hub that your business booms from. What you make of it is up to you.
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