Monday, August 2, 2010

Advantages of hosted shopping carts

Many people will ask the question of themselves when getting a new shopping cart website up and running - why should I get a hosted system as opposed to one I install myself? The following are some of the many advantages of going hosted.
  1. Server infrastructure is already managed for you. It's also of a high grade industrial standard - hosted in power redundant, high bandwidth, high availability, highly expandable world class quality data centers.
  2. Your online store is a business critical front to your customers. You need to know it's got the backing of professionals, and is installed on high grade cloud based hosting, and not being run out of a backyard operation.
  3. Hosted shopping carts are run by people who know what they're doing. They are handling many other web stores like your own which are now the livelihood of their store owners. There's a lot at stake and they know what it takes to keep such systems not only live, but running seamlessly and smoothly from day to day.
  4. Hosted shopping cart systems are feature rich, and are always improving the platform on which they run. The systems get improvements based off the feedback of store owners, and are proactive in building better features continually. There is no "set and forget" - no business should be. There is always improvement and refinement to be done.
  5. Security is already handled in hosted shopping carts. You have peace of mind that sensitive data such as credit card data will be handled professionally, and the security should be of a standard expected by the Payment Card Industry.
  6. Contrary to popular belief - hosted carts can be very flexible in order processing and design integration. Cow Command for example, will handle any design thrown at it, and if unique requirements are needed, they can be easily built in.
  7. The content management system is pre-installed, and pre-configured. It's already got easy product content management built in, plus the good ones have blogs and buyers guides and a whole host of other bells and whistles already integrated.
  8. The admin panel should be easy to use - Cow Command is built with simplicity in mind, but still offers an extremely powerful and flexible platform by which your store can be managed.
  9. All the hard work of integrating financial and shipping services is already done for you.
  10. Hosted shopping carts such as Cow Command help increase incoming traffic out of the box due to already optimised pages for better search engine rankings.
  11. Systems such as Cow Command do not take ownership of your store designs, content or data. You can export product data or customer data to manipulate as needed for use in external systems.
  12. Spend your time running your store, not maintaining or building it. It's the age old question: Shouldn't you be working on your business, not in it?
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