Know Your Business Should Say Yes to Open Source Platform

For a successful e-commerce website, it is essential for online retailers to pick a prominent platform, as suggested by e-commerce website development company. Open source platforms propose an approach of offering undeniable freedom, scalability and flexibility. However, sometimes they don’t stand as the best choice for everyone since these platforms can be technical, difficult and expensive to manage individually.

In this post, we are going to elaborate those major factors that e-commerce retailers must consider when you determined that your site requires the support of an open source platform.

Your Budget

When it comes to having an impact on your budget, open source platforms are more expensive than alternative options such as template-based platforms.

What’s the reason?

Essentially, an open source retailers start from scratch that means they have to invest more money, time and resources into their site development and pay some money to the aspects like developers, updates, extensions, maintenance and much more. But keep in mind that this cost is largely unpredictable, with some unanticipated expenditures such as security boards, updates for software and redesigning pop-ups.

All in all, we can say platforms like open source cost an average of 4 times more than other options such as template-based platforms. Later, the key is for retailers to be aware of these differences and ponder those factors such as the potential of the company towards growth, nature of the company, and overall growth for the site to evaluate open source is worth or not.

Users in Open Source Platform

An ideal user accessing open source platform can be designed highly structured, heavy site developed by the experienced development team and a well-developed business plan. With all these factors defined, the e-commerce company can have both internal bandwidth and the requirement of an open source since these sites comprise specific vision for their site and a need of customization level that other platforms can’t provide easily.

On the contrast, a retailer working at small-scale along with easy-to-evaluate catalog and a technical team might get overwhelm with the requirements of open source platform.

Later, the major points are that retailers have to consider all the relevant aspects, prior to allocating the budget and determining that open source platform is a smart decision for their business.

Technology to Access

If e-commerce retailers wish to develop a proper and well-structured website, then they must connect with expert, certified developers. The nature of open source platform depicts working with the site’s source code which directly reflects that retailers will be having a clean slate when we consider the back-end actions for their site.

However, it provides a sort of freedom permitting for an unparalleled amount of customization and flexibility. If a development team has lots of resources and a clear vision, but still there are some limitations for them, there is still a room for error, as depicted by digital Marketing Company. For instance, in case, an e-commerce retailer is using multiple developers and all the developers are not Magento certified, then there are the chances that they will build conflicting codes, incompatible connectors, and unsupported extensions and keep in mind that if things will exist on your site, it will turn into an unresponsive website and it will likely to be redesigned which means loss of revenue, time and some unanticipated expenses.

It is highly recommended that retailers must consider the technological scope before they land on the open source platform.

Your Business Strategy

Companies, who are having a well-defined business strategy, should access an open source platform and once again it has to be combined with flexibility and scalability. By implementing template-based platform such as BigCommerce, most of the time the retailers have to change their business actions in order to fit in the template-based model.

Thus, we would recommend that retailers should consider the requirements and limitations of their business while choosing an appropriate solution.

Type of Product & Catalog

While taking the platform into consideration, e-commerce retailers must consider both the number of products their website have and the number of variations available for their site. Depicting the general rule of thumb, the more complex and variations in catalog, it is more likely to have an open source platform.

Why this?

When it comes to template-based platforms, they tend to perform best for simple catalog type. Once the catalog starts becoming more complex, the product’s page performance begins to suffer on such template. And this can easily cause a big problem for the retailers since it can lead to slowing the site’s speed, unresponsive product page design, or low-quality images and directly it is going to have direct negative impact on traffic and conversions.

In this big picture, it is important to site owners to identify a potential platform, since it works for the foundation for your online business and provides best support for company’s requirements.