Hosted Ecommerce Website or B2B/B2C Store
When you plan to put your business online, you have two choice. Purchasing web hosting service and domain name then design your ecommerce site with your personal style, OR go with an existing B2B/B2C platform like amazon, ebay, alibaba etc. But which is better choice to earn your business success? In this article we'll going to compare the pros and cons for both options and you make the final smart choice.
Pros of Hosted Ecommerce Website
Hosted ecommerce site is more and more popular because of the big improvements of online business. More and more stores are created on independant domain names by enterprise groups and personal merchants. To host the ecommerce website by yourself, you can make full use of all available technologies including:
- Website Creation You have full access to all website data including files/database and emails etc. You can make instant change of your site without notifying anybody else. Because the website and hosting space is completely managed by yourself, you have authority for all website materials. You can design the website with any style as you like and it's fully customizable from code behind.
- Products promotion A hosted website can be deeply optimized with SEO technologies so you can get better ranking from search engine. When customer got to your product details, there's big chance they will browse your other products so more sells is expected.
- Brand Promotion Your website is your brand, you can put the name anywhere for promotion. The longer you operate the site, the more popularity you will receive on the site. Every other well known brands were started with less popularity.
- Flexible Payment With your own website store, you can configure any payment gateway as required but not limited by pre-defined solutions. You can manage clients/orders/delivery and all stuff from website behind. It's simply a full functional management system.
- Less Cost. You don't have to pay yearly renting fees to third party platform and submit various certificates in order to get your store running. For self hosted website, you just need to pay hosting space and domain name, you can setup the store via lots of powerful softwares like magento, oscommerce etc. The setup is almost one time so you don't have to make big changes in future.
The Cons
The cons of self hosted ecommerce website is you have to be knowlegeable in website installation/configuration and you have to monitor the uptime stats so you can always keep your store online. The website troubleshooting can be solved by following lots of online documentations, but you have to find a reliable web hosting provider so you can sleep well at night or else you have endless problems to deal with.
As about above explanation, what about the popular B2B/B2C platforms? Can we feel safe to put our business with them? Let's compare the pros and cons in quick view.
Pros of B2B/B2C
With such platforms, you don't have to worry about website creation as everything is pre-designed, you just follow an existing template and fill out the required information to get your store running in short time. The most important billing part is fully integrated with lots of available solutions so you don't have to deal with a single technical stuff but just need to be familiar with their system. Their tech team will be responsible for system maintenance and security updates etc. Because the popular platforms got huge daily traffic so your products will be founded more easier by people and most visitors are real purchaser. That means you can earn easier success with such platforms.
Cons
The main weakness of B2B/B2C platform is you have to pay a lot for the store. The basic fees include account registration and product promotion. Most popular B2B service will cost you several thousand dollars per year and there will be internal advertising fees to show your products from higher rank. The ads fees can be several hundreds to thousands per year based your actual financial ability. The investment is not a dead number and will easily break your budget. Also, when you make online transaction from your b2b store, they might charge per sale. Their sales team will always advise your for various paid services for products promotion.
The conclusion is, if you have strong financial support and just want to make the business more easier, the available B2B/B2C platforms are good choice, you just need to prepare the customer support to serve your clients. But if you would like to keep all properties in hand and promote your own brand, a hosted website is better choice because you have full access to all data and know exactly what's going on with the store. It's extremely helpful when you have a professional team to handle the website stuff.
The Best Ecommerce Web Hosting Provider
Unlike all other types websites, ecommerce site has extremely high requirements for uptime and speed. So basically, the best ecommerce hosting service must be fast and stable with at least 99% server uptime stats. Inmotion Hosting(http://www.inmotionhosting.com) is awarded the best ecommerce hosting based the strict requirements. InmotionHosting setup datacenters on both east and west coasts with Max speed zone enabled. Their no overselling policy is strictly followed and provide up to 90 worry free trial period in case you're not satisfied with their service.
Go to InmotionHosting for ecommerce hosting plan details http://www.inmotionhosting.com