The significant differences between hosted and custom eCommerce website solutions
As eCommerce website design evolves the industry has separated into hosted and custom eCommerce website solutions, both very different from each other. As we explore the differences take into consideration what your goals are for the website your having built in respects to traffic, sales and longevity. We’ll help you in making the correct choice that’ll best fit your goals and budget.

What are hosted eCommerce solutions?
Hosted solutions offer an easy-to-start eCommerce website solution that you can usually get up within a few days, possibility a week or two if you customize the design. The advantage to these premade solutions is they usually cost less to start, which is the main attraction. Aside from this you don’t have to worry about maintenance, updates (assuming your solution of choice updates often) and making sure everything is set up correctly. Again, this can depend on the solution, but since hosted solutions are premade they are often stable and don’t require much attention.

What are disadvantages of hosted solutions?
The main disadvantage with a hosted eCommerce website is that the customer does not own of the website and the code behind the site cannot be modified, making functionality customization nearly impossible. The eCommerce features that come with the website are what you get and custom features cannot be added. Now, this is not always a problem if you’re running a basic store and don’t need a website that offers features that are unique. If you want a website that stands out, looks unique and would allow a web designer to make modifications, a hosted solution is probably not the way you want to go. For a very basic site with a stand eCommerce structure and flow, a hosted solution may work. But, if you want the ability to grow the website and make updates in the future, you’ll probably need to move to a custom solution. If you anticipate this happening it’s better to start with a custom eCommerce website which will allow your website to grow without it needing to be completely redesigned.

SEO for Hosted Solutions – The Struggles
A problem we’ve run into multiple times is the task of performing eCommerce SEO on a hosted solution. We’ve found, nearly 99% of the time, we’ve very limited in what can be changed. Of course changing and tweaking code in the website is essential in the SEO process. The results we’ve seen optimizing hosted solutions have resulted in significantly lower traffic and sales. Also, without the ability to modify code variance testing becomes very difficult. An example of variance testing would be creating multiple versions of the same landing page or product page and comparing statistics on which performs at a higher level. Without the ability to modify code and all design elements creating these pages is usually not a possibility or is very limited.

Custom Developed / Open Source eCommerce Website Solutions
Custom eCommerce websites will allow you, or your developer, to make any changes to the website, given their knowledge or programming, design and SEO. This is an obvious advantage but of course a custom solution also takes more time to set up, additional programming hours and often no type of template solution is used. In the end you’ll pay more upfront for a custom website but you will not have monthly charges as high as a hosted solution. We’ve seen multiple times clients paying over $2,000 a month (without SEO!) for their hosted solution when they have high traffic and sales. Your custom eCommerce site also creates a high-end feel and in the end will provide the functionality you need without the clutter that you don’t. Not to mention you can update it and make changes as you need. Want to try a new checkout system? Not a problem. Need to import and integrate 50 different manufacture databases? Again, not a problem. If custom fits your budget, it’s the way to go and no one will ask you “Do you want fries with that template?”.

• eCommerce
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