Requirements for webshop solution
What requirements must your webshop solution meet in order to be a good choice for you?
When you have to choose your first webshop solution, you probably have a new business idea that needs to be tested.
These things are worth considering before choosing what your webshop solution should be able to do:
1) Should your business idea be tested quickly?
2) How quickly should your webshop solution be ready?
3) How big is your startup budget?
4) How big is your monthly budget?
5) How much do you have to maintain your webshop solution yourself?
6) Can the webshop solution support future growth?
7) Is the speed of the webshop solution important?
8) The stability of a webshop solution?
1) Need your business idea tested quickly
All guidance on starting a new business points to the importance of testing your business idea as soon as possible.
Here it is incredibly important to find out as soon as possible whether your potential customers want to buy your product. Many new companies spend far too long preparing the product launch, so they run the risk of running out of money and having to close.
That's why it's important to get your business online as soon as possible, and then adapt it as you get to know your customers better.
2) How quickly should your webshop solution be ready
Can your business go online today or do you need a team of consultants and designers to develop your webshop solution and be ready in several months?
As described above, it is incredibly important to get started quickly and get to know your new customers so that you can get important input to create a better product and a better business.
Therefore, you must choose a hosted webshop solution. With a hosted webshop solution, your business can be online within a few hours.
3) Your startup budget
How you use your start-up budget for your new business is just as important, whether you have a small or a large budget. For example, you must consider how much you want to spend on product development, sales, market research.
If you choose a custom-built webshop solution, it will often be expensive and a big burden for a newly started business, which will go beyond other items in the budget. In addition, the extra profit you get from a custom-built webshop solution will not be worth the cost.
Therefore, it can be advantageous to use a hosted webshop solution for little money, in order to minimize start-up costs.
4) Your monthly budget
How much does it cost per month to have your webshop solution online? For new businesses with a small turnover, the fixed costs can quickly erode any small profit. It is therefore important to keep the fixed costs as small as possible at the start.
A custom-built webshop solution typically costs a lot per month. Whereas a hosted webshop solution has very few monthly expenses.
Therefore, it can be a great advantage when starting your new business to choose a hosted webshop solution, so that you use your expenses best on new development of your product and your business.
5) Maintenance of your webshop solution
Maintenance of your webshop solution means in practice a focus on how much time and resources must be used to keep your online business in the air.
If you choose a custom-built webshop solution, it may contain untested functions that have been tested but not tested over a longer period.
These functions can prove to be less practical and mean more wasted time on daily maintenance of your webshop solution.
With a hosted webshop solution, you get the same well-tested functions that are used a thousand times every day. It provides an incredibly solid webshop solution that minimizes daily maintenance.
6) Can the webshop solution support future growth
When choosing a webshop solution, a significant consideration is included as to whether the webshop solution can support future growth. In practice, this means that when your business grows, your webshop solution must be able to keep up.
Here you have to look at whether your webshop solution is scalable. This means whether the system resources on the server park where your webshop is located can be supplied with more (virtual) ram and cpu if there is a need for it. If in the future you receive twice as many orders as today, your webshop solution must be able to handle this without it being perceived as slow by your customers.
A hosted webshop solution is typically cloud-based, where the solution resides in a server cloud, which can be made more powerful if needed.
7) The speed of the webshop
Have you experienced being in a webshop that is slow? - If you have experienced this, you will perhaps remember it as an irritated experience, as today we expect a webshop to be fast and provide a fluid buying experience.
If your webshop is perceived as slow by your customers, it will mean declining sales, no matter how excellent the products you sell are.
But speed is not only important for your customers' buying experience. The search engine Google periodically tests all domains, and if it registers your webshop as slow, your webshop's google score will drop. This again means that your webshop is perceived as less relevant in a search on Google.
That's why you need a fast webshop solution.
8) The stability of a webshop solution
How stable is your webshop solution when it comes to uptime? Uptime is defined by looking at a time interval, which could for example be a month, where the time that the webshop is down is subtracted from the time period, after which the uptime is found.
Downtime can be divided into unplanned and planned. Unplanned downtime is if a web server or database server does not respond to a request, and your webshop solution is therefore not displayed. Scheduled downtime is if the hosting platform has a scheduled service window where the servers are updated. Planned downtime is typically scheduled at night.
Most often, the stability of a webshop solution will not be a problem, as today there are many security systems to avoid downtime. If you choose a well-tested hosted webshop solution, stability will usually not be a problem.
