Why Outsource Your Online Store?

End-to-end online store solutions have emerged that enable storeowners to outsource the entire operation of their online store. These solutions are increasingly popular due to the inherent complexity, risks and expense of maintaining your own online store.

For many years, point solutions have solved aspects of supporting online stores. For example, hosting services have provided secure servers with 24/7 access or software companies have provided shopping carts.  These early solutions have matured into fully integrated online stores that allow even novice storeowners to sell online quickly, without costly set-up and support.

Online stores require six basic areas to operate effectively. These include:

• A hosted store in a hardened data center that provides unlimited access to networking, hardware and database that is immediately scalable for increased sales
• Security that prevents unauthorized access and protects the credit card and other confidential data while preventing fraudulent orders
• Worldwide payment processing that goes beyond a credit card or two and permits offline orders (checks, money orders, wires)
• Software to setup and maintain the order pages with custom merchandising capabilities
• Accounting and administration to include affiliate payments, splits, vendor payments, tax filing and payment, reporting, inventory updates and other necessary back-end tasks
• Customer Care that can extend beyond the storeowner to the buyer

Solutions that fall short require you as the storeowner to take up the slack. For example, payment processing is often left to the storeowner to implement. To do this, you must:

• Select and set-up the Merchant Account Bank (MAB) to accept the credit cards
• Install the Internet Secure Gateway (ISG) to the MAB
• Ensure you have adequate hosting capacity for your order pages and shopping cart
• Ensure your website has a secure name certificate for secure connections
• Meet the security requirements of the ISG
• Install the shopping cart software and customize your order pages
• Provide the buy button that serves as a trigger point to the ISG
• Create the capability to handle returns and chargebacks, including forced reversals from the banks
• Create the capability to handle customer calls about their credit card charges
• Ensure you have adequate fraud prevention to assure your customers that you are protecting them against credit card fraud

To maximize your sales, you will need many MAB’s because each MAB deals in a particular credit card, usually Visa and MasterCard and only in a single currency. To have your site accept a comprehensive list of credit cards and currencies, you must separately set-up each one, pay the fees and maintain the rules and understand the minimums for each.    

From this example, you can see that partial solutions leave you to complete the missing elements before your online store can be operational or reach its potential. In order to evaluate whether you should consider a total outsourced solution or a do-it-yourself solution, consider this. Do you have the expertise, time, inclination and resources to put together and maintain the puzzle pieces of a complete solution?

If the answer is ‘no’, then outsourcing is your best option for having a great online store and a good night’s sleep.