I recently had the wonderful opportunity to read a well written book by Melinda F. Emerson, Become Your Own Boss In 12 Months.
Melinda, who hosts the Small Business Chat on twitter every Wednesday night from 8 PM to 9 PM Eastern Time, focuses on helping people become entrepreneurs and for the small businesses they create to grow and succeed.
A lot about what Melinda shares involve proper planning and preparation.
Whether you have been in business for many years, or are just starting up… did you know that if you properly plan and prepare for your ecommerce store you greatly increase your opportunity to succeed?
If you are nodding your head, do you know how many business managers just leave this decision to their “Web” person or “IT” person?
The wrong choice in this area often leads to two major areas which can ruin your business:
- Hacked store with stolen customer information which can ruin the reputation of the business.
- Performance issues where you are must choose between more expensive and more expensive hosting to scale up with the hosting environment needs of the ecommerce system, or face a complete redesign with another ecommerce system.
Over the past 17 years in business, we’ve seen, read, or heard about the above two issues so often, we’ve lost count.
As you take ownership and responsibility of the decision for picking a shopping cart / ecommerce system, I encourage you to ask the following questions:
- Is the ecommerce system PCI DSS certified (if the answer is no, attaining payment card industry (PCI) compliance runs from impossible to expensive)?
- When was the last security bug (problem, issue, report, etc.) filed for the system on Secunia’s Vulnerability Database?
- How many times per year is there a security bug reported over the last 15 years (the more frequently published, the higher degree there are unreported security bugs)?
- How long has the ecommerce company that created the ecommerce system been in business (unfortunately a lot of business five years old or less fail)?
- Does the ecommerce shopping cart provider list certified technology partners that can assist you if you run into problems using the system?
- Is the ecommerce system fully portable should you need to move to a different hosting provider?
- Will the ecommerce system work on the smallest of shared hosting plans?
- How well does the shopping cart system scale? How long can you stay in a shared hosting environment to keep your monthly hosting investment to a minimum?
While you do need to trust the people with whom you are working, if you are the steward / manager of the business, the buck stops with you; and, I would encourage you to double check against any bias which may cost you your business.
I would like to share with you why you should consider ShopSite from ShopSite.com as the only ecommerce shopping cart you will need.
ShopSite is VISA PA DSS Certified. Since 1998 (when we started using and offering ShopSite as a ShopSite certified technology partner), any customer of ours using ShopSite who has a PCI Compliance Scan has ShopSite passing with flying colors.
In all of the years ShopSite has been available, they’ve only had one (1) security issue back in 1996. Compared to any other cart, that is outright amazing!!!
ShopSite has been in business for almost two decades. Very few other companies compare.
ShopSite has certified designers and certified technology / hosting partners. Dynamic Net is a certified technology / hosting partner; and we maintain relationships with certified ShopSite designers.
ShopSite is extremely portable especially if you purchase the license vs. renting (it is still portable with renting; but you want to assure that with the hosing provider from whom you rent the software prior to renting it — for us, it is 100% portable).
ShopSite is extremely fast (it is compiled code vs. interpreted PHP, Perl CGI, etc.); and ShopSite scales extremely well in a shared hosting environment.
ShopSite ecommerce stores have handled massive floods of traffic when the business is featured on national media in a shared hosting environment.
ShopSite is relatively web server agnostic; you don’t have to worry about a down ecommerce store because your hosting provider updated the operating system, the web server software, or the database software.
Please contact us if you have questions as to why ShopSite would be the only ecommerce system / shopping cart software your small to medium business will ever need.
Please share your thoughts and questions about this article below in the comment area.