While many who transition to ecommerce look for a provider of ecommerce website development services, they have little idea of what the service constitutes. Actuallv by, an ecommerce website developer’s main focus is not to develop the ecommerce technology but to use existing programs, solutions and applications to make your Internet space appear and behave responsively as a web-based online store.

It should be capable of accepting orders, offering amenities, processing customer payments and releasing the purchased merchandise to carriers who will ship them directly to customers.

There are three known ways by which a website developer customizes and builds an online store.

One is to build it from scratch using an open-source ecommerce platform.

The Drawback of Building from Scratch

Building from scratch may seem economical at first, as it uses an open-source ecommerce platform, which allows modifying any or all aspects if the codes. Yet the developer here is building only a website designed and customized for ecommerce use. At the end of the day, turning it into a functional and mobile-responsive ecommerce website will prove to be more costly and cumbersome.

The ecommerce merchant has to pay web hosting fees, obtain tools and applications, and hire an administrator to ensure the online store is PCI compliant, has no security issues exposing its customers to cyber theft, is up to date with manual patches and software updates. This is why many developers give advice against building from scratch because in time and as the business grows, the greater the complexities become.

Lease to Customize a Third Party SaaS Ecommerce Platform

The second option is to simply customize a monolith solution of a large block of pre-built, cloud-based ecommerce platform offered for lease by a third party SaaS provider.

This is the traditional ecommerce model, which ties together all the needs and requirements into a single monolithic architecture. This of course benefits an ecommerce merchant in terms of setting up market operations within a shorter period of waiting time. Although it does not offer much in terms of flexibility of customization and functionality integrations, the SaaS solutions provider assumes administrative many responsibilities.

Such responsibilities include site hosting and ensuring security, software updates, PCI compliance and all other tasks that basically comes with managing the cloud-based software.

Build Using the MACH Approach

The third option is to use the MACH approach, which follows the principle of building an ecommerce platform using the best of breed in Microservices, API-First, Cloud-Native and Headless (MACH) architecture.

This approach allows the ecommerce merchant with plans of expanding into other regions and/or launching multiple ecommerce websites. A monolith architecture is a smart choice if your intention for your ecommerce store is to let it stay within the small and mid-sized scale so you can limit the requirements.

If you have not found an ecommerce website developer who can provide you the kind of service that ecommerce store needs, reach out to Brainvire. The company has a team of knowledgeable and highly qualified web developers. They can unlock the potential of any eCommerce platform to create and accelerate the rollout of a customer-focused, web-based store using the eCommerce platforms of Magento, WooCommerce, Shopify and Squarespace.