Data is the backbone of every enterprise that is serious about eCommerce. To be a leading player in the market, it is important to know how to manage, analyze and use this important asset in the right manner.
Enterprise content management system offers one of the best solutions for e-commerce business. It is a formal way of organizing and storing data and content relevant to an organization all under one umbrella, to be delivered to respective users in a timely manner.
The decision to move from a custom-built eCommerce CMS to an enterprise eCommerce CMS platform like EPiServer, Sitecore, Ektron or Kentico, is a crucial one. Would it prove more effective, depends upon a company’s specific needs.
Mike Johnston, Founder of CMS Critic, says that by investing in a custom-coded eCommerce solution you will be wasting your time and effort following the path that existing eCommerce CMS platforms have walked. “It’s much more intelligent and cost effective to implement a proven solution rather than attempt to create your own from scratch,” he writes.
Let’s find out the advantages of adopting an enterprise eCommerce CMS system:
Get noticed globally
For your business to get global visibility, it must offer customers a user-friendly, highly adaptable platform that offers varied options in languages and currencies. This support is incorporated in an enterprise CMS. For a custom-coded platform to be able to add such enhancements, it will require time, effort and money.
Smooth scaling up
Suppose your digital marketing campaign results in a sudden increase in traffic to your site, it will be difficult for your custom-coded solution to take this load. The Enterprise CMS platforms these days, comes loaded with many features like cloud hosting, which makes it a cakewalk to scale up your business depending upon the incoming traffic. So before you invest in a digital marketing campaign, make sure your CMS platform can take the possible positive outcome of it.
Enables efficient integration
Most often a custom-coded platform will not have an option to integrate content and commerce, thus making the user-experience a bit patchy, awkward and disconnected. Not just this, important data like customer information or analytical data collected and stored at the business’s other digital checkpoints sits there idly without being of any use to the eCommerce platform. This situation is called siloed data. Without efficient integration to a business’s marketing automation platform, product information management systems and customer relationship management systems, your eCommerce solution will just remain a useless tool for your business, and sometimes even turn it into a loss. Thanks to enterprise CMS that allows smooth integration through API layers, your data, analytics and digital marketing efforts would not go unused.
Responsiveness across devices
A good eCommerce solution should be flexible and responsive in terms of design and navigation. With more than half the world using their mobiles and tablets to shop online, if your custom-coded platform doesn’t have a responsive design, chances are that customers would opt for another provider with an easy-to-access site design and functionalities. It is possible to extend your platform’s functions but it will involve huge investment and time, which is not a great idea if you are still in the early-stage of business development. Enterprise eCommerce solutions offer enhanced support for mobile websites, allowing you to build online stores that is responsive across various devices at much lesser cost and effort.
Ensures security
One of the main reasons that make customers hold back buying from eCommerce stores is the increased concern about the security of their personal and financial information. As Custom eCommerce solutions are not easily upgradeable and do not have backing from software manufacturers, they become easy target of phishing. To ensure that a security system is in place for your platform, would be a costly affair. As enterprise CMSs are created keeping its applicability across different businesses in mind, it offers frequent updates to keep security concerns in check.
Quicker modifications
The digital landscape is ever-evolving and so are the needs and demands of customers. To account for such technological and behavioural developments, your platform should be able to adapt and take advantage of such changes. However, in the case of custom eCommerce solutions to allow such modifications. This will mean that your business will lag behind while your competitors swoop in on all the benefits of moving to the market first. This might result in decrease of revenue. Entreprise CMSs can modify design and functionalities in much lesser time, and in a more efficient way. This can ensure that you stay on top of such developments and reap the benefits of it as well.
It is clear from the above-mentioned points that an enterprise CMS is definitely superior to a custom-coded platform, in terms of cost-effectiveness, allows modifications in lesser time, offers increased security, easy integration, smoother scaling up and enhanced responsiveness across devices, which will ensure that the business has a better reach and increased revenues.
However, moving to an entirely new platform is easier said than done. An experienced hand will guide you through this journey and help launch faster.
To know more about how Suyati can help you with its expertise in platforms like EPiServer, please e-mail to services@suyati.com.
