7. Pros and Cons for businesses

Advantages for businesses Disadvantages for businesses
Don't need expensive shop premises perhaps in a high street Need to pay a lot of money to have a professionally designed web site developed
Don't have to pay so many costs from running a shop such as insurance, electricity, business rates Need staff with expertise to keep the website maintained and up to date
Usually need less staff with an online business than compared to a shop so large savings If the website goes down then no one can purchase things
Customers from all over the world can access your products No personal contact with customers so repeat orders might be harder to get
Customers often impulse buy when online or add extra items A lot of online fraud, risk of losing money on sales
Can easily keep track of competitors and quickly change prices to match The web site needs to be hosted on a reliable server.
Can perhaps sell more to each customer by offering related items "Customers who bought this also bought these..." There needs to be strong service level agreement with the hosting company so things get fixed quickly
Can easily highlight the most popular products and offer bargains to clear older stock  

Most businesses do not have the technical expertise to run their own server (nor do they want to) and so they hire a specialist company to host their site on a server in a data centre. There are two types of offering

  • A 'virtual' server. Your site is shared with others on a physical server. Low cost option but it may be very slow to get something fixed
  • Fully managed server. Your site is hosted on its own physical server in their data centre and they look after all the maintenance and backups. Quite expensive option but usually excellent technical support

 

Challenge see if you can find out one extra fact on this topic that we haven't already told you

Click on this link: Ecommerce Hosting