The Case for Hosted Ecommerce

By Peter Otte – Earth Day April 22, 2010

It's Earth Day today and I couldn't think of a more appropriate topic to write about than ecommerce. Ecommerce can help save the planet. Why? You don't have to get in your car to drive down to the store. Instead, just purchase the item online and drive to the beach instead.

Or something like that. I'm not really sure if ecommerce will save the planet or not, but I do know that it's a growing trend. It's hard to find reliable statistics about actual trends, but I do know anecdotally that a lot of businesses have decided that it makes good sense to sell their goods or services through their web site.

Choosing the right ecommerce solution can be a daunting task. There are three different types: hosted, licensed, and custom built. With a hosted solution, you pay a monthly fee to have it hosted on the vendor's servers. A licensed version is an off-the-shelf solution purchased either in a store or downloaded. Custom built estores are built from scratch.

We're very impressed with FoxyCart and we wanted to share their perspective with you. While a hosted option may not be appropriate in every situation, POP can help you determine whether it makes sense in your case. The following excerpt appears on their FAQ page and I found their argument very compelling. We like FoxCart because it's designer-friendly and rich with advanced features.

Foxycart - The Advantages of the Hosted Solution

Just by way of explantation, a web designer had posed the question whether FoxyCart offered a licensed version rather than a hosted version. The answer was no and the following explains their reasoning behind it.

"Hosting ecommerce yourself is, 90% of the time, more trouble than it’s worth. This is especially true as PCI compliance changes and the rules become more strict. Your cost in the additional business insurance necessary to store credit cards and personal information on your own servers is very likely more than $19/mo. There are lots of costs that you’d never think about, and with FoxyCart, you don’t have to.

"Additionally, if you’ve ever used a self-hosted solution, you’re probably familiar with the constant security patches and updates that you need to apply (or risk getting hacked). That’s ok if you manage one store for yourself, but if you’re a web professional with many clients, that gets really old, really fast. You finish a project, get paid, move on to the next, then see a security alert. Now you either ignore it and let your client get compromised, or you have to go back, bill the client again, hope they’re willing to pay for a cost you likely didn’t tell them about in the original project proposal, and etc.

"A self-hosted version of FoxyCart would, also, massively increase our support burden. We really don’t have the time or the interest in figuring out why a particular feature won’t work on Fedora Core 5 with whatever assortment of other systems the user may have running. Or why things are slow on a shared hosting environment. Or etc. We’d rather focus on providing the best solution available, and not on tracking down all the bugs that would inevitably pop up.

"Finally, even though FoxyCart is hosted, it’s far more flexible (in the ways that most people care about) than any self-hosted solution we’ve seen. FoxyCart is clearly not for everybody, but in order to keep FoxyCart true to the original mission, we’re a hosted service at this point. We may offer a self-hosted solution in the future, and we do have enterprise plans for users that have very specific requirements, but we feel that FoxyCart as a hosted solution offers more advantages than disadvantages for the vast majority of users."

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