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High-Tech Must-Have
The days when consumers would forgive clunky, feet-dragging, technically troubled e-commerce sites are long gone. Standards for this one-time frill have knocked up in harmony with its increasing materialization as a high-tech must-have.
What Consumers Want
Today, consumers demand excellent, reliable web performance of their electronic shopping missions. The speed and reliability of a brand’s online store both dictates its sales and shapes its reputation. The best sites are interactive, content rich and viewable on any device. They’re secure and compliant. They load pages swiftly (studies show that 47 percent of consumers expect a page to load in two seconds), and can cope with all kinds of spikes in demand. And they offer order-processing paths that are swift and payment procedures that are smooth as glass.
Anything less and abandoned shopping carts and lost revenue are the sad consequence. Almost four-fifths of customers who have a negative online shopping experience, say the studies, won’t return to the site.
Outsourcing
Given this backdrop, and the sophisticated IT infrastructures that power the most successful e-commerce platforms, the wisdom of outsourcing the stuff to a managed host becomes incontestably apparent. Why?
Because:
– Managed hosting environments offer huge cost savings per volume usage for ambitious, expanding e-retailers.
-They can bust through any technical challenges that may have held an organization back.
-They can root out performance issues and help companies maintain consistently fast speeds — no matter the traffic.
-They protect organizations’ e-commerce operations from lurking security threats — hackers, human error, equipment failure, natural disasters and utility outages prominent among them — that can bring them to their knees. And the sense of security is further enhanced with the knowledge that valuable data is backed up multiple times in multiple places.
-At the end of the day — a day that, no doubt, is crowded with all kinds of opportunities to purchase things on line — managed hosting makes sense. It adds an extra layer of service and support to your offerings, and relieves you of common maintenance and performance issues so you might focus on more lucrative pursuits.