When merchants are considering opening their own ecommerce store, one of the first questions they need to ask themselves is, “Should I install software on my PC and host the website myself or rely on a company that manages everything for me in a Cloud environment?”
To help answer this question from a Cloud Computing perspective the following benefits should be considered.
The term “Cloud” is really just another name for the internet and Cloud Services are services or applications that are delivered over the web. When we’ve shopped on Amazon, searched on Google, communed on Facebook or logged into our Hotmail account, we’ve used a cloud service.
Actinic Online is a cloud service, which instead of installing software on your computer you access the service online by logging onto a website. The ecommerce applications and data are stored on servers that you access to use the service and this arrangement is often referred to as SaaS (software as a service).
One of the fundamental benefits of cloud services is they can be accessed from anywhere so if you are in the office, at home, somewhere with wifi, or even using your iPhone, they are available.
Your data will automatically be protected by industry-standard systems and procedures, monitored by specialists who are experts in the field. Actinic is likely to have a far greater level of physical and electronic security than you would be able to provide for yourself ensuring that both the contents of your website as well as your customers data is secure.
If your server is down, you can’t take orders and worse still, it’s a massive turn off to enter a web address or click a link and have nothing happen. You don’t just lose an order you potentially lose a customer for life.
With Actinic Online your web site is hosted in a world class data centre, monitored round the clock and protected by the highest levels of security to ensure maximum up-time. Actinic Online is powered by Oxatis which has provided continuous 99.96% uptime for the past 10 years.
The data centre takes advantage of the performance and energy efficiency increases offered by the latest IT equipment, ensuring the service is available even at the busiest trading times like Christmas, January Sales and Valentine’s Day etc.
There is strong evidence that the faster an ecommerce web site, the more successful it will be. Your visitors will expect a fast response from your ecommerce site; if the response is slow, it will put them off. Research has highlighted that half a second delay in loading a web page can reduce traffic by 20% and that improving speed reduces shopping cart abandonment rates by up to 41% when selling online. Google takes the speed of a website into consideration for how it will rank a site.
Actinic Online is charged on a monthly basis which lowers the start-up costs of running an ecommerce store particularly as there are no capital costs or commitment beyond the monthly fee which start at £15 therefore reducing the overall risk, particularly for start-up and small businesses.
With online cloud applications there is no software to install and no complicated system requirements to worry about, so it’s generally faster to get started. There may be new practices to learn initially, but ultimately the package may be easier to use than a Windows-based system, because it has been designed from the ground up to do just one thing, to run a successful online shop, without being tied to very generalised standards.
Telephone and online Support are included in the monthly package, rather than being an added-cost option. Running the application on a central server reduces the cost of maintenance and support for Actinic to provide the service and therefore that saving can be passed onto our customers.
As the functionality is the same for all users of the service everybody automatically gets immediate access to all the latest developments as soon as they are available at no additional cost. There is no need to manually upgrade to the latest software release, it’s all done for you, saving time and potentially costs associated with a third-party needing to get involved in the upgrade process.
Your site will benefit from the latest ecommerce functionality many of which are essential requirements in today’s fast moving online ecommerce market. Features such as dynamic stock management, customer accounts and order tracking combined with up to date reporting and integrations with other applications such as price comparison sites, eBay, Amazon, Facebook and a Mobile Optimised version of your store all working together.
The term “Cloud” is really just another name for the internet and Cloud Services are services or applications that are delivered over the web. When we’ve shopped on Amazon, searched on Google, communed on Facebook or logged into our Hotmail account, we’ve used a cloud service.