Ecommerce Platforms: Build, Buy, or Outsource?

[mandy]

Neil Kugelman, CEO of online jeweler Goldspeed.com, is convinced there is no better way to run his business than outsourcing his e-commerce platform.

“Today I’d only go with a hosted solution,” says Kugelman, a client of on-demand, software as a service platform vendor OrderMotion Inc. “When you start a company, you are focusing on your product and your customer. A focus on infrastructure takes your eye off the ball. If it’s developed and I can plug into a network that can be used anywhere, I want to do that.”

At home dÈcor and gift e-retailer RandomAccents.com, Bill Patterson, president of site operator Concentric Business Group Inc., is sold on buying much of the software he needs to run the back end of his web site, which attaches to the Yahoo Stores platform on the front end. He believes he’d have less flexibility to make needed changes quickly on the back end if he were using the software as a service model to support his order management system. So instead, he licenses software to do it from Stone Edge Technologies Inc.

“If you own the software, you can pretty much do what you want with it, providing the software allows you to do that,” he says...

full article: http://www.internetretailer.com/article.asp?id=24883