eCommerce businesses in the customer acquisition phase should beware of using up all their funding on website design.
That is the view of Shopit founder Adam Pritchard, who believes these companies should only have to shell out larger amounts once the revenue rolls in.
“Imagine having to fill your car with £200 of petrol every month, irrespective of how much it is used,” he told BusinessCloud.
“If you don’t use it for a while, you don’t have to visit the petrol station. The same principal should apply to eCommerce.
“We get that fixed price software helps business planning, but what if you could save 60 per cent by going variable? By only paying for the actual resources you use?
“We pay for food, electricity and petrol as we use it – the same approach should be taken for software.”
Pritchard will take part in a panel discussing how to choose the right eCommerce platform at our Insights 2020 conference on Wednesday next week alongside Sean Brown, CEO of Mercarto, Visualsoft COO David Duke and Laura Beattie, co-founder, Careaux.
He describes Shopit as “the world’s first pay-as-you-grow eCommerce platform”.
“It helps out the younger businesses, the people who haven’t got money in their pocket. It levels the playing field,” he said. “They pay for it as they use it. If they get a thousand or a million visitors, the servers get used and the cost comes into it.”
Magento 1.9 support comes to an end in June 2020, which could force a lot of online sellers to reconsider their approach to digital.
Pritchard says that Shopit, like the big players in eCommerce hosting, scales resources up and down in busy and quieter periods in the calendar.
“If you aren’t looking to get into the cloud and still paying fixed prices, then you’re going to get left behind very quickly,” he said.
“£30k websites and £10k hosting will soon be dropped as an unnecessary business risk by most SMEs, as the move to cloud-hosted platforms becomes the norm.
“We have seen businesses move to us and spend £150 per month when they previously spent £500+ on other platforms.”