5 Hidden Ecommerce Costs You Need to Know About

Christina O’Toole
Christina O’Toole
February 26th, 2018
Estimated read time: 3 minutes, 24 seconds

You did it!

You designed the perfect digital software, built a beautiful website, and have plans for marketing your new business. You even set up your social media profiles to build a loyal following. You’re ready to take the digital world by storm.

Just one thing. How do you plan on selling your software?

It can be tempting to try to build an ecommerce solution on your own instead of paying for an ecommerce platform. But there are so many factors to keep in mind like processing payments, the shopping cart experience, product fulfillment, chargebacks, and tax/VAT compliance. You’ll find yourself having a hard time trying to manage it all.

There are plenty of ecommerce tools and platforms out there to help you with your business. But finding the right fit for you will take some research.

Luckily, we’re here to help! Check out five hidden costs of ecommerce that you should know.

1. Customization

Your website’s shopping cart should be an extension of your brand. According to research from Kissmetrics, 93% of consumers consider visual appearance to be the key deciding factor in a purchasing decision. But designing a dynamic commerce experience that inspires your website visitors to make a purchase is a tall order.

An ecommerce platform can help you build a storefront, but be wary when they force you to use a clunky, rigid, and unbranded experience. Some solutions will even charge you for upgrading to a customized storefront. It doesn’t have to be this way!

2. Maintenance

Keeping your ecommerce website functioning requires regular maintenance. It’s a 24/7 job to make sure customers are able to make a purchase on your site from anywhere around the world, on any device. The probability a customer will leave your site increases by 90% if the page takes up to five seconds to load. The right ecommerce platform will take this burden on for you so you can focus on other important aspects of your business.

3. Tax/VAT

Aside from a full-time tax professional, no one has the time or patience to become an expert on domestic and international tax laws. If you’re planning on taking advantage of the emerging global economy, you need to be able to accept payments from anywhere around the world. Customers feel more comfortable paying for a digital product when the transaction happens in their own language and currency and with the appropriate taxes accounted for. Without an appropriately equipped ecommerce platform, you’ll end up spending lots of precious time and money making sure your business is tax compliant.

4. Fraud

It’s important to recognize that fraud is a serious issue for ecommerce businesses. Fraud comes in several forms for ecommerce businesses. You have to know what to look out for – card-not-present transactions, high-risk payment methods, unethical or deceptive vendors, excessive chargebacks, identity theft, and many more. This isn’t meant to scare you off from building a business, however, it’s important that you do everything you can to keep your business secure. The right ecommerce platform will have built-in features to protect your business from fraud.

5. In-house resources

Managing the ecommerce function of your business takes a lot of resources. It takes true dedication coupled with a heavy investment of time, money, and effort. You will end up spending a large amount of your budget building and maintaining an ecommerce experience on your own, not to mention maintaining it once complete. You’d be surprised how much you can save by outsourcing the heavy-lifting of managing your businesses’ ecommerce. Just think of all that extra time you could be spending on developing new products or entering new markets!

There’s no question that having a successful ecommerce website takes a lot of work. Luckily you don’t have to bear the burden on your own. Full-Service ecommerce platforms like FastSpring enable your digital business to build a successful ecommerce experience and grow your business.

See how FastSpring can turn your shopping cart into a growth engine and increase conversion rates over 30%. Get a demo of FastSpring’s full-service ecommerce platform today.

Try FastSpring

Get a free account and see why FastSpring is the ecommerce partner of choice for software providers around the world. Try our full-service ecommerce solution today to unlock revenue growth for your online company.