Estimated read time: 5 minutes, 13 seconds

For many SaaS companies, going live isn’t the glorious, revenue-driving, self-vindicating moment they dream of. In fact, it could be the exact opposite.

Being too occupied with development prevents software companies from giving their go-to-market strategy the attention it deserves. And instead of celebrating their hard work and success, many companies are often forced to hold their breath as they take their product to market with a hastily assembled DIY ecommerce platform that consists of only the bare minimum functionality and features.

But how does this affect your company’s bottom line?

In reality, an unreliable ecommerce solution will largely contribute to lost revenue on your ecommerce site. Wrestling to piece together multiple point solutions strips your business of valuable resources that could be best focused on improving your business’s core metrics.

Like most software companies, your company always wants to lead with your best foot forward. Here’s why an all-in-one ecommerce solution is your best option for protecting your company’s bottom line and streamlining your entire ecommerce experience.

Choosing The Right Ecommerce Solution

For digital business owners, selecting the right ecommerce platform is just as important as the quality of the product being sold. Regardless of how cutting-edge your innovation may be, if you’re unable to display your products on your site and effectively demonstrate its benefits to potential customers, your company will struggle to close sales of your software or service.

Integrating with an ecommerce solution offers companies who want to spend their time building innovative software products an easy solution to this problem. Let’s take a closer look at how a full-service ecommerce platform helps software companies better focus their energy and resources.

1. Simplified Maintenance:
Running an effective ecommerce business means having the time and resources at your disposal to gain maximum exposure for your product. Development and support teams shouldn’t be occupied with keeping working parts of your online store intact; instead, they should be coding and testing the next iteration of your product!

Cloud-hosted ecommerce platforms use the best hardware and software solutions on the market to provide a powerful and reliable computing infrastructure supported by an expert staff. This, in turn, helps to reduce potential instances of ecommerce downtime and ensures that you’re maximizing as much sales potential as possible.

2. Superior Flexibility:
Established companies with thousands—if not millions—invested in existing software may be hesitant to host a newly developed software product on an externally managed solution. Questions around compatibility with legacy ERP or CRM systems can also make things a little murky. Plus, how do customers get their hands on your digital products or software after they’ve completed their purchase?

FastSpring’s platform helps circumvent these issues by empowering your software company to build ecommerce experiences that are tailored to meet your exact needs. FastSpring’s Store Builder Library comes preloaded with a variety of built-in integrations designed to help you quickly launch and optimize your online store from one centralized account.  Additionally, once your customers have finished their transactions, they can enjoy a reliable post checkout fulfillment process that automatically delivers their digital file or software key via email.

3. Subscription And Payment Localization:
The leading ecommerce platforms offer a range of payment solutions to help support the growth of your company.

Uncertainty around currency conversions and unexpected costs from unaccounted taxes can cause customers to lose trust in your checkout process and ultimately abandon their purchase altogether.  Making the payment experience as frictionless as possible by intuitively displaying prices in your customer’s native currency and enabling your customers to buy with a variety of payment methods helps to ease buyer concerns. This, in turn, instills greater confidence in checkout and helps boost the conversion rate on your site.

Moreover, our built-in subscription management solution allows your store to maximize your revenue potential by introducing recurring revenue streams. Adopting a subscription model allow your business to move beyond the unpredictability of one time sales and instead focus on nurturing long term relationships with your customers.

4. Advanced Security: Another common misconception about hosted environments is that they’re unsafe – especially for ecommerce. Cloud technology has grown by leaps and bounds in recent years, with new security systems being developed in tandem. It’s also worth noting that most newsworthy security breaches in recent times occurred in non-hosted—that is, “locally hosted” IT environments.

As the cloud becomes the de facto means of building networks, older legacy configurations will stagnate and fail to deliver on comprehensive security measures. Research has also found that internal staff are most often the cause of security breaches. Unauthorized access to server rooms are far more common than the average business owner might think. Cloud-hosted platforms reduce these and other security risks to the point of being virtually non-existent.

5. Eliminates Back Office Administration: Once a customer clicks on your checkout button, a series of processes kick into action. These include order fulfillment, product delivery, chargebacks, taxation compliance, and customer inquiries.

Does your company have the bandwidth to support these necessary functionalities?

As stated, leading ecommerce platforms come equipped with both the technology and human expertise to manage the daily functions of even the busiest SaaS companies. Outsourcing your back office administration to a trusted ecommerce partner frees up valuable employee resources.  Allowing experts to handle the complexities involved in cross-border tax management, for example, frees your resources up to promote, develop, and improve your software product further, instead of taking a crash course in tax compliance.

An All-In-One Ecommerce Platform for your SaaS Company

Building a great software application is undoubtedly the main objective for any SaaS company – and rightly so. But what happens after you’ve nailed your software and need to bring the product to market and begin selling to customers?   FastSpring alleviates the infrastructure and administrative headaches of busy software and SaaS companies, so they can focus on running their business. Our all-in-one platform brings together the software applications you love the most while making sure that your infrastructure is built for tomorrow’s demands.

Want to learn more about how partnering with an end to end ecommerce platform can help scale your business and accelerate your time to market? Click here to speak with one of our platform experts.