ShopMaker Blog

There is nothing to stop the popular pace of open-source solution. Once upon a time, open source is only a foundation framework and development tools, and now it has quickly infiltrated the enterprise environment in every corner. With the development of open source and the strong increase in user acceptance, it brings enterprise the advantages such as quality, reliability, transparency, low cost, as well as interoperability. Especially in today’s financial crisis, companies are careful calculation and strict budgeting, which in this field of e-commerce, entrepreneurs are more clearly selecting open source solutions to reduce in-house application development cost. Although IT budgets are shrinking anywhere between 5 to 25 percent, IT e-commerce organizations are expected to sharpen the online shopping experiences of their companies’ customers.

As we know, whether in business-to-consumer or business-to-business e-commerce, as customers are exposed to new capabilities, they expect those at all other websites. E-commerce firms should turn to commercial, off-the-shelf, or open source software as a replacement for current custom web development initiatives to save up to 35 per cent of their ongoing maintenance and licence costs, Gartner advised in its report “Cost Cutting in E-Commerce, 2009″.

The report identified five interesting tips in which IT leaders in charge of e-commerce operations.

In particular, IT departments shouldn’t invest on creating their own applications for basic e-commerce functions, since those can be implemented at a lower cost through commercial “off-the-shelf” software.

In the case of rich Internet applications (RIAs), the custom development work should be limited to those applications that will generate high sales conversion rates. And leverage established community websites, rather than building communities in the site. A company’s e-commerce developers should be focused on building the types of made-to-measure applications that will give the company an edge over its competition.

The report also advised e-commerce firms to extract more return on investment (ROI) from technology they already have deployed. Such a move could decrease costs of service, sales, and marketing by 15 percent for large businesses and 10 percent for small businesses in 2009 and 10 percent in subsequent years.

IT departments should be merciless when dealing with their e-commerce software vendors and aim to lower their 2009 license fees from 20 percent to 50 percent.

Finally, IT managers need to take stock of their e-commerce staff to see if there are employees elsewhere doing the same tasks, such as separate marketing people for online and offline operations, in which case the work can be consolidated and personnel reduced.