Software as a Service (SaaS) is now essential for ecommerce. Choosing a SaaS may be one of the best decisions your company makes this year. Retail ecommerce sales grew 10.1 % in previous years while the retail industry as a whole grew about 1.4 %, according to data collected by professional services firm, PwC.
Essentially, ecommerce is growing more than seven times as fast as the rest of the industry. There are many factors contributing to this growth, including convenience, improvement in omnichannel customer experience, and changes in customer behaviour.
For example, in just the last few years, mobile devices have radically changed the way consumers shop, and successful businesses adapted to those changes rapidly. Businesses changed because customers changed. While we’re on the subject how mobile-friendly is your site?
If you boil these down, each of the four reasons we’ll cover in this article translates into helping your retail enterprise business adapt and grow more quickly in response to changes in the marketplace. Collectively, these reasons describe how enterprise-level SaaS ecommerce solutions can make your business more agile.
SaaS Lets You Focus on What Drives Your Business
Even the most successful enterprise operations have resource limitations, and there is a sense in which the software your business selects reflects your company’s priorities.
Will your business prioritize server maintenance, managing software upgrades, and ensuring your ecommerce solution meets Payment Card Industry (PCI) Data Security Standards (DSS), or will you focus on what drives your success — things like retail innovation, operating efficiencies, and improved customer experience?
Effectively, this is the choice between managing your company’s ecommerce infrastructure and software or choosing an enterprise-level SaaS ecommerce solution that will do these things for you.
An analogy may help make the point. If your goal is to travel from London to Rome tomorrow, would you begin by buying a plane or becoming a pilot? No, you would fly with an already-established airline that specialises in international passenger flights.
In the same way, enterprise-level SaaS ecommerce solutions let your business focus on what makes it successful. Your company’s IT department and decision-makers can pay attention to what gives your business a competitive advantage rather than trying to maintain the plane.
SaaS Makes Integration, Implementation Faster
In many, if not most cases, SaaS ecommerce platforms take less time to implement and integrate than do other ecommerce solutions, getting your business selling more quickly.
First, the necessary infrastructure is in place. Your business doesn’t need to deploy multiple web servers, worry about database schemas, or even think about load balancing and uptime. Having all of these things done for your business is, in part, the benefit of choosing an enterprise SaaS platform.
Second, SaaS providers understand your business will need to integrate with other systems, so they have solutions ready and waiting.
AI machine learning hyper-personalisation solution vendors, of which there are discerning distinctions, personalising each one of individual consumer’s product selections for them selected and presented via email. Offered using live streaming data from your site to ensure as each email goes out, at a time only pertinent to that consumer, that it has products with the highest likely buying propensity. Zero segmentation is involved, and the whole system never requires any human involvement. This enables the enterprise retailer to run it as either an email “stand-alone” solution or in tandem, running alongside an existing email program to complement the ROI. Want to share statistics and sales data with your enterprise resource planning (ERP) suite, use the API.
Finally, SaaS ecommerce solutions often include optional extensions or add-ons to connect your enterprise ecommerce platform with other SaaS applications.
With an enterprise SaaS ecommerce solution, your company can go from choosing the platform to selling on the platform fast.
SaaS Helps Your Scale During Peak Sales Periods
Retailers must scale during peak selling periods. Imagine for a moment you are in the lawn and garden segment. Your stores — brick-and-mortar and online — sell products like fertiliser, herbicides and garden gnomes. You have weed whackers, hedge trimmers, and replacement lawn mower blades. Your hot new sellers are elastic, rip-resistant garden hoses; bird feeder cameras; and a GPS-guided robotic pooper scooper.
When do you think you’ll get more sales in January or in May? In the northern hemisphere, the answer is May when the weather is warm and your customers are working in their gardens.
Similarly, if you sell toys, would you expect to sell more in Autumn or Winter? The answer is Winter when Thanksgiving and Christmas drive toy sales. Some toy retailers may do more than half of their annual sales volume in November and December alone.
Retailers must be able to scale during peak sales periods, or they will lose revenue and anger consumers.
SaaS makes scaling relatively easy. Your enterprise-level SaaS ecommerce provider should have redundant systems to more than handle your busiest times. Look for services that demonstrate page response times of less than 200 milliseconds when your site is experiencing as many as 500,000 requests per minute.
Your business will still need to be concerned about inventory levels, product fulfillment, and customer experience during peak sales periods, but it won’t be worried that your ecommerce solution will cost you even one sale.
SaaS Provides a Better ROI
Money makes you agile. When the market turns and your company need to respond, having financial resources available is a distinct and powerful advantage.
It is for this reason businesses often work for efficiency and effectiveness. It is for this reason that return on investment (ROI) is so important. And, enterprise SaaS ecommerce solutions often provide a better ROI than competitive platforms.
“SaaS reduces or even eliminates the high upfront costs that firms spend on hardware and licenses in on-premise projects. SaaS reduces customisation costs in favour of lighter-weight, point-and-click configuration and ‘best practices’ built into the applications,” wrote Liz Herbert in a Feb 2022 Forrester report, “Quantifying the value of SaaS.“
Herbert also said that SaaS tended to reduce the cost of adoption, make adoption faster, and provide for better adoption. In short, SaaS solutions often help your business get more for its money, and to help there are many tools available to help companies optimise their SaaS spend.
