E-Commerce Sites for Businesses

In no other mainstream website scenario (besides data specific applications with sensitive date), is your security posture more important than with an E-Commerce website. It is public facing, and you don’t dare shut off access points or sales channels to harden security. It is run on historically looser security architectures, and you have constant traffic looking for vulnerabilities. Not only are there a lot of updates, but the patches are often released too early and any small change can break a website.

Furthermore, you need compliance in place for payment handling, data handling, storage of PII, and there is a direct connection to money. A catalog of products or services means you have hundreds of endpoints. Customer interaction, account creation and account management introduces more human error potential. Historically, start up E-Commerce companies have used shared hosting environments enhancing the risk factors. Backups and database structuring are both complicated endeavors. Shipping integrations, tax collection, proper optimization and a huge amount of needed content means you are tied to the site management procedures around the clock.

As you grow, your profit margins shrink because you have a larger set of existing assets to manage from a risk profile perspective. Simultaneously, you have to ensure you don’t have customer service issues, because a single bad experience can go viral and ruin your brand name. Hackers abound. Growth is inevitable if you’re performing even at an average level and therein lie more concerns. You need to scale up; you probably should have built on a scale-out platform or at least separated development assets, workflows and databases based on the most important parts of your integrated systems.

You need a consultant. You need a Security Operations Center. You need a redundancy plan. You need someone who has done this before. Hello. Is it us you’re looking for? We do that.

Often times, the biggest issue facing an engaged company’s leadership team is how to manage growth properly. Success on the internet from an E-Commerce perspective is largely a relative race. That is: relative to peers all things equal, if you are outperforming them from an optimization, a credibility and a brand recognition position, you will win the E-Commerce game.

Even against larger peers, where longevity, backlinks and global brand building far outweighs your start-up’s resources or potential, you can still favorably compete in segmented areas of the sub-markets you both compete for. This is incredibly effective from a local E-Commerce perspective. You can easily compete locally or regionally with big E-Commerce companies, as long as the local variable makes sense – in product offering, distribution channels, delivery of physical goods or some other factor. It’s up to you and your business consultant to determine how to compete on more, and more strategic levels.