Taking advantage of Cloud Computing on the Internet can save your firm money, increase your sales, Enhance your position with the search engines, and help your compliance posture all in one fell swoop.


Moving your operations to 'the cloud' means taking advantage of off-site processing resources while enhancing security and compliance, and economizing on expensive resources.

First let's examine the situation many merchants have arranged today: they have their ecommerce web site on an inexpensive shared hosting account (typically $19 - $65/month) that uses a dedicated an inexpensively installed ecommerce package that runs on a shared database. To support this, the merchant has to purchase a secure certificate every year and arrange for expensive off-site SEO functions that help shoppers find their products. For many merchants, this is an ideal situation - inexpensive, total control, and fairly secure...

...until you consider the less expensive options. Moving your eCommerce to the cloud can save you money, lower your monthly bills, make your ecommerce more secure, and make your compliance posture unassailable.

How? Well, let's take a look.

Savings
When you move your eCommerce operations to a cloud-based service like 800Cart, you can downgrade the services you subscribe to on your web host to a $7/month account without losing any functionality. In addition, you no longer have to pay for a secure certificate. But your big savings comes from the fact that you no longer have to pay for SEO services with the right cart. Since your cart is 'cloud based' (ie: it is 'out there somewhere' in the Internet Cloud') every product you offer for sale 'out there in the cloud' produces several links back to your web site enhancing your web site's authority and visibility in the search engines.

Sales and SEO
When your SEO is off-site and an integral part of your ecommerce (in other words, when every product you sell is generating a dozen or more links back to your web site) then several good things happen, not the least of which is lower bills for SEO. As your visibility on the search engines increases, so do your sales. And the SEO built-in to 800Cart promotes your PRODUCTS as well as your business. Consider by observing your own behavior: when you go to the search engines looking for a product you want to buy (let's assume you are looking for a 'Widget') then you do not type into the search engine blank 'companies that sell Widgets' - you simply type in 'Widget'. That's exactly how good product-based SEO works for you. The products you sell (the products folks are searching for) are promoted instead of your company or company type. Who care if folks know or have heard of your company name, as long as your products are showing up #1 on the searches for your products? Good 'cloud based' ecommerce will sell more of your products.

Compliance & Security
When you devote your ecommerce to the cloud, you not only do away with the requirement for a secure certificate for your site (you vendor maintains that for you) you also cover yourself on compliance in ways you could not by maintaining your own ecommerce/database on your own servers. Consider the case set forth above: a merchant is hosted on a shared server with a shared database - in the compliance environment that will obtain this July, you will have to pay for expensive audits, security checks and perhaps even site visits - and you will be required to maintain and examine logs that are not available to you in a shared environment.

Putting you ecommerce 'in the cloud' make all those liabilities go away! You are no longer required to prove that you are reviewing logs you currently have no access to!

In these days when hostile regulators from both government and industry seem to be pounding you from bot left and right, and profits are constantly challenged, moving your ecommerce 'to the cloud' could be the smartest move you could ever make. Reduce your costs. Raise your profits. Protect your compliance posture.

The author is a senior executive at 800Cart Shopping Cart/SEO an advanced ecommerce solution that combines cart, chackout and payment processing PLUS highly advanced, relevant SEO in one simple solution that takes only minutes to set up and copy/paste onto your web site (any web site).

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Cross-posted with additional details in our eCommerce and SEO Libarary