For far too long, most e-commerce and retail companies have relied on large monolithic platforms. While many businesses have followed this paradigm, a few businesses chose to build their own commerce systems. However, both these models require massive resource utilization. No business owner is willing to spend significant amounts of money on tremendous resources to put these systems together rather than on the actual products.
Commerce as a Service (CaaS) emerged in the market a few years back with the advent of APIs. The origin of CaaS has provided the opportunity for a multichannel selling strategy through an outsourced end-to-end commerce operation.
What is Commerce as a Service (CaaS)?
Software as a Service (SaaS) or Platform as a Service (PaaS) are well-known terms in the technology industry. Commerce as a Service is a relatively similar service that provides brands a platform to minimize their cost and resource utilization. With Commerce as a Service, the business data and computing move to the cloud, and, in some cases, your front-end stays your responsibility. It gives freedom to design a front-end as desired and not worry about the back-end functionality such as product management, inventory management, security, etc. It is a cost-effective approach allowing your business to keep current with technological trends without you having to pay high costs.
Let us explore how Commerce as a Service benefits e-commerce businesses in growing their revenues.
Flexibility and Security
Going headless and using commerce as a service gives you the flexibility to design your front-end freely without worrying about the back-end. The APIs handle the back-end functionality, and with just a few clicks, plug your data into a new website. That brings flexibility to your business.
Next is security. A self-hosted system makes you responsible for protecting your customer’s data, which puts you at considerable risk. With CaaS, the data security is put in the hands of the CaaS supplier, and you are free from the burden of securing your customer’s data.
Scalability
Scalability is a critical part of any e-commerce site, contributing to your business growth and profitability. In traditional monolithic systems, a large central database is a basic bottleneck when it comes to the speed of your commerce platforms. Taking the database load out of the equation makes life much easier. In peak business times, when there is a spike in sales and website traffic, a monolithic system has a significantly higher chance of failing or slowing down.
Using a CaaS platform, you can sit back and relax in peak times of your business. The data resides in the cloud, so the data handling is the responsibility of your service provider. Thus, CaaS platforms are easily scalable for making peak times manageable and accessible.
Data Across Multiple Platforms
Using CaaS, your business gets the leverage of data sharing between multiple platforms. You get to share the data across platforms such as web and mobile e-commerce, point-of-sale, etc., to increase flexibility and accessibility.
Speed Boost
We all know that speed is a leading competitive differentiator. Every customer that comes on your e-commerce website needs speed and faster response time. Nobody wants to wait for the data to be loaded after every click, and this issue is handled using the CaaS platforms. With your data moved to the cloud, choked-up servers or databases no longer limit the speed of your e-commerce platforms. Instead, it increases your website’s speed, allowing you to run a significantly fast website at a relatively lower cost..
Agility
In e-commerce, agility primarily refers to the ability to respond quickly to seasonal changes, deal with new trends, develop technology breakthroughs and innovations, and generate new content while retaining quality. All of this is done with one goal in mind: to address the growing need for responsiveness among today’s clients.
In today’s fast-paced marketplaces, providing agility is the key to increasing revenue, optimizing growth, and maintaining healthy profitability and scalability.
Advanced Business Features
With Commerce as a Service, you can incorporate advanced business features into your business platform, such as search engine optimization, ratings, reviews, personalization, etc. Your customers are your core business users and providing them ease and comfort takes your business to new heights. For example, an optimized search engine takes your customers right where they need to be when looking for something, be it a product, a manufacturer, or a variety of other things. With commerce as a service, you can save the cost and money required to build these core features from scratch. On the other hand, your service providers will take care of the hassles while your customers enjoy additional services and perks.
Upstart Commerce as CaaS Providers
We at Upstart Commerce provide commerce as a service for retailers and business owners. We are an e-commerce solution provider selling directly to consumers. We combine services with APIs to provide an end-to-end solution that reduces the overall cost for the business owners and increases sales to the customers.
Upstart Commerce takes the responsibility of building your business platform and lets you sit back and relax. We provide custom implementation to the customers according to the business requirements in addition to 24×7 support. Our front-end portal is designed to provide a smooth user experience to create a business platform. You can find out more about us on our website.
