Overcoming Industry Challenges

With the e-commerce explosion came several intrinsic challenges. Consumers are demanding ease, speed, and privacy. E-commerce companies in turn, have increased pressure on software providers to keep pace, if not stay ahead of the curve.

Back-end development challenges include:

• Decreasing “time to market” by implementing faster
• Monitoring and analyzing online user behavior for future marketing
• Establishing mobile access to the full range of online services
• Providing better FE usability and BE reliability/performance
• Integrating e-commerce FE and BE with other corporate systems
• Managing, storing and analyzing enormous volumes of data
• Aggregating 3d-party information and services

Increased e-commerce demand has also ratcheted up the market for the Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) and Application Service Providers (ASPs) to develop and provide solutions to the millions of clients and customers who need them. These providers are tasked with:

• Providing both excellent customization capabilities and turn-key implementation
• Shipping solutions pre-integrated with main payment systems/gateways
• Providing Business Improvement (BI) capability
• Easily integrating systems with various back-office applications
• Providing extensive search capability
• Maintaining multi-store management
• Following industry trends such as software open architecture (SOA) and cloud computing