Question

For a new Saudi e-commerce company do the following: 1. Based on your experience with e-commerce systems. Set out different 3 alternatives projects 2. Evaluate the different alternatives based on different criteria. Basically use the criteria that shown on table 4-2 3. Show your results based on table 4-4. TABLE 4-2 Possible Evaluation Criteria When Classifying and Ranking Projects Evaluation Criteria Description Value Chain Analysis Extent to which activities add value and costs when developing products and/or services Strategic Alignment Extent to which the project is viewed as helping the organization achieve its strategic objectives and long term goals Potential Benefits Extent to which the project is viewed as improving profits, customer service, and so forth, and the duration of these benefits Resource Availability Amount and type of resources the project requires and their availability Project Size/Duration Number of individuals and the length of time needed to complete the project Technical Difficulty/Risks level of technical difficulty to successfully complete the project within given time and resource constraints Criteria Weight Alternative Rating Score Alternative B Rating Score Alternative C Rating Score Requirements Real-time data entry Automatic reorder Real-time data query 5 905 905 18 5 905 181 18 14 1_ 14 50122 250 Constraints Developer costs Hardware costs Operating costs Ease of training ē slaaaa 8888 153 Total

Answer 1

What is an Ecommerce Platform?
An ecommerce platform may be a software application that permits online businesses to manage their website, marketing, sales, and operations.

Ecommerce platforms like BigCommerce offer the powerful features needed to run a business, while also integrating with common business tools — enabling businesses to centralize their operations and run their business their way.

Why Use an Ecommerce Platform?
Whether you’re expanding a brick-and-mortar store, looking to seek out an enterprise-level solution, or maybe starting a business from scratch, your choice of ecommerce software features a huge impact on the profitability and stability of your business.

The only real alternatives to using an ecommerce platform are:

Building one from scratch, which is out of the question for many businesses — and only justifiable for multimillion (or multi billion) dollar companies.
Using a plugin, which isn’t an option if you’re looking to create and grow a legitimate business – even alittle one.
What Ecommerce Platform Options Are There?
There are 3 main ways to classify the various sorts of ecommerce platforms:

Open-Source.
SaaS (Software as a Service).
Headless Commerce.
Beyond this, there are two ways during which ecommerce platforms offer a hosting environment for his or her customers.

All business owners need a hosting environment to run their ecommerce store.

The two sorts of web hosting environments are:

Cloud: Hosted Elsewhere.
On-Premise: Self-hosted on your business premises.
Let’s take a glance at each of those .

Open-Source Ecommerce Platforms.
Hosting Environment: Cloud or On-Premise, though all patches and platform updates require manual implementation across the board.
Open-source ecommerce platforms are ecommerce solutions during which you'll modify all aspects of the code.

This type of ecommerce platform was the foremost popular within the early 2000s and remains fashionable development and IT heavy organizations who want 100% control of their ecommerce environment.

Using an open-source ecommerce platform means you – the brand – are responsible for:

PCI Compliance.
Hosting (depending on if your open-source solution is on-premise or cloud).
Cloud commerce solutions that are open-source differ from on-premise only therein your hosting environment is obtainable by your provider and managed off-site.
Keep in mind that simply because your ecommerce platform is hosting your store employing a cloud environment doesn’t mean you've got unlimited bandwidth such as you would see on a SaaS solution. Ask about specific bandwidth allowances, specifically if you're evaluating Magento or Volusion.
Manual patch and update releases from the platform provider.
Security issues.
QA for all additional applications, often including integrations with:
ESP.
CRM.
CMS.
ERP.
Analytics and BI tools.
The building of net new tools for the location , often including:
Discount and promotion engines.
Merchandising and marketing tools (e.g. SEO features, email marketing).
Design drag-and-drop builders.
For many brands, open-source ecommerce platforms are too cumbersome, expensive to take care of , and need an excessive amount of technical knowledge.
As such, there has been a huge movement to the 2 other sorts of ecommerce platforms:

SaaS.
Headless Commerce.
In fact, open-source ecommerce platforms hosted via the cloud (i.e. not on-premise) are today only 46% of the consideration set for giant ecommerce brands.
Why?

Because on the average , open-source ecommerce platforms and sites have a 6x annual cost of ownership versus SaaS or Headless Commerce models.

Brands can get to plug materially faster with SaaS and Headless Commerce, in a mean of 55 days.

And we sleep in an incredibly competitive environment, where a slowdown to beautiful and innovative UX, product or backend optimizations can give your competition the leg up.

SaaS ecommerce platforms.
Hosting Environment: Cloud.
SaaS ecommerce platforms remove much of the complexity from running a web business because rather than managing the software yourself.

Instead of building and developing a custom solution or an open-source solution (which is usually developed upon such a lot on be custom), you essentially “rent” the platform.

When factoring in development cost, this is often a vastly cheaper option than open-source solutions.

Product updates, security, hosting, PCI compliance, and each other task that comes with managing your own software are managed by the SaaS provider.

Marketing and growth teams at ecommerce brands are often the interior cheerleaders for SaaS ecommerce solutions at their organizations. this is often thanks to a SaaS solutions ability to go-to-market quickly and affordably.

IT and development departments are often concerned a few lack of flexibility and customization thanks to the closed off portion of code on a SaaS solution. APIs help to ease this concern, also as non-proprietary coding and staging environments for UX build outs.

Platforms that meet the above criteria are often mentioned as “Open SaaS.”
Headless Commerce platforms.
Hosting Environment: Cloud.
Headless Commerce may be a version of CaaS ecommerce during which the handcart is decoupled from the CMS.

In these use cases, brands often use a design experience platforms (DXP) like Adobe Experience Manager and Bloomreach or a content management system (CMS) like WordPress or Drupal. Then they connect a decoupled ecommerce handcart solution to function the cart.

SaaS technologies like BigCommerce also are often used here in situ of decoupled carts thanks to their low total cost of ownership and high API flexibility.

Historically, with on-premise hosting, open-source platforms or proprietary platform builds, IT and development departments at large brands are controllers of the business.

However, thanks to the high cost of monolithic technology stacks and wish for speed and innovation from a marketing standpoint, SaaS and cloud hosting disrupted the model.

Headless Commerce alleviates this pain point by allowing faster attend market with significantly lower total cost of ownership.

Using APIs, plug-ins, and infrequently decoupled technology, brands can maintain their single source of truth monolithic systems on the operations end.

Other decoupled solutions a Headless Commerce provider works with include:

Content Management System (CMS).
Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP).
Email Service Provider (ESP).

Marketplaces like Amazon or Ebay.
On the presentation layer, SaaS APIs leave a contemporary SaaS technology stack, including ecommerce SaaS platforms also as everything from ESPs and even lighter weight ERPs like Brightpearl