But if you think going for the most innovative commerce solution is outside of your budget, we’re here to show you how it’s actually the financially smarter choice.
One of the most crucial things to consider when deciding to migrate to a new platform is TCO. After all, the TCO of their digital platform will greatly impact a company’s outgoing expenses while potentially boosting their bottom line. And because of this, it’s vital for companies to choose the best option to meet their needs – at the right price point. But what is total cost of ownership (TCO)? And what aspects of TCO should you consider when comparing commercetools as part of a best-of-breed approach against all-in-one legacy platforms?
To begin with, in terms of setting up an eCommerce platform, the TCO is the sum of all costs and expenses associated with buying, implementing and managing your online store, which includes but is in no way limited to: licensing fees, hosting, extensions, third-party apps/integrations, feature development, design and ongoing maintenance with solution partners and optimization. So what does the TCO of commercetools look like?
Types of costs and how commercetools stacks up
Upfront costs refer to payments that have to be incurred when initially deploying commerce – this can include infrastructure and licensing fees. With commercetools’ headless commerce, you can select the third-party vendors that best fit your business needs. Signing on with several vendors instead of one large all-in-one software provider doesn’t always lead to higher starting costs. Due to the nature of modern commerce and software-as-a-service (SaaS), pricing is more straightforward, with no large upfront costs associated with setting up infrastructure and the platform – unlike legacy suites. In the long-term, you can also benefit from the best pricing from having several different vendors to choose from.
Running costs comprise of maintenance, support, data storage, security, backups, and software updates. Because commercetools is a cloud-native SaaS, there are no infrastructure maintenance costs. Plus, our agile releases mean always being updated with the latest features for better reliability and security. These updates and many new features are included as part of our transparent pricing – which means being hit with huge upgrade costs every so often is something you can leave in the past with legacy software. Onboarding and training new developers is also much less expensive because there’s no proprietary tech.
Unseen costs are less tangible but can still be costly. They typically include potential loss from platform instability or un-scalability that can result as lost revenue and time. But with headless commerce, you don’t have to deal with unexpected expenses that cost extra money or time. That’s because, on the commercetools platform, crashes don’t happen, and hours spent on planning around upgrades never occur.
Access low expenses right from the start
When you partner up with us, you won’t have to deal with upfront and upgrade costs. We also offer low entry expenses and capital investment, and our SaaS subscription model ensures that you only pay for what you use – you don’t have to buy into an entire package that have features that are of no use to you. This same pricing model also takes care of infrastructure (including servers and security) and behind-the-scenes upkeep and upgrades, as well as staffing since you won’t have to keep a dedicated IT department to handle ongoing maintenance. The result? You can focus on building and delivering the best commerce experience to your customers, instead of worrying about the logistics and additional costs that surround what’s actually important.
What’s more, because the commercetools platform is programming language-agnostic in nature, you aren’t restricted to the expensive training and hiring of specialized developers – a common criteria with legacy suites that restrict you to certain programming languages or, even worse, proprietary languages. In addition to being able to pick the tech stack you’d like to work with, you also gain access to a larger talent pool of developers.
Stop wasting time and start spending it on what matters
Time spent on fixing programs and finding ways to work around your monolithic platform is a major unforeseen cost that must be taken into consideration when thinking about TCO. Think about all the wasted man hours spent on meetings, trying to fix crashes, slow time-to-market and months spent on trying to react to market changes – and what that ends up costing you in actual money. Afterall, if your website crashes or you’re not fast enough to meet the ever-changing demands of buyers, they’ll be quick to move on and you’ll lose revenue while waiting for it to come back up.
With commercetools, your online shop is future-proof and highly scalable to grow as you grow, delivering to your customers a highly reliable shopping experience. And releases can often be deployed instantly rather than taking weeks or months – so your commerce platform is flexible enough to rapidly pivot to unexpected changes in the market. All of this means that you can spend your time on what really counts – providing the best shopping experience to your customers across all touchpoints.
Dive into more details in our white paper about what TCO considerations you should take into account if you’re thinking about migrating from your legacy to a modern commerce architecture.