SaaS for Retail: Transform Your Business or Risk Brand Decline

It’s decision time for traditional retailers.

Time to decide whether you’re going to use an old self-hosted platform and business model that holds you back, or make a game-changing decision to use cloud and SaaS to take your business into the future.

For you, Amazon’s commodity market is profitable but earns little brand equity.

And micro-brands numbering in the thousands are chipping away at your brand recognition and loyalty – with much smaller teams and much smaller budgets.

You’re getting squeezed in the middle – and there’s only one way to stop it: innovate at speed and cost.

If you don’t, your company won’t be around in five years.

You simply won’t be able to compete.

I know that because I’ve seen a lot of changes to the world of ecommerce since I started working in the industry over 15 years ago.

Back then, nearly all of the ecommerce sites I built were bespoke, self-hosted solutions.

I worked for a Magento Gold Partner agency for almost 5 years, and during that time I saw the many limitations and challenges of self-hosted ecommerce platforms.

Although they were designed with flexibility in mind, many necessary functions like integrating other systems or securing development talent at any kind of reasonable cost were massive money and time debt centers.

The plain truth of it was that self-hosted platforms like Magento were very complex to work with and took a long time to go to market.

But, they were the only options available. That’s no longer the case.

Why SaaS: Making the Move

When I worked agency side, we started building ecommerce sites on SaaS platforms like BigCommerce.

I already knew the benefits of SaaS across other pieces of the commerce platform stack, including:

• Omnichannel commerce technologies.
• OMS Systems.
• WM Systems.
• ERPs like NetSuite.

I quickly saw that working on SaaS ecommerce platforms was so much easier than working with self-hosted platforms, especially at the enterprise level with integrated systems.

The SaaS benefits are easy to see

• It is much less expensive.
• Doesn’t require an army of specialized developers.
• Companies can go to market much faster.

This is how those micro-brands outcompete you with less resources and capital. And you can fight back.

Traditional retailers are starting to realize the benefits software as a service, and of making the move to SaaS.

I saw the writing on the wall.

In fact, I witnessed a large migration to SaaS across the entire commerce and business technology stack, not just the ecommerce platform itself.

However, large organizations don’t always move as quickly as they should — even when it’s in their best interests.

Fear and technology investment debt are holding traditional retailers back, allowing Amazon (and other marketplaces) to strike from the top and micro-brands to attack in the thousands from below.

Death by a thousand cuts if you will.

The black swan for your business isn’t a disrupting startup. It’s a line item on your P&L.