Do You Need a Shared Platform?

A company needs a shared commerce platform only if it is beneficial from a business point of view and is feasible from a technical point of view. To determine whether a shared commerce platform would work and would be useful, the company must consider a number of different factors. For example, it is important to look at the number of sites that would be required, the differences between the sites, the administrative characteristics of the sites, the efficiency of the current site infrastructure, and the trade-offs that would need to be made in adopting a shared platform.

Any one of these factors can be sufficient to justify the need for an investment in a shared commerce platform. For example, if the company needs only two sites, it might still be a good idea to build the sites on a single platform if they are sufficiently similar to each other in terms of content and administrative procedures. At the same time, sometimes a few concerns might preclude the use of a shared platform, even though from all other points of view the shared platform seems like a good idea. This is illustrated in the following example.