Recently I was asked to review a website that used a free shopping cart software that had been installed by another web design firm. The customer was in a vicious cycle of having to spend a lot of money every few months when the upgrade of the free software caused all the custom features of her website to fail.
This is a very common experience for so many customers that think they are getting a good deal by not paying for the software. But they end up spending much more to fix issues with the software.
Customers end up spending more money with "free" software
The reason for this is three fold:
1) Open Source and Free Software is often a Hacking Target Hackers love open source and free software because they have the ability to go through the code line by line and look for vulnerabilities. Then they use these vulnerabilities to attack sites running the software. This then means a new version or upgrade needs to be released.
2) Upgrades and patches are rarely compatible and break websites This is the reason the customer I was talking with was paying significantly every times a security update came out. Their website would collapse entirely and it not only cost them money to fix the site but they lost credibility with customers who were unable to order.
3) You are on your own when something goes wrong Whilst you may have a developer or web designer that helps manage your website they are at the mercy of the free software just as much as you are, and if a major issue occurs that requires an upgrade they have to wait until the software is patched just like you so your site can be at risk of hacking or down for days.
Our Approach is different
We have a very different approach to our shopping cart / ecommerce software. Our team has built the software in-house and we know every line of code so when an issues is found we resolve it rapidly.
Code Security
But more than that we understand that the security of our service is in our code and that's why we protect the core of our code and host all of our sites ourselves. We don't allow anyone other than our team to work or view the source code for the Core of the software. This means we have absolute control over the software and the environment.
We build our sites differently
When we build our websites we separate the code into Core and Custom components. This means we can upgrade the core of the software without breaking things.
Customization is still exceptional
We also recognize that customers want to customize their own experience and we've written the software to allow for this. So when you are researching your new eCommerce website setup and balancing the pros and cons of using free or open source software you can understand that there is a huge hidden cost!
