How Extensibility Can Benefit eCommerce

In order to fully understand extensibility, think of your website as a house. Barring extreme disaster, a house can be redecorated, added on to, and repaired without the foundation of the house being changed. If you are putting up a shelf in the bedroom, you do not have to do anything to the kitchen. A website built with extensible design works the same way, giving you a stable coding arena so that you can make changes without fearing a collapse.

eCommerce is an industry that is always changing, growing, and innovating. Whether you run a B2B or B2C business, customers expect their shopping experience to be current with the trends in eCommerce. To be effective, your platform has to be able to keep up with the times. Extensibility ensures that you can continuously implement new ideas and technologies at the drop of a hat without having to do an entire overhaul. New pages can be built using existing templates, and existing templates can be updated on the fly and applied to all relevant pages, without updating them one at a time. Having an extensible design means that you can continue to be creative with your eCommerce platform, and your business, with no hassle.

As your business grows, new challenges will arise and they will be easier to meet if you have a flexible system in place. Best practices for security dictate that you should stay up-to-date, monitor any errors that may appear on your website, and be aware of new innovations in the security world (both by hackers and website protectors). An extensibile website means that you can make these updates without putting your website (and your customer’s data) at immediate risk. The parts of your site that are secure and working properly can stay as such, while the holes can be mended and the updates made. As security is a continuous practice, extensibility saves you from going through a major headache each time a change needs to be implemented.

In eCommerce more than anywhere, time is money. With an extensible design, you ensure that you can make changes or improvements to your website without having to shut it down and lose business. Extensible design also means that changes require less coding to be done (since the base is already set), which means that changes can be made more quickly and with less effort/cost. Without extensibility, it is easy for your time and your finances to be sucked into large overhauls of your website that ultimately ruin your profit margins. But with extensible design, changing your website can be easily integrated into your everyday business costs and routine.