The Proliferation of Third Parties
In the early days of eCommerce development, the world was a simpler place. You created the user experience, configure the payment servers, set up the fulfillment channels, and turned it on. The browsers were fairly simple HTML rendering engines that took what you sent it and drew them on the screen. You could control the user experience by tuning your servers to deliver the resulting HTML quickly.
Fast forward to today. It is not unusual for a modern eCommerce site to use twenty-five or more third party sites. These sites help to satisfy both the non-functional and functional requirements. For example, an eCommerce site needs to know how many shopping carts are being abandoned, how many orders are being placed, how many pages are being accessed, how often certain pages are being viewed, etc. Enter Web Analytics vendors. You place a JavaScript snippet in your important pages and there you have it. Do you need to understand the detailed performance of your site’s pages? Just add more scripts that send data to a Web Performance Company. Do you want to provide consistent performance in spite of the geographical location of your customers; you need a content delivery network. Do you want to sell travel, conduct auctions, sell credit cards and gift cards? There are services for all of these.
Third parties also provide better functionality like product reviews, detailed product specifications, customer feedback about your site, special catalog items, and store locators. All of these services enrich the user experience and increase the effectiveness of your site. This does not come for free however. In addition to the cost of the service, you have to plan for other chores. Many of the sites require a regular feed from your systems. These feeds must be written to a specific specification and maintained. You also have to take customer service calls about these features because the customer thinks that they are on your site. Their reliability and customer-orientation can reflect on your brand, either for good or bad. Finally, their response time will form part of your overall page-load time, which may cause sales to be lost if it is slow.
In short, using these third parties may increase the value of your Web properties, but they may also detract from them if not managed properly.
