Why is it important to have updated e-commerce software?
Owners or tenants of commercial venues are aware of the maintenance needs or intentions of making necessary improvements, but usually ignore or are unaware of the maintenance that is carried out in the building or mall where their business is located.
Within your property, you have the authority to choose the best timing for a renovation, update, or redecoration, but as soon as you cross the door, new obligations, rules, and norms appear that are also relevant. However, these rules are usually delegated to building or mall administration, and you only hear about them in monthly expense overviews.
E-commerce is the commercial venue
In the same way, the administrator of an e-commerce website can use it as they consider best and make decisions about:
- Its design or visuals
- Its features
- Its main functions
The person responsible for the e-commerce is subject to norms, protocols, and requirements over which they have little knowledge and authority to decide at which moment a specific task is required to be conducted.
An electronic commerce website is located on one or several servers, situated in a datacenter (or a cloud defined as a group of datacenters) that uses certain operating systems and countless other software pieces:
- Web servers
- Load balancers
- Data base servers
- Cache managers
- CDNs
- Among others
These inputs are “invisible” to the owners of the e-commerce in question, but the correct functioning of the website inevitably depends on them.
E-commerce software and hardware aren’t controllable, they change and update constantly. It would be unthinkable to try to imagine a 2022 e-commerce running on the same combination of servers, operating systems, and data bases that were current in 1995, 1999, 2010, and 2020.
New technologies require new hardware, and this hardware requires new software. Although someone could say they’ve been using Windows since 1995, it’s clear it is not the same Windows but a version that has been updated multiple times.
Every time the pop-up “there are new updates for Windows” appears, it means that something has changed and that it’s necessary to update and adapt to these new changes. The personal computer user can omit and postpone the update every day until something starts to fail:
- Some programs won’t run
- They won’t be able to access some websites
- A virus will put data integrity in danger
- Other consequences
Microsoft can’t do anything against this because they advised updating the Windows version several months back, and that advice was ignored even though they insisted. Additionally, at some point, the user began to ignore the fact that Microsoft would stop supporting Windows XP because it’s an operating system that was launched twenty years ago and its last update was fourteen years ago.
The e-commerce platform is a living software
Different from a 90s videogame, that once installed on your computer could be used without having to be updated or interacting with other “programs”, e-commerce platforms are living softwares that are permanently connected to other online systems (payment platforms, logistics providers, accounting systems, etc.) that change, are modified, and updated with a certain frequency.
Because we’re talking about systems that handle money and highly sensitive information (personal user data, credit cards, among others), online shopping websites, the platforms they run on (Magento, Salesforce, Prestashop, Shopify, or others), and the servers they are located in, are regulated by international and national government norms and rules. An e-commerce must meet strict inspections depending on the country it’s operating in, selling in, and distributing to.
Abiding by these norms, regulations, and security protocols isn’t the e-commerce representative’s responsibility, it’s the administrator’s. To wrap up and summarize what we’ve discussed:
Is it necessary to keep your business’ e-commerce updated?
Absolutely. It’s necessary to work on the most recent versions of online commerce platforms, using innovative technology that is compatible with the system.
Can you continue clicking on “skip this update” indefinitely?
Definitely no. Ideally, you should evolve your e-commerce, and these updates are key when it comes to accelerating implementation, reducing times, and increasing transactional performance.
