When you decide to open an online store, you face a range of options, from outsourcing everything to doing it all yourself. Choosing the software that will run your store is a complex process; and even if you don't plan to do it yourself you'll still need enough information to make informed choices. To help make up your mind, run through this summary of your choices, along with their advantages and drawbacks.

Build Your Own System

When you build your own online store, you have full control. You can customize each aspect of the site to optimize performance and to integrate with existing inventory, accounting, and other legacy systems. You can tinker with your store until you get it just the way you want it; and you can quickly change it to take advantage of emerging opportunities.

Several vendors offer tools that help you build a custom online store. Companies such as Microsoft and Adobe offer e-commerce toolkits that provide the technology and the development tools for building an e-commerce site. These toolkits include the basic software components that run an online store, software "hooks" that can link to databases or other back-end systems, and even their own programming languages.