Forums: Discussions for entrepreneurs and small business.

Good Afternoon,

I am trying to get an idea on peoples thoughts about outsourcing their internet presence.  In regards to businesses who run ecommerce sites or sites that require a lot of maintenance and updating. 

Any input or thoughts about this.

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Can you give us a particular example?

For my own, as an analogy, what if I own a hamburger place? Would outsourcing mean I would outsource the design and printing of my menus? I could outsource my cleaning the place at night before shutting down, but it`s not that big a place.

On the other hand, if I have an e-commerce site that`s very large, with hundreds of transactions per day (not clicks...transactions), why wouldn`t I hire a department to maintain the ever-changing content and volume?

I`m not sure what it means to outsource an Internet presence?

A lot of people who work with us choose a combination of content management (work on their part) and maintenance contract (work on our part). For example, an ecommerce site we launched not too long ago had a couple thousand products that needed to be entered in the system. They decided to have us do the initial entering of the products, and they will keep it up to date. Another of our clients decided to do their own uploading of news stories, pictures, and other documents, but they rely on us to keep their ads updated and working smoothly.

It seems to have worked out well in many cases to use a mix of in-house work and outsourced work for many of our clients. Keeps them from having to sit for hours figuring out (or uploading) tons of stuff, and keeps us from having to do the small updates that they can easily do by themselves and save money.

I hope I answered your question.


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Let me explain what I refer to as outsourcing.  In regards to your web presence, instead of hiring a team of designers, webmasters, and programmers to handle to your website, you would have the ability to have an outsourced dedicated team handle your site.  By doing so you would be able to save money and be able to handle the business you know best.  By allowing an outsourced team to maintain your site you would be able to focus on the business you know best, and by outsourcing your site you would have a dedicated team at your disposal to handle anything regarding your site. If you needed content changes you would submit them and within 24 hours changes would be made, etc..

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