SAAS eCommerce solutions vs. Self-hosted ones?

Magento definitely has some big ticket clients. If you like their formatting but don't want to build a site yourself (definitely time consuming), you could hire a developer? I think Magento contracts some out, so you know the dev is talented and well versed in working with Magento.

Shopify does market to small/mid-sized businesses, but I don't see why a large business wouldn't use them as well. I believe you could scale their software to grow with you. Maybe ask this question in one of the Shopify forums? I'm sure some big businesses currently using Shopify could offer you insight.

Good luck!
Tiana with ecomdash

Well, have you checked out the Opencart ecommerce platform. It is one of the best ecommerce platform for the light project and based on SAAS platform,Apart from this, it also provides attractive themes and customization facility. The whole website is completely user friendly as well as mobile responsive.

I personally used wordpress to build my site since there are a lot of plugins out there that does the job (membership,cart,ready made themes etc.)

It cuts me the work needed a lets me focus on other things such as marketing and product research/creation.

I have used bigcommerce, magento, and woo commerce. I like bigcommerce a lot and they do offer a enterprise version which may resolve your problem but it get's pricey. Personally if I were to launch another store with intent to scale it I would just start with magento.

I'm building a woocommere site and rebuilding it because of the issues i faced with the limited AWS servers i initally allocated. The Goal is to build alternate ecommerce store that automatically sync's products daily from the leading ecommerce websites.

Believe me, i learnt it the hard way that this is a very big task when it comes to the server esp. as a guy with no experience architecting or handling servers. Yet my vision to build the site far above the problems encountered, so i did build the site wiifom.com which then went on face a lot of overload issues as the product portfolio crossed 100. My goal was 1 Million.

The guys i worked on fiverr to handle the servers were initially cooperative but then got slagging and slow to respond which also affected the site great a bit.

I found AWS solutions architect to design the servers for my requirement but also to keep the costs down, so he gave me a simple solution without a CDN, Cache, Read Replicas, Staging Servers which in itself was totaling to around ~$700 in monthly bill.

Now with the new servers installed and configured, i am now struck between the config. engineers in fiverr who also some time tend to be egoistic acting as if they were the bosses telling me what to do and refusing to work if i didn't go by their suggestion.

As of date that i'm writing this reply, the site is down and hope to be upped on new servers in a day or two but suggest me a topic under which i could write a new thread sharing my experinces with the site, the problems and how i encounter them, my goals and how i reach them until we have a system that you all you replicate to establish large ecommerce affiliate sites without all these hassles that i'm currently going through.

SaaS providers like Shopify are time based solutions, you only grow by hiring people, other solutions like Magento can be semi-automated and then you get to the high-end platforms like Hybris which can be fully automated. You can run huge stores on Shopify, but you will also have a very low revenue per employee number often sub $100k, Amazon is $750k.

On the Magento side you have semi SaaS such as @Pixafy, @CommerceKick, @Creatuity. We are setting up some business data loads for an affiliate site based around Magento (SIA-Affiliate which is the parent of @CommerceKick) on AWS which is scheduled to grow to millions products, if you don't know what you are doing however it implodes almost instantly.

A SaaS can run large stores and onsite platforms (Magento) can run small stores, the key is in the revenue you generate per resource and that is what restricts the platform choice.

This sums up the hosted route i.e it's good enough for most. Only when you get the revenue/sku's/scale do you really want to take on your own IT infrastructure and develop your own Internet properties.