As e-commerce momentum continues to build, many retailers find themselves enjoying success beyond their expectations. With success comes growth, and with growth comes stress on a retailer's information technology underpinnings.
Small and medium-sized retailers have successfully adopted hosted Software as a Service offerings that allow them to delegate the technology fully to a vendor and apply their focus around domain expertise--buying, marketing and merchandising goods to sell, such as apparel, electronics, sporting goods, books or real estate.
In stark contrast, large retailers have historically been unable to take advantage of commercial packages and services. The requirements for scale, legacy integration, cross-channel business processes, support for organization complexity and perhaps, most importantly, brand differentiation, have driven them to build and run their e-commerce and direct-to-consumer platforms. Even when--as is frequently the case--these systems include commercial packages, the packages become so heavily customized that the retailer is left with the functional equivalent of build and run (shorthand for you build it, you own, you operate it), and is on the hook for innovation and scale.
Source: CRM Buyer, http://crmbuyer.com