Either you Buy it or you Build it

Nowadays, many e-commerce and companies try to integrate a chat feature to their website or application. There are 2 ways for businesses to integrate this feature. One way is, they build the chat from scratch by themselves and the other is they buy licensing or subscription from a third party chat SDK provider.

Both these strategies have their own advantages and disadvantages that must be considered before the company integrate chat feature in their applications and websites. The advantages and disadvantages are related to various factors such as infrastructure, development cost, and development time.

Chat infrastructure — is very important when it comes to chat features. First, the chat infrastructure needs to accommodate personal and group chat based on its business model. Depending on the business model, the chat infrastructure also needs to accommodate attachment like images, files, videos, location, and many more. More importantly, the chat infrastructure also needs to have a reliable security system. The system must guarantee all data and information that are sent through the chat feature is safe and encrypted from anyone or any organizations that do no authority to see it.

Development Cost — including server, technology, and investment on the employee. The economical factor is an important factor in business. It is a costly process when a business wants to add a chat feature in their applications and websites. Expenses could include server costs, employee salaries, employee benefits, technology costs, and maintenance costs.

Development Time — is all the time and processes that are spent to develop or create a chat feature. Development time will have a massive impact on any company’s business profit because the longer the development time, the greater the costs. Just as mentioned in the paragraph above, all the costs include; Expenses could include server costs, employee salaries, employee benefits, technology costs, and maintenance costs.

All these factors will affect any benefit that all businesses can get from either the strategy. If a business chooses to build its own chat feature, flexibility in terms of infrastructure will become the main benefit that the business gets. If a business chooses to subscribe to a third-party vendor, simplicity in terms of development cost and time will be the main benefit that the business will get.

At the end of the day, it really depends on whichever you think is effective and efficient for your business. We in TapTalk.io, we provide the solution businesses who want to avoid all the cost and development time. Integration is as easy as A-B-C as all you need to do is just to put a few codes!

For more information, visit our website http://taptalk.io or contact us through email hello@taptalk.io.