With more retailers then ever grumbling about the cost of Payment Card Industry (PCI) security and the increased complexity associated with the IT infrastructure need to run these sites, it’s become apparent that many companies might be a whole lot better off shifting responsibility for the entire activity to a third-party provider.

Increasingly, it looks like more companies are coming to that conclusion. For example, Venda, an e-commerce-as-a-service provider that specializes in the retail vertical, is now running more than 300 sites on behalf of customers operating in 11 different countries that understandably got tired of managing their e-commerce infrastructure.

Everyone knows of at least one e-commerce fiasco that could have been prevented if there were better management tools in place. By relying on a specialist, companies can not only greatly reduce their security risks, they can also benefit from the hard-won experience of the third-party service provider when it comes to supporting e-commerce applications that as time goes on are only going to become more complicated -- especially as the number of vendors that need to be integrated into the site continues to grow.

As we head into the holiday season, we’re on the cusp of the heaviest volume that e-commerce systems typically experience. We all know that in one way or another, many e-commerce systems are not up to the challenge of either defending themselves if attacked or processing high volumes of transactions should they suddenly become popular destinations.

It’s too late at this point to think about shifting over to an on-line service. But once the season is over, there’s no shame in deciding to call in specialists to make sure that next year the problem is going to be the hands of people that eat, live and breathe e-commerce every day.