A word to the wise... When you have a goal and a vision that usually spells hard work. That’s OK provided you don’t compromise. We can help you achieve your goal and most importantly, support you along the way.
eCommerce environments present a different level of attention. Below are a few KPIs to appreciate.
Website Breakdown Processes
- Web Design
- Web Development
- Mobile Compliance
- Hosting
- Maintenance
- Search Marketing
- Security
- On-going Auditing
- Analytics
- Support
eCommerce Policies
- ICM (Inventory Control Management)
- CMS (Content Management System)
- CRM (Customer Resource Management)
- Product Fulfillment - Warehouse / Dropship / Track
- Price Control
- Product Policing
- Retention / Loyalty / Rewards
- Multichannel Distribution
eCommerce websites if implemented properly can be a profit center if you can provide a positive experience, fairly price your product, and establish a retention. You need to remember who you are building the website for. It can also be disastrous if you select the wrong tool for the right job. Prepackaged programs may tout “ease of administration” for building and maintaining websites but many of our clients concluded their experience was anything but “easy” and their investment poorly supported. Design restrictions identified late in the process deviated from their original concept when forced to use their templates. This is another reason why most eCommerce solutions look septically generic, and unmemorable.
Just because you use social media, doesn’t make you a media engineer. That’s like saying you’re an a mobile engineer because you downloaded an app onto your smartphone. With that said, many honorary engineers are rushing headlong to redesign their website and eCommerce platforms without extensive evaluation. Take a guess how that story ends.
Bear in mind, just because you think it’s easy doesn’t make it effective or marketable. In fact, we know of several entry-level systems that are far from flexible, hard to list on Google and once again, poorly supported.
Whether it's Woo Commerce or Magento forget about having a stable team. That means you are going to have to repeat your problems more than once. One of the reasons why we don't support or recommend Magento is because it's an open-source e-commerce platform.
The Drawbacks of Open Source Software
- Compatibility issues
- Lack of Support
- Hidden costs
- Usability
Security risks
We know WIX, Square, GoDaddy and eCommerce platforms like Magento for example aren't ideal because they offer far more cons in our experience than pros as identified by our clients. No point is talking about WordPress incase you were wondering and if you were you better keep reading.
Is your goal to be a webmaster, designer, social marketer, application coder, mobile app engineer, systems engineer, hosting manager, compliance officer or an SEO expert ... or should you be concerned with managing and articulating products?
If you were a courier, why build a truck when all you need to do is lease it and focus on delivering packages?
Are we making any sense?
Unfortunately, there’s a lackluster of talent swimming about in the pool of uncertainty. Both in terms of support and end user learning curve.
"Let’s start by identifying the anatomy of the company and its goals. If you waste all your time being conditioned by an expensive hard to learn program supported overseas, your schedule is already blown. If you are a product specialist, you already know time is money. If you forgot that, then you just accelerated your budgets burn rate."
Case Study: Magento resulted in one of our clients wasting substantial dollars, time and, more significantly, lost opportunity grappling with their platform which held them hostage for making the slightest change. They had to hire then fire a third-party company (overseas) after 13 months to get a mild version of what they wanted. $ix figures later it didn't perform as expected.
Recently, we noticed an eCommerce company that looked promising when it comes to cataloging and product management. Although we haven’t tested KIBO, we tried reaching out. Sadly, when we attempted to contact them, all we got was crickets. If they invested half the energy and money manning the phones as they did for their decision tree selections, someone could have picked up the phone. When we found the eCommerce support sections (plural) it rang for 11 minutes! Their information looked incredible and to me personally, they hit all the right cords but no one answered. We couldn't even get sales to respond. Everyone can’t be in the bathroom at the same time, can they?
Forrester Research found that one of the most common mistakes companies make when implementing websites is not having a clear vision or purpose. Websites can represent a significant investment in time and resources. That's why, whether you are considering eCommerce or just a simple CMS solution, it's important you pursue a well-thought-out process in planning, and know confidently who will be supporting your investment.
You have to take a business-oriented approach to planning, deploying your eCommerce platform if you’re going to deliver and intend to win. A website can revolutionize the way you do business if the right relationship is formed with the most experienced and stable provider.
Make them prove how great their eCommerce system is in real-time. We do.