5 Things You Need To Consider Before Plunging into Ecommerce Development

Before just diving into ecommerce development, you need to consider lots of factors. Having several know-how’s associated with it, ecommerce development is not something that you can handle alone. Once you choose Magento as your development platform, you need to start your hunt for those who can help you in turning your dreams into reality. Choosing an ideal development firm is not a decision to be rushed; no matter how excited you are about having an ecommerce store. You need to consider numerous factors before hiring an agency. Here are some questions you need to ask yourself while choosing a development agency.

1. Are you all set with your plan?

When you decide to seek the help of an agency, make sure that you have planned everything in detail. You need to consider the features you want to have on your site, the payment methods you prefer, goals you want to achieve, the amount of traffic you are aiming to have on the site and many other things. All these factors help the agencies to come up with their own ideas, and you both can decide if it is a good fit.

2. Who is in the team?

Taking from design to the responsiveness, an ecommerce site comprises numerous elements. Just make sure that the chosen agency has all the required experience like certified Magento developers, so that you won’t land up in trouble down the line. Also, it’s very helpful for you to have someone in the team who can understand the business better rather than just building an ecommerce site.

3. Are they outsourcing?

Just have a look at the size of the agency before signing up the deal with an agency. Outsourcing can sometimes be beneficial as the agency may handover your project to a third party who can take your site to a whole new level. But if most of their developers are outsourced freelancers as well, it can lead to stumbles in the communication and can also waste your time when there occurs a glitch in the system. This is something that could cost you the customers when your site goes live.

4. What development process are they using?

The development process used by the company is yet another important factor to be considered. Are they following the waterfall approach or they prefer agile methodology? It’s really important to have clearly defined steps, especially if you have set a deadline. At the same time, an in-house talent can also be useful if the problem arises.

5. Do they have an SEO expert?

How much ever good your ecommerce site might be, it is very important to optimize your site to reach your audience and achieve your goals. Magento platform has already scored well in SEO, so having an SEO expert in your agency’s development team can be invaluable when it comes to the launch and also while ensuring things like conversion channels.

There are a few important factors you need to consider when you decide to choose a Magento development firm to build your ecommerce site.

3 Revolutionary Trends in eCommerce Platforms for the Year 2015

It’s just a month passed in the New Year, and as always there will be some or the other changes in the field of technology. Every year brings some new trends and opportunities to the ever changing eCommerce community; no one can be very certain about the evolving trends. But according to some logical estimation, we can make some predictions on the current trends of eCommerce.

Three popular eCommerce trends we could expect to see in 2015:

1. Increased mobile responsiveness:

• Though tablets and smartphones have been distributed widely throughout the world for quite some years now, the potential for eCommerce activity on mobile devices is still in the beginning. Several eCommerce stores still depend on their websites as it’s their main selling point. The number of mobile friendly websites is increasing day by day, but accessing the web via mobile browsers is still inconvenient on most of the smartphones.
• So one of the biggest trends you can expect in 2015 is that the increase of mobile apps as the means of selling merchandise. Also the improvements in the usability of such applications like processing payments and restoring payment information. So people are excited to see how payment details restoration becomes easier and secure on mobile apps.

2. Social eCommerce:

• It’s certainly not a thing to be hidden that most of the purchases are influenced by comments, recommendations and other user generated contents available on social media. So the eCommerce trends in this year are sure to include a very close relationship between eCommerce platforms and social media.
• Not to be wondered if we see Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest pages are turning into eCommerce stores that sell products. Here the users can enjoy their shopping experience without having to get out of the comfort zone called “social media”. Obviously each and every purchase would generate an automated post which informs the buyer’s friends about the purchase.

3. Niche-based Marketplaces:

• As many marketplace platforms like eBay, etsy, Amazon and others have seen a huge success with Amazon dominating about 28% of online searches in US, we can surely see an increase in niche based marketplaces which are built using Magento or any other platforms. Here both the vendors and suppliers unite to provide variety of products to their customers.
• As such marketplaces can become potentially huge; they will be more likely to invest on advanced mobile technologies like marketing, content writing, advertising, payment processing, shipment and more. So try to be the first one in your niche to have a multi-vendor marketplace on Magento or any other eCommerce platforms.

These are some of the trends which we can predict to happen in the year 2015.