As an SME considering building or replacing an e commerce website, you need to consider what sort of investment you want (and need) to make. Do you want a cheap ecommerce website? But that has the danger that you will quickly outgrow it. Or perhaps something using Magento?
Follow our five main factors below to guide your choice:
- Cost: You must remember that this is a capital infrastructure investment and the correct level of investment (compared to the revenue of the business) needs to be made. This means that you need to have an accurate picture of your business volumes and margins now. But you also need to have an accurate forecast for future demand too (always a bit more challenging). This makes sure that you don’t over-purchase a system and burden yourself with too great a back office cost.
- Size: The critical question is ‘what size are you?’ If your business is small and you don’t need third party system integrations then a more simple solution might be more appropriate (compared to something like Magento which has many more features).
- The Future: We’ve already indicated that having a good forecast of future demand is important to make sure you invest at the correct level and don’t over-buy. There is the other side too - it will be an expensive mistake if you purchase a system which you outgrow in 12 - 24 months. There are more flexible platforms available now - typically they will be cloud based - and this means that SMEs can invest with confidence that they won’t have to invest again in a short period of time.
- Usability: User experience is an extremely important element of your e-commerce proposition - you will very quickly get feedback if your site does not deliver a good experience for customers. It is critical that your site is neither difficult to negotiate nor complicated to use.
- Expertise and Resources: If you have decided you need a more functional site and you opt for something like Magento, you should be honest with yourself and, unless you are very competent, it is likely that you will need external experts to help build your site. You need to cost in the requirement for external developers. However, a major plus point is eBay owns both Magento and PayPal and, therefore, they are very closely integrated and will give a very good experience for customer payments.
ITQ Solutions is a Magento agency but we also design and build in other platforms too, depending on our customers' requirements.
If you liked this blog then perhaps you will also like this previous blog too: http://inbound.itqsolutions.net/blog/retail-trends-in-2014-adding-e-commerce-value