You are at the point of choosing an e-commerce platform. What are the questions you need to ask yourself before buying? Do you want to go cheap and cheerful? Or do you go for something a bit more functional right away?
The answer to this is partly to do with your ambitions, your budget and growth plans.
Follow our factors below to inform and guide your choice:
- Cost: You must remember that this is a big investment. A critical investment, in many ways. You have to judge the correct level of financial investment and compare that to the revenue that the website is forercast to generate. 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 difficult to predict). 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. Additionally, some platforms have different service levels so you can purchase entry level and then upgrade if / when the volumes make sense.
- 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.
There are a number of options available to you: from a cheap ecommerce website to something much more sophisticated and expensive. Using Magento, one of the more expensive SME platforms, would suit someone trading up. It would give a very good e commerce website.
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