3 Tips to Choose the E-commerce Platform that Matches your Business.

E-commerce has become part of our daily lives and some of the most successful business ideas of the past decades rely on this new distribution channel. We all know of Amazon and of Alibaba, just to name a few of the most high-profile mastodons in the industry.

If we jump back in time and travel to the very beginnings of online shopping, the New York Times recorded the first online transaction in August 1994. The World Wide Web was in its early days, and the Pew Research Center estimated only 10 million American households were connected to the Internet. While some voices spoke loudly of their skepticism about selling goods and services online, public interest and curiosity were significant, as demonstrated by the growing number of articles published on the topic at the time.

Indeed, years prior to the rise of the Internet and online shopping, consumers were already enjoying “home shopping” via TV, phones, magazines - or the Minitel. Thus the demand for remote shopping was nothing new. However, consumers’ expectations have grown with their familiarity and use of the Internet, and the E-commerce landscape has considerably complexified. Today’s online shopping is characterized by a complex set of features and non-trivial architectural and operational needs, as well as an ever-growing list of service providers and integrations. This article summarizes a few of the keywords and aspects to keep in mind when revitalizing your current online shopping proposition or when considering starting a new digital business.

The Customer Experience

Most customers are by now well-versed in online shopping. They expect a visually appealing and intuitive website. Just like a store’s design will influence foot traffic and conversion rate, in brick-and-mortar retail, an E-commerce shop needs to deliver a compelling experience to its visitors. A broken website will hinder the brand’s image and its products credibility. And, just like offline retail, this requires a pre-defined strategy and significant investments. Try to do less, well instead of more in a clumsy manner. In other words, in digital, more than anywhere else: simple is best.

To know what you need to start or improve your E-commerce strategy, take a short quiz below ↓

1. How large is your product or service portfolio
2. Less than 10 products/services
3. A few dozen products/services
4. Hundreds or more products/services
5. Who is the target market for your products/services?
6. A niche and well-defined audience
7. A large audience and well-defined audience
8. My products/services are targeted at the mass market
9. How often do you need to update your website?
10. I update the homepage regularly
11. I launch new products every season or more
12. I update various pages on the website weekly or more frequently

If you have a majority of (a), a turn-key solution such as Shopify or WooCommerce will offer relevant features without the complexity (and flexibility) of enterprise-level software, at a reasonable cost. These platforms have the benefit of being all-in-one solutions that you can simply plug in and play.

Statista regularly reports an increase in the use of social media for shopping. Integrations with Facebook, Instagram and other social media platforms can be a great way to seamlessly drive traffic to your online store.

If you have a majority of (b), a turn-key solution like (a) could fit your needs, or not. You will need to carefully consider the scalability of your business and operations. Depending on the specificity of your requirements, your business might require custom developed parts on top of a generic E-commerce platform. You will want to talk to a specialist to fully assess your business needs and get tailored advice. The Plant has a team of multidisciplinary and multilingual experts: contact us here.

If you have a majority of (c), you will need to consider the technical infrastructure of your E-commerce system. The system you will implement will need to reliably support your large-scale operations, enable rather than limit them. Whether it is traffic spikes that require a complex and elastic server infrastructure, admin interface that supports a complex UI/UX and large amounts of content, or a set of custom features unique to your products and service, chances are you will need some sort of customizations, as no available platform will answer your needs fully. The Plant has specialists that can help analyze your needs and propose a tailored solution to your peculiar business needs: contact us here.

The Operational Infrastructure

Turn-key E-commerce platforms will often offer most of the features listed above. They are fairly easy to use and require only a small initial investment. You may want to set up your online shop yourself using tutorials or ask a vendor to do it for you. In any case, this is a great way to start your online business at a relatively low cost. However, there are limitations with the one-fits-all model. You may have to adapt your operations to match the processes defined within the platform, and you may encounter issues at scale. If you plan to increase the volume of your operations early on, you may want to consider a more robust and flexible solution to avoid a costly and time-consuming platform transition in the future.

SalesForce’s Commerce Cloud and Adobe Commerce (ex-Magento) are leaders in enterprise E-commerce platforms. They combine a common foundation similar to turn-key services, but require a layer of development to function. This extra layer allows for customizations and the development of tailored features. It is often a preferred option for mid-to-large E-businesses, and provide a more advanced feature list while mitigating necessary initial development effort. You will need a contract with the platform provider of your choice as well as to partner with a certified vendor to set up and develop your shop. It is important to note that the ownership of the platform, its foundation codebase and features, is entirely in the hands of the platform provider. Your software development vendor and yourself will only be able to tweak the customization layer on top of the foundation. This layering approach of features leads to complex systems that become difficult to operate as more functionalities are added. Although these solutions may offer a stable ecosystem, they can result in longer time-to-market and additional development costs for businesses operating in fast-paced industries that require frequent innovation.

At The Plant, we developed our own proprietary platform, QOR, on which we have complete control over. We function in a similar manner as previously mentioned providers, with the notable difference being we combine our services with software development. Our team of engineers, UI/UX experts and data analysts have in-depth knowledge of the industry and the platform we provide, because we have built it from the ground up. As a result, we deliver at lightning speed and offer incomparable flexibility. This approach helps our clients cost-efficiently stay ahead of the technology curves and E-commerce trends. We specialize in mid-to-large scale E-business, E-commerce and Omnichannel solutions and have a track record of developing custom digital solutions for unique business needs at scale. To know more about our platform and service offerings contact us here.

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1. Insider Intelligence forecasts Amazon’s retail ecommerce worldwide sales to reach $746.22 billion in 2023.
2. Alibaba expanded its operations well beyond E-commerce to now englobe most verticals inherent to our daily lives, from shopping to online payments, from cloud services to FineTech.
3. The British Newspaper Archive lists close to 25,000 articles referring to “online shopping” in 1994, a number of which are shopping guides and manuals for the novice. Two years later, the number of articles is one hair away of reaching 30,000 - a 20% increase - and now focuses on security.