The ecommerce industry in India has seen exponential growth over the last few years and even though there have been bumps in between, it has always bounced back. This trend is expected to continue, and the industry, valued at $14.5 billion in 2016, is expected to touch a whopping $80 billion by 2020.
This makes ecommerce very attractive to entrepreneurs and retailers in India, and the relative ease of getting started and setting up operations of an ecommerce business means we’re seeing the birth of new ecommerce websites every day.
But running a successful ecommerce business isn’t just about having a great idea and being at the right place at the right time.
Yes, those things matter too, but without hard and focused work, and a thorough business plan, it’s hard to get the business off the ground.
We’re breaking down the process of an ecommerce website development project into 7 major steps, each filled with detail and tips to help you understand the process and get it right.
That’s changed now. Even niche businesses see the advantages of getting online, now that ecommerce business processes are better established.”
Indeed, one can find ecommerce portals for a variety of businesses today, from school uniforms to medical equipment, and craft supplies to construction material.
If you are still in the process of identifying products to sell, keep the following points in mind in order to choose well:
Know your ecommerce customer
It’s vital for any business to understand who their customer is so they can reach out to him/her in the best way possible. One way to ascertain this is by evaluating the customers of your competitors. Some parameters to keep in mind are:
With the basic questions of what to sell, and whom to sell to answered, it’s time to move to the next stage: the ecommerce website.
To begin with, as the business owner you need to decide whether you’d prefer a self-hosted platform, or a hosted one. While the requirement for both is different, hosted platforms are usually preferred as they usually consist of full-features websites and maintenance plans. This minimizes the scope for error and makes website management much easier.
Even then, there are many platforms to choose from, the most popular include Hybris, Magento, WooCommerce, or Shopify.
When choosing your ecommerce platform, you need to keep your business requirements as well as the features on offer in mind. To help you get going, here’s list of things to consider:
If you already have a business and are now expanding online, you have preexisting systems and a database. It’s important to ascertain the compatibility of the platform with your existing systems and the ability to integrate them.
Imagine having to shift all the data you have built up over the years, or are working with concurrently, to the new system. To ensure easy integration and prevent downtime during transition, choose a compatible platform. You will probably need professionals to assist you in this, but it is well worth the money and time spent to create a stable online store.
Even full-feature platforms like Magento come with set features which may not suit the needs of your business, or you may have requirement for additional capabilities in your webstore. Moreover, each business has different requirements, and it’s important for theplatform to support these.
One of our clients had a unique requirement—as a seller of books, they had to abide by their country’s laws which allowed them to sell certain books only to people over a specified age. This made it difficult to sell the books online, but the client needed the book to be listed in the online catalogue to make website visitors aware of its availability.
To suit this unique case, the project developers were able to create an additional restricted catalog on the ecommerce website, where visitors could view the listing, but not purchase the books.
Similarly, grocery ecommerce websites require the capability to list product or size variants, list perishables with unique weight or size measurements, offer features such a shopping lists. Choosing a platform with good scope for customization makes it possible to enable the development of such features and deliver a good customer user experience.
One of the challenges faced by ecommerce businesses in India is the discomfort with online payments. So it is vital include traditional payment options, such as cash on delivery, along with regular payment options, such as credit and debit card payments and netbanking. It has now also become necessary to provide the option of linking to payment wallets.
Your ecommerce platform of choice must support these capabilities.
If you seek international expansion, or cater to customers from various countries, it’s important to incorporate multiple currency options to facilitate payment for overseas customers.
A good online commerce webstore is supported by a robust backend for an organized and easy-to-use admin experience. A high quality platform will provide several admin features such as multiple admin logins, easy changes in inventory, taking stock of orders, and so on.
Ensure you check for this because a good customer UX doesn’t count for much if it isn’t powered by an organized backend.
Studies have shown that people are spending more and more time on the mobile phones. While some businesses do choose to build apps to cater to this growing demand, app development requires an investment of time and money.
So responsive ecommerce websites, suitable for viewing on mobile phones, are a great alternative. The importance of a mobile-friendly ecommerce website cannot be ignored as customers do much more than make purchases through their phones. The easy accessibility leads to increasing amounts of time spent browsing on the phone, which often leads more online as well as in-store purchases.
The platform must support a website that is optimized for a mobile-friendly yet rich UX.
Do consider the marketing tools offered by the ecommerce platform—some platforms offer integration with analytics tools, social media websites, promotion tools, etc. Once you go live with the webstore, marketing will form a significant path of business growth, so anticipate the needs for these capabilities and choose your platform accordingly.
A handy guide to evaluate ecommerce platforms is Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for digital commerce. The Magic Quadrant assesses platforms and categorizes them as per the performance and growth annually.
Your server should have the capacity to deliver good website speed. This is also dependent on the internet connection speed for your server, so check that too. Providing good speed is vital as not only do customers have little patience for websites that load slowly, but search engines also rank slow-loading websites poorly.
A good way to assess the kind of service you will get from the host is to check recent uptime records of other websites being hosted by the provider. One of the greatest attributes of ecommerce is any time, any place availability and shopping convenience. This is enabled by maximizing uptime, so this is a vital check.
What kind of support services does your host provide? Some just provide the infrastructure, while some also give managed services that help minimize troubleshooting response time and improve uptime. Sometimes managed services also cover issue management and upgrades.
Choose servers that can adapt to your business needs. This means your website doesn’t go down due to an overload in traffic (as the servers scale up to accommodate increased traffic during peak season or offers), as well and optimizes the costs.
As an ecommerce website, you accept payments online so the servers must be PCI-DSS compliant. It is also important to ensure data security through secure servers.
Contrary to the popular practice of outsourcing to cheaper locations, it makes plenty of sense to commission ecommerce website development to a local company. With an intensive task like this, that requires regular and deep involvement, it helps to be in located in the same time zone in order to speed up communication and coordination. Losing hours, or even a day, sue to time difference can add significantly to development time and cost.
A great way to ascertain the ecommerce vendor’s level of commitment and quality of output in the interest shown in your business requirements. Each business has unique needs and circumstances, and your ecommerce website and development process must be adapted to suit these needs. A vendor who takes the time to understand your goals, requirements and hurdles, and takes the time to address them is likelier to deliver a website that will be more to your expectations and will fuel business growth.
Ecommerce website development is a lengthy and task-intensive project, with goals and hurdles that change along the way. Therefore it is very important to partner with a vendor who follows agile processes that are continuously adapted and improved on the journey to suit the changing needs. Due diligence for quality assurance in processes also helps deliver predictable outcomes and more bang for your buck.
Ecommerce development, especially if it is multichannel or omnichannel, is carried out phase by phase, and the resources needed at every phase differ, especially if timelines have to be met. Choosing an established ecommerce website development partner makes resources available as per need without much delay. This ability to scale up or down as per project needs facilitates smooth development and minimizes the time lost to logistic problems.
The importance of testing cannot be stressed enough—slow-loading websites, poor navigation, broken links and bugs have been known to cause losses for ecommerce websites as customers leave dissatisfied.
So what is usually checked in the ecommerce website testing process?
As to the amount of time that needs to be devoted to testing, various business experts and researchers suggest anything between 25% of development time to continuous testing all through the development stage. You can read these suggestions here and decide what suits your business the best.
Some of the popular marketing methods used by businesses include:
Ecommerce has evolved from websites to multichannel, and then omnichannel. In the recent past, newer features like virtual reality, or augmented reality, or location-based alerts, have changed the level of personalization and convenience offered. Brands that have managed to upgrade quickly and enjoyed continued success.
Upgrade your platform regularly to keep your website running smoothly and offer up-to-date features. Periodically check for security updates and implement them.
Track customer browsing habits, purchase patterns, cart abandonment, and other user behavior to tweak your offerings and presentation accordingly.
Your ecommerce website and business require nurturing to enjoy healthy growth and deliver long-term returns on your investment.
We’ve outlined the process to help you get going, now it’s time to put in the sweat and blood. All the best!
Partner with Embitel’s ecommerce website developers for implementation on Magento 2 and Hybris. Send us an email at sales@embitel.com