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While it’s easy to start an eCommerce business using a Saas (Software-as-a-Service) eCommerce platforms like Shopify, BigCommerce, and Squarespace, you would need to hire an eCommerce developer agency.
Why would you hire a development agency when you can do-it-yourself or have an in-house team who can do it for you? Indeed, when you’re small and starting, you might not need external help. But as your business grows, it gets complicated and requires additional time and resources to help you with the constant changes.
Regardless of the size of your business, a development agency brings vast experience, resources, and support in various relevant areas to run the business smoothly.
Here are eight reasons why we think hiring an agency is a good idea.
Since many online stores use already available popular themes, free or paid, it’s hard to stand out from the competition. And you might be missing on the features that make the most sense to your business.
A development agency can help you create the custom design and shopping experience that entices and engages your customers.
38% of people leave a website if they find the layout unattractive.
Source: Adobe
In the present world, the average person owns 2-3 devices. People want to access and experience content in devices with different form factors – Desktop, Phone, Tablet, and Laptop with their own choice of a browser.
Walmart found that for every 1-second improvement in page load time, conversions increased by 2%
Source: Cloudflare
A development agency can optimize your website for different devices and platforms, using best practices with high performance and usability in mind. Page loading time can be a critical factor in your CRO (Conversion-Rate-Optimization) strategy.
As the eCommerce platforms evolve and as your business grows, adding new features can often bring in further problems and even break your site if the changes are not done right.
A development agency will study the implications of adding new features and test them in a safe environment before publishing the updates to your site – minimizing the risk of breaking anything.
Similar to adding a new feature, adding a new integration can break your site. Fixing this usually takes time and may result in losing revenue. Sometimes the damage caused by an incompatible integration is irreparable.
A development agency will have comprehensive knowledge of most of the integrations available. It can help you map the right integration for the right requirement of your site or business. They may even build a workaround to integrate a service you want with your website.
An eCommerce platform can be sophisticated with different moving parts, resulting in a higher number of things that can go wrong. Hence, quality testing and eliminating issues found are essential.
A development agency performs rigorous testing for any updates to ensure your online store remains operational at all times – so you don’t lose a single sale.
Apart from optimizing experience and performance on various platforms, you might want to expand beyond the web platform experience by taking an omnichannel approach to sales to tap into a different segment of the audience.
According to a survey conducted by Accenture, 61% of global shoppers want to use AR and VR technology in visualizing how clothes might fit them, and 54% of shoppers want to shop for household items and furniture.
Source: Accenture
A development agency can build a shopping experience on AR (Augmented Reality), VR (Virtual Reality), Mobile Apps (iOS/Android), Social Media Commerce, and Conversation Commerce with a focus on driving more sales and distinguish you from your competition.
We all wish things run as they should, but it’s not an ideal world. Your website requires constant maintenance and support to ensure the smooth running of your business – especially during the holiday season.
Working with a development agency ensures regular maintenance and support by performing comprehensive checks and keeping your security up-to-date so that your customer data is safe.
As your business grows, you might find that your current eCommerce platform doesn’t meet your growing needs or might be experiencing critical issues. If migration is the solution to these problems, depending on the eCommerce setup you have with several products, data, and integrations, migration not done correctly, will result in data loss.
Working with a development agency from the inception can help you find the right platforms to avoid the need to migrate altogether. However, if you’re in a place where migration to a better platform is the only solution for your business, an expert can help you with the migration without any data loss.
You might either have a running eCommerce business or are planning to set up a new business, hiring a professional development agency helps you with the challenges ahead and overcome any existing problems.
With the support of a development agency, while you focus on growing your business, they handle the technical challenges aiding that growth.
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