Planning to scale your eCommerce business through an online store/website? You might want to hire a custom eCommerce web development company or check out popular off-the-shelf platforms like Shopify or Wix. The first option is highly recommended if you do not want to be swept out by competitors, but the popularity of readymade solutions might override your choice.
Off-the-shelf platforms being the easiest, fastest, and cheapest way to build an online store seem cost-effective at the beginning, but limit the option to scale your website, and do not make it highly responsive and secure.
A custom eCommerce website is no different than a readymade website. The only difference is that you have to do the planning, designing, and development part on your side to meet the unique needs of your businesses and your customers’ needs. Here, the control is completely in your hand. What do you want and how do you want it? You can decide and get your expectations done. There is more to it.
Following are the benefits you will get by choosing the custom option
Your website reflects your brand. From its logo and design to color, everything reflects what your brand is all about and what it truly values. Take Amazon as an example, the leading eCommerce platform has a big smile on its logo showing customers that they value their happiness.
Having a meaningful design element is thus crucial for building a brand image in the mind of your customers and they can easily differentiate it from others. With popular eCommerce platforms that offer pre-built solutions, you cannot have that level of brand personalization. It would be more like another web store in the market that simply sell products.
Make yourself unique with custom eCommerce solutions.
If you believe, by offering the products at a reasonable price you are making customers happy, you are still the old-school guy. More than 60 % of customers care more about the experience than the price during their buying journey. The moment they land on your website, they judge everything from the website’s navigation, customer service, products, graphics, and so on.
If the CTAs are not placed correctly, the website does not load properly, or texts are not readable; all will hurt your customers forcing them to leave.
Thus, UX is said to be the most crucial website essential that can do wonders for you and your customers. It can boost the conversation rate by 400% as per a survey and improves the bounce rate.
A custom eCommerce platform is a way to improve your customers’ experience right from the discovery stage to the engagement stage. It also gives them a feeling that their shopping journey is in their control where they can filter out options they want, make payments as per their comfort, get customer support on time, etc.
Unlike off-the-shelf platforms, a custom e-commerce platform gives you the flexibility to adopt the latest technologies i.e., AI and ML. These technologies give the power to analyze user behavior and provide personalized product recommendations based on their search history, purchase history, and browsing habits. Predicting inventory needs, identifying best-selling products, and monitoring stock levels are also possible with the use of AI and ML in eCommerce.
They also help in identifying trends and targeting specific audiences for personalized marketing and advertising campaigns.
The eCommerce market is dynamic. It keeps on evolving to bring advanced ways to make customers' buying journeys exciting, valuable, and affordable. A fixed website with limited features is hardly going to survive in this dynamic market. Custom eCommerce development wipes out this limitation and gives you room to expand and move forward with the market’s pace.
Where to make changes, what to update, and how to streamline the new changes to match the business goals; everything is in your control with custom solutions.
One of the must-have features of a good eCommerce website is security. According to a survey, this industry is highly vulnerable and experiences more than 30% of cyber-attacks- the highest ever in any industry. So, it does not matter whether your business is small or big, there is always a chance of cyber threats and fraud. And by ignoring this factor you are not putting only your customers but also your brand at risk. Once a data breach happens, you lose customers and their trust. Customer retention is now a tough way to go.
So, take security as your highest priority. It needs to be taken care of at the initial stage of eCommerce development. With custom eCommerce development, you can add extra security features other than the basic ones anytime you want which is not the case with readymade software platforms. You will have to wait for the update, in the meanwhile if something happens only and you are responsible for it in the customers’ eyes.
Customized solutions give you full control to act promptly and fix issues on the time.
Also read - E-commerce Technology Trends
There are plenty of operations in the eCommerce business that take place, like onboarding vendors/suppliers, purchase order approvals, refund claims, catalog listing approval, and so on. These operations demand accuracy and speed as they directly or indirectly affect your business. Manually doing them means slowing down your business and making it vulnerable to errors.
You can automate these processes and improve the workflow by integrating automation tools in custom eCommerce software. Thus, reducing time, effort, and errors, and saving money.
Traffic management comes without saying when your brand becomes global or reaches as many as the audience it can within the region. It can be quite daunting with off-the-shelf platforms as they have limitations on product listings and the amount of traffic.
For example, Shopify supports small enterprises with a few numbers of products whereas Magento supports enterprises with more than 500 products. For high bandwidth, one must upgrade to the pricey plan. Even though, there is no guarantee because of the shared server factor.
As a result, your website crashes or slows down more frequently. When that happens, your customers are likely to switch to another platform and may not return ever.
Custom eCommerce platform gives you the freedom to manage any amount of traffic without failing on speed, performance, and quality services. You can implement a cloud-based infrastructure, test your website before peak times and implement other traffic management techniques to accommodate thousands of visitors.
SEO is imperative for every business including eCommerce. It can increase your visibility in the eyes of search engines and customers too. Custom solutions let you play with SEO and go beyond the basics. You can connect your website with the latest SEO tools and plugins to stay ahead of the competitors. With readymade websites, you can only rely on the in-built plugins and tools.
Today, customers are not limited to one or two platforms. Your potential customers are everywhere thus having a platform-restricted website means pushing your customers away. A custom eCommerce web development solves this issue and ensures platform accessibility on different browsers and devices.
Custom eCommerce solution allows you to integrate with an existing system like CRM, CMS, ERP, marketing tools, etc. As a result, you can directly utilize the customer data on these systems like buying preferences and channels they are coming from for increasing sales.
Your eCommerce website should not have only good-looking features. Its functionality matters a lot for giving a satisfying shopping experience to your customers. From product details, price tags, CTAs, and delivery and payment options, every feature contributes to it.
These features are not just enough to ensure your customers are having a happy shopping experience. You might want to scale them in the future and add advanced features such as mobile-optimized checkout, advanced search, and filter options, reporting tools, abandoned cart recovery, etc.
With pre-built eCommerce software, the possibility of scaling is not high always. Furthermore, you may or may not get the desired feature in every off-the-shelf platform.
Your business goals change with time and so as your customers’ needs, thus a customized eCommerce web development can help you take a better decision and implement an effective solution anytime you want. There is no need to adjust your website according to the limited features on readymade platforms.
There are millions of eCommerce websites in the market. To stand out among them, you must offer an exceptional buying experience to customers which you can achieve through custom eCommerce web development. It creates a separate and unique identity for your brand in the market. The freedom to scale your eCommerce website is one of the key reasons to adopt custom solutions.
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