Choosing the Right Development Company to Build Your eCommerce Store

Some glimpses on the eCommerce landscape of now

According to the current retail trends, 51% of Americans prefer to do the shopping online. No wonder that a great number of eCommerce startups have been emerging recently. How to make sure, however, that your online business is able to grow and even leapfrog to the forefront of the e-retailing market? If you are about to launch an online shop, the first thing you need to begin with is to get a robust eCommerce platform installed on your website.

What does it take to get the things right when it comes to building your own eCommerce store? First off, ponder over the website development, namely how to find a dev team that can guarantee actionable output results. If you happen not to have an in-house design and development departments, you’d rather look for a third-party digital agency to help you out with creating a decent web store.

However, the competition is fierce, forcing online retailers to employ multiple tech-enabled strategies to stand out on the eCommerce market. So if you fail to relay the web store development task to a reliable dev company, your online shop is likely to fall short and you will stay behind the curve. Moreover, customers evolve and do not want to reconcile with getting poor user experience. A recent CBRE’s press release shows that the holiday season eCommerce returns could reach $32 billion this year.

Tips to pick a decent development company

Relevant eCommerce platform

Before signing a contract with one of the digital agencies, try to decide what platform you are going to utilize for a web store. With a plenty of them on the market, there are just a few that gained popularity by showing high efficiency and and workflow performance. To get to know more about these, please, refer to our recent article.

Contractor’s portfolio and expertise

The first thing you have to know about a would-be contractor is whether it has enough competence to cope with your web store development task. It is preferable for the agency to have considerable expertise of creating actionable online projects in the same industry.

A good portfolio with relevant cases on the company’s website is a must-have for further collaboration. Looking through the implemented cases allows you to see the potential contractor’s proficiency level and figure out if it fits your business goals. Also, you can evaluate the scope of its previous works to know what functions and design solutions have been employed so far.

Any seasoned development company must provide you with any technical details concerning the future online shop project. Learn what programming languages they use, what eCommerce platforms they are good at, what prerequisites might be needed, etc. Do not hesitate to ask your outsourcer about responsive design and cross-platform capabilities. Let them show you the benefits and weak points of different development solutions (or modules, platforms, applications and what not) they are about to utilize in your project.

Healthy communication

The other important factor you must think of is proper interaction with your contractor. A timely and meaningful dialog between a web store owner and a developer is hands-down required when it comes to customizing various ongoing routine details. Poor and ineffective communication will result in misinterpreting your final business goal and gaining no profits. So estimate what channels you are going to communicate with them, see how quick the are to reply to your initial inquiries and if there’s gonna be an exclusive manager responsible for your future project. To begin with, try to meet them in person first as it gives you the precise picture of further collaboration.

Sound relationships

Once you are confident about the dev company’s proficiency level and succeed in communication, it is high time to establish strong business relations with this digital agency. Bare in mind though that having a self-hosted eCommerce platform gives you much more opportunities to grow your online business, it requires solid tech support and maintenance. It holds true even after the development process is done and everything seems to be up and running.

You will definitely need further assistance – from getting new modules and extensions installed and tailoring some functions to better fit your changing business goals, up to orchestrating your current data and making backups. That’s why make clear the web development agency is ready to provide you with post development services.

Terms and time limits

Time is by far one of the most valuable things in business, especially in eCommerce. By setting distinct timeframes around the tasks you are going to relay, you secure yourself from any shortcomings that may occur. It must be your contractor’s concern to get web store development completed in time and without any implementation delays. To be ensure they will meet all the deadlines, try to find some feedback from the previous customers. You can look through the official website or, which is much more revealing, stalk the comments and threads on corporate social media pages. Reading Google reviews could be also of great use to help you clarify the matter.

Pricing

Quite evidently, that project costs are one of the most essential factors while launching your online shop. For the uninitiated, it often seems to be a no-brainer to allocate their funds properly. Budgeting, however, is a bit more complicated than simply giving your money to a third-party development company, even when you have tried and trusted collaboration.

To avoid the risks and not to be left in the lurch, plan all the upcoming expenses wisely. Your eCommerce store dev process may include multiple tasks that in their turn require separate spendings. With this in mind, ask your prospective contractor to come up with a detailed quote on your online project to be aware of any future expenditures.

Feel free to contact us, in case you need to set things straight with your eCommerce store.