5 essential priorities for success as an ecommerce pure-player
User Experience (UX)
Many ecommerce pure-players are relatively new players with lower brand awareness than, for example, established retailers with physical stores in combination with digital commerce.
For many, UX thus becomes the new brand that enables them to create superior buying experiences than their competitors and thus a real perceived value for customers.
Potential customers do not excuse you for a bad experience because you are a smaller player with fewer resources than your competitor, for them it is very simple: "If others can do it, you should be able to do it!"
The online store is their most important channel and the user experience is their most important tool to achieve long-term goals such as a good reputation and trust, but also to achieve short-term goals such as conversion, loyalty and turnover.
Our experience is that it is easy to agree with this, but it is nevertheless under-prioritised and that is the reason why you can still use user experience as part of your differentiation strategy from several competitors.
Read more about how we work with UX here
Best of breed evens out the difference between large and small
Traditionally, the best and most innovative technology on the market has been reserved for the largest companies, but this is no longer the case.
Because if you use an Open Source and API-driven ecommerce platform such as Magento Open Source and Adobe Commerce, you have the opportunity to connect to the best services on the market in what is referred to as a "best of breed strategy", instead for being locked to the ecommerce platform's functionality in isolation.
Good examples of this are personalization services such as Nosto and Clerk , on-site search such as Algolia, Marketing Automation and CRM such as Voyado and DotDigital or product reviews such as Lipscore and Yotpo.
By all means, there is still technology that costs an arm and a leg, but our experience is that medium and large companies use the same services to a much greater extent so that the difference between large and small players is reduced.
If you want a fast pace of development and a future-proof digital platform that gives you the opportunity to compete with the best, then it will be important to choose an open source platform that facilitates such a best-of-breed strategy.
Read more about our platforms for digital commerce here
Speed
Delivering a fast and responsive online store has a direct impact on SEO, user experience and conversion. At the same time, it is a complex topic that requires more than turning up the server capacity.
Several online stores want a Headless Commerce approach where the front-end is disconnected from the back-end in order to, among other things, increase speed.
We have developed Harmony which is a front-end based on Magento PWA Studio which we use in our Headless Commerce projects.
Scalability
We have seen several good growth companies go from early success to complete chaos because they never planned for operational scalability. Fortunately, we have managed to save some with major turnaround operations, but others have never been able to recover.
What we often experience is that when you start an online store, you think it is easy to handle orders and products from the online store's administration panel, but as the company grows, it will go from simple to ineffective. It is from this stage that many pure-players who experience rapid growth have major problems with increased personnel costs that change the margin picture to handle manual tasks, slower deliveries, lack of control and poorer customer service.
Managing growth can be just as challenging as creating growth, so we work with this topic strategically and operationally for our customers.
Our solution architects work to streamline and automate internal tasks for our customers. We use our integration platform Flow in all projects where we integrate the online store with services such as ERP & POS to name a few.
Sparring partner
Succeeding in digital commerce is about more than bits & bytes, even recognized online shopping platforms have their success stories and failures, because the technology is a hygiene factor, it is the expertise that makes the difference.
eCommerce pure players often have smaller internal teams and therefore limited expertise spread across many disciplines. Therefore, it is particularly important that we, as your dedicated eCommerce agency, act as an active sparring partner that you can use to strengthen internal competence and outsource tasks that you do not have time to carry out yourself.
We do this by working strategically, operationally and with our services within UX.
