In our experience, the key elements for a successful online store are simplicity and flexibility – seasonal changes, stock availability, customer trends and many other factors mean that owners of e-commerce websites must be able to react quickly.
Some hosted e-commerce solutions are very simple and cheap (or even free) to set up by non-technical users, however these systems tend to be quite inflexible and are only really suitable for the most basic stores. On the other hand, asking a developer to make changes to a bespoke e-commerce solution will probably result in a hefty price tag, a couple of month’s delay and a lot of painstaking testing – and then probably another delay while bugs are ironed out!
To offer the best of both worlds by maximising security, simplicity and flexibility for our clients, we develop e-commerce websites using Opencart and Magento – both of which are industry-standard platforms and help us to deploy solutions very quickly and efficiently.
Each retailer’s business is uniqe, it is very likely that each retailer’s website is, or should be, unique too. We often find that there is something specific that our clients need their online store to do – it may be an product design tool, a stock import from a drop-ship supplier, a loyalty scheme or even a multi-store setup which allows them to sell the same product at a different price to a different market sector.
All of these things and many many more are relatively simple for us to ‘bolt on’ to an Opencart or Magento store, because there is a worldwide third-party extension marketplace – whatever it is that you need for your store, it is quite likely that someone has already developed it (or something similar that we can quickly adjust). Suddenly something that was out of reach for cost or time reasons is very much within reach, and could potentially be installed on your website within a day or two of your request – and at a very low cost.
The use of mobile phones and tablets to visit websites is rapidly becoming the norm, many of our customer’s Google Analytics statistics are reporting around 50% of all traffic being via a mobile device. Mobile devices are often constrained by display size and ideally require a different screen layout to avoid a lot of ‘pinching and zooming’.
Our modern approach of using CSS ensures that your online store will respond to fit whatever browser it is viewed on, whether it be today on an iPhone or in the future on a device that hasn’t been launched yet. From the very start of the project we consider how your site will look and work on a mobile, particularly the all-important ‘buy now’ button.
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