How to select the best E-commerce Website development company for your project?

Back in 2013, when I had just graduated, I thought of starting an E-commerce portal of my own, which deals with a niche like sea food. E-commerce boom had just started to pick up that time. All in one players like Flipkart, Snapdeal, Ebay, Junglee (amazon was operating in this name before it entered India in 2014) had started to do business quite aggressively, where as vertical players like Myntra, Jabong, Urbanladder etc had started focusing on their particular niches. As is very difficult to compete with the big & cash heavy players in the market, so I decided to go for a particular product with a vision of scalability & product diversification. Primary market research was done, suppliers were selected, target market was selected and we had started operations. But to grow the business, we needed credibility in terms of our web presence & along with that we wanted to give a hassle free buying experience to our customers. For that reason, I wanted to build an online sea food website, through which our customers can explore a wide verity of options and order them while sitting at home. So in the month of August 2013, I started searching for an E-commerce website development company who can build an E-commerce portal for me as per my requirement. I did my graduation in Mechanical Engineering & that time my technical skills related to computer science was at absolute 0 level. Anyway, after talking to few of the E-commerce website development companies in Bangalore, I had shortlisted 4 companies in the primary stage. I didn’t have much knowledge about the back-end technologies & stacks they were explaining that time. Some were pushing me for PHP based, some were for python, some for NodeJS and some were also pushing me for Ruby on rails. Anyway, after discussing with many people, I decided to go ahead with a PHP based E-commerce portal. I selected one of the best website development companies in Bangalore and agreed to the terms, conditions & payment process along with after delivery services. They had given me a timeline of 45 days and for the entire development they were charging me approx. * Lacs in INR. I kept on paying them as per the development progress. When I had paid almost 80 % amount, I wanted to see the final outcome. When they had shown me the work and the final delivery, I felt like a mountain had just fallen on to my head. The portal was looking so horrible, looking like being made by an amateur. The CMS didn’t have options to even increase quantity of the product and add offers. They couldn’t even manage to add a proper payment gateway feature to the portal. Overall, the website was looking third class with pathetic UI/UX. After a lot of argument, I decided to at least start the operations through portal. As I had told earlier, due to faulty payment gateway integration, customer payment was failing and after multiple failed attempts, CC avenue ( the integrated payment gateway that time) had blocked our account. For this issue, I asked the so called top website development company to resolve the problem, but instead of helping, they started asking me for more amount which was hefty. So I decided not to go ahead with them and started searching for other web development companies in Bangalore to help me in this regard. But whoever I contacted, everyone asked me for the source code. When I asked for the source code for the E-commerce portal, they denied, instead asked me to pay almost 3 times the total cost which I had already paid them only for the source code. As I couldn’t find any alternatives, so I filed a lawsuit against them, but lost that as well, as their terms & conditions were favoring them only. I had run out of funds by that time and didn’t want to drag it further. The business, which could have grown as big as Licious/ fresh to home etc was brought to a complete stop. Being a naive to the technical world, I lost my money, time and a great business opportunity.

So, to all wannabe entrepreneurs, I don’t want you people to face the problems that I had had faced in my earlier days. Starting an E-commerce store still holds enormous potential to grow considering the internet penetration and information availability to the mass. So our team at Plixbox not only understands your technical requirement, but also will give you suggestions for it’s growth as well. So, Let’s discuss a bit about the E-commerce market and it’s growth potential in future.

E-commerce trends and future growth potentials

Let’s make a comparison between retails & E-commerce. There has been a steady growth in the overall value of retail transactions happened over years. But E-commerce still contributes to a very less chunk of it. In 2019, E-commerce contributed to only approx 14% transactions out of the entire world wide retail transactions. With a steady growth rate and increased data consumption, it is expected to contribute to approx 22 % by the end of 2023. And for obvious reasons after it reaches its peak ( may be with in next 10 years), it will achieve a stagnation phase.

Many people might be thinking that they are late to start the E-commerce business, but believe me, you are not too late in this game. 2009-2014 was the golden period to start E-commerce business, as the market penetration was less, when many horizontal players proliferated in the market. But now if you want to start your E-commerce store, it is highly advisable to start vertical E-commerce business and to just focus on particular niches you have expertise in.

PWA and AMP, a must have for E-commerce Websites

People are switching to mobile commerce. If a website takes more than 3 secs to load, almost 50% consumers abandon the site. Many E-commerce companies have opted for mobile first approach and have seen success as well. To give optimal user experience, the website should be PWA ( Progressive web application) ready. In PWA ready E-commerce stores, the web page shortcut is saved on the mobile home screen, thus making the user access the website instantly. Advantage of PWA is that, it gives the functionality like an app, but you don’t have to download that while helping you save some space on your device. A must have thing in your E-commerce website is to make it AMP ( accelerated mobile pages). Here the stripped down version of the html web pages are loaded instantly. Google has been prioritizing the mobile first indexing for ranking purpose. Our experts in Plixbox will help you building your website, which are PWA & AMP ready. We build websites while adhering to mobile first approach and latest goolgle algorithms.

Digital Marketing for E-commerce

If you have an already existing business, the E-commerce website will give you an identity and brand value. Even if you are starting anything from scratch, the E-commerce website is the very first thing that you need to show your online presence and trust. Here I am going to tell you what to do, once you have an online store. Many people might think that once you build a website, users will come on automatically and buy the products. Unfortunately things don’t work that way. Even if you have a website, how will people know that? So here you have to spend some bucks in advertising and marketing.  To help you grow organically, you have to do SEO, but it is a long term process. If you are following the shortcuts like white black-hat techniques, there will be massive penalties from all search engines in future. For instant success, you can advertise your products on platforms like google, facebook, instagram, youtube, tiktok, linkedin etc. It requires a combination of strategy and platforms to get the best ROI of your business. Our digital marketing experts in Plixbox knows it very well where to spend and how to spend the client’s money, so that he/she will get the best ROI of it. So once you build your website, we at Plixbox will help you scale up your business and maintain a healthy bottom line of your business.

Conclusion

It’s never too late to start a business. If you are investing you time and money in right direction, success is inevitable. Never fall prey to cheap offers, as there is a saying, “You get what you pay for”. If you don’t have any technical expertise related to something, feel free to ask our experts. Being a pioneer at E-commerce website development, we at Plixbox are always happy to assist our clients for their business in all possible ways.