So, what points should be considered before choosing an e-commerce platform? Here, PowerSync explores the fundamental aspects to consider when deciding the right eCommerce platform and shows the benefits of magento integration with salesforce.
This includes issues related to functional and non-functional requirements.
Table of Contents
Budgetary requirement
Money…everyone’s favorite subject. When it comes to software, budgets determine everything. The services provided by e-commerce platforms vary greatly in price. Budget requirements include design and development costs, fixed costs, marketing, integration, SEO and licensing.
Design and development costs are by far the biggest expense for your enterprise. Corporate website design and development costs start at $100,000 and can reach over $10,000,000 if you decide to use an outside agency. One of the most important aspects to consider is how your design will be done. You need to decide whether you want to build your online store using an existing team or hiring a team from a software agency. Design costs vary depending on whether you’re building your e-commerce site using purchased themes or building it from scratch (custom design).
Maintenance costs include platform support, SEO optimization, analytics, and data management. You must take into account the costs of maintaining your online store once it is set up.
Fixed costs are consistent monthly payments
These include things like website hosting, transactions, and subscriptions. For hosted platforms like Shopify, you have to pay for monthly subscriptions and transactions. For self-hosted platforms like Magento, you have to pay for server storage, bandwidth, and plugins.
Integrations
Generally, existing integrations or modules will cost less than developing custom solutions. You should consider such fees when comparing different platforms.
Marketing costs
Marketing costs are the most important aspects from a strategic point of view. They include the costs of Google Ads and posters.
Licensing
Some licenses cost the same each year; others are revenue-based and will increase as your online store grows. Think carefully about the impact of the license structure on long-term costs.
Design requirements
If you want to achieve your marketing goals, you will need a beautiful and user-friendly design. When designing your website, you can apply ready-made themes or a custom design.
Ready-made themes can be found on any platform
You can choose a theme from an extensive theme library and apply it to your website design. These templates are quite affordable and sometimes free. However, you are not allowed to create any unique designs that you may need for your online store.
Custom design
All visual and functional features of a website, such as color palette, font size, web page layouts, scrolling animations, adaptive adaptation and many other design features are created, coded and tested specifically for the requirements of your brand and its target audience. A customized approach gives you the opportunity to create a website unique to your project. Sure, you can pay more, but the likelihood that someone else will have the same design is nil in this case.
Whether you decide to use a custom or off-the-shelf theme, make sure that your online store design reflects a professional image of your business.
Long-term goals
Determining long-term goals before choosing a corporate platform gives you the opportunity to focus on what’s most important within the project. You need to think hard about what your online store will be like in five years.
- What current enterprise e-commerce platforms will allow you to achieve those goals?
- What kind of development will be needed?
- Where would you like to see your company in three years? Five years from now?
- There are many paths you can take. E-commerce platforms will offer you a variety of off-the-shelf features for a variety of fees.
Although the technology is steadily evolving, comparing on a licensing basis can still be helpful. One solution may cost less in the first year, but in the long run it can cost a lot more. For example, some solutions have a more powerful feature set, which means fewer tweaks will be needed to meet enterprise goals in the future.
Search engine optimization (SEO) strategy
It’s a well-known fact that all online activity begins with a search. Thus, you are likely to have difficulty if visitors cannot find your online store through Google. Search engines read the keywords you include in your online store to determine the content of your website and determine if your online store is an appropriate search result.
When choosing an enterprise e-commerce platform to launch your online store, it’s critical to consider SEO features in your decision-making process. Let’s take a look at three key features your e-commerce platform should have.
Editable Robot Exclusion Protocol
A robot exclusion protocol is a text file that tells web spiders which pages on your site to crawl. The Robots.txt file allows you to tell the search robot which pages to ignore when crawling your site and which URLs and directories to identify in order to index them for search engines.
This is especially useful for blocking search engines from crawling files other than HTML (e.g., PDF) that do not support the robots meta tag. The no index robots meta tag is the best solution to keep certain pages from appearing in Google search results. It is better to find an e-commerce platform that allows you to set up individual pages to display the no index meta tag.
Google Analytics-enabled site search
Your online e-commerce store should allow users to search for items on your site. Your e-commerce platform should be integrated with Google Analytics site search reporting. This allows you to check the keywords that users enter when they search.
While this feature seems pretty obvious, many e-commerce platforms only support basic Google Analytics code, but do not support Google Analytics e-commerce transaction tracking. When choosing a platform, it is advisable to check if the platform supports Google Analytics e-commerce tracking.
Canonical URLs
- Canonical URLs allow you to syndicate your content in different places on the web, while letting Google focus on only one URL. This allows Google to determine the page you want to rank. This is a useful solution when you need to use multiple URLs for the same product category.
- If your e-commerce business uses multiple domains, you need to spend some time setting up canonical URLs or 301 redirects to send users and search engines to a different URL than the one they originally requested. If you don’t do this, you risk lowering your search rankings by sending traffic to broken links.
- If calculating 301 redirects and canonical URLs isn’t right for you, an eCommerce platform that supports automatic redirects may be the solution.
