Building and growing your business in the digital era demands an eCommerce partner that understands that challenges your business is facing, and one who can support you in the operational and strategic aspects of your business.
This may seem like an easy task given the abundance of agencies that offer eCommerce support, but it should be handled with deep consideration.
When choosing a partner agency to help you outline, create, develop, and improve your eCommerce site, consider these things:
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This seems obvious, but it is important; given the diverse nature of eCommerce, you will want to pick a partner with proven expertise in all areas of eCommerce that concern your business.
When evaluating options, asking for recommendations, case studies, and customer reviews will give you an understanding of whether or not the partner can turn your eCommerce goals into reality.
Briteskies has years of experience in eCommerce and ERP integration. Our longevity in a sometimes-volatile industry and our years of experience in other tech areas allow us to adapt and support the changing needs of our clients.
Strategy is a critical part of any business and if you haven't done it in-house, be sure to pick a partner who can help develop yours. Your partner should have a general process or framework for their strategy and it should be a repeatable, yet customizable approach for working toward eCommerce success.
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It is equally important to view each phase opportunity to discuss a topic and derive a strategy to achieve the set goals.
A key part of the Briteskies eCommerce strategy is discussing data requirements and rules. In this phase, we identify the necessity of data, how it is used, and where it will live as well as making sure that your integration is happening in all crucial areas of the business.
Integrating your eCommerce site with your other business systems is critical. Whether it includes your PIM, Order Management, CRM, Payments Gateways, or ERP, improving our integration channels helps enhance business efficiency and optimizes the customer experience. The key is to find a partner who has the expertise required to integrate with your systems.
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What sets us apart from other agencies is our expertise in integrating with legacy code. We were able to help integrate a legacy IBM i system with a custom Magento site with branded sub-sites allowing customers to peruse multiple brand catalogs from a single site. Beyond improve customer shopping experience, this also ensured that all online orders could be processed by the RPG-based IBM i through a series of transactions between customer orders, XML documents, API's and, IBM i systems.
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Today’s online shopper cannot be contained to a desktop.
Having just a website is not enough, you need to be present on every channel and the shift between them needs to be seamless. Communication between channels improves customer experience, whether that means improving communication with third-party shipping companies, or allowing customers to view order histories from multiple channels in one place, the more communication your business can have, the more improved the customer experience.
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Keeping every aspect of your site and customer experience impeccable after your site goes live is no small task. That is why it is imperative to find a partner who can offer you continuous growth and support as your eCommerce grows.
With a Briteskies team member at your helm, your eCommerce site will stay up-to-date and continuously supported through patches, upgrades, and day-to-day needs.
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There is no one-size-fits-all solution for eCommerce; your business is unique, it does and will continue to face specific challenges, and will have distinctive needs.
After a project with CVI, the eCommerce Coordinator had this to say:
We are able to move our customers to the website to place orders, which frees up our inside sales department to work on other important sales functions.
You need a partner that can help through every step of your journey, one who knows your business and systems and who will take the time to fully understand your site requirements and what tools are best suited to help you reach your eCommerce goals.
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If your site crashes in the middle of the night before Cyber Monday you want a partner that will jump into action to solve your problem and get your site live as fast as possible; minimizing profit losses. Make sure your partner will start work to fix your emergency issues within hours, not days.
Once you know that your potential partner is capable of completing the job, it is important to consider compatibility. You wouldn’t hire a team member without first considering how they would work with the rest of the group and you should take the same into consideration when choosing an eCommerce partner.
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As your team will work closely with this company, consider not only development styles but personality cohesion as well. You want a great site and a great experience while working on it.
Admittedly this is a metric that is harder to measure and ensure, but there are questions you can keep in mind -
At Briteskies, we want what is best for our customers and their business. We focus on building trust and relationships with our customers and recognize that both are earned, not given. The trust we build allows us to cultivate lasting relationships with our clients while helping them craft and improve on their eCommerce solutions.
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