Overcoming Challenges of the eCommerce Journey, from Development to Fulfillment

The eCommerce industry has been growing at a remarkable rate over the last few years. While the potential of growth is unprecedented, it’s not always smooth sailing.

From the development stage to fulfillment to launching and running a startup eCommerce platform, you go through many hurdles and it takes a lot of time and research to make sure the whole process from start to end runs without a hitch. Let’s discuss some of the challenges faced in each stage and some viable solutions and tips to overcome those.

Development Challenges in eCommerce Projects

When designing and developing an eCommerce platform, many issues can surface and obstruct the flow of the development process. Albeit, every issue that pops up will not demolish the whole project timeline but, there can be some insidious technical issues which, when not dealt with on time, can prove to be disastrous in the later stages.

Amidst the development of eCommerce projects, there were three problems in particular that we noticed the developers faced. We’ve listed them below and their solutions as well, so you stay one step ahead.

1. Third-Party Integrations

An eCommerce platform needs certain third-party tools or services to be connected. These could be anything or all from shopping cart systems, order processing platforms, analytics, payment platforms, or any other, depending on the requirements of the clients. If the eCommerce project entails a move to a headless commerce platform or modern framework, the opportunity to add more API-based connections and upgrade integrations would mean thorough planning is required. During third-party application testing, the integration may occasionally fail during use. Failure may occur if your product doesn’t support third-party integration or if the third-party application does not allow access to your product.

Mitigation Tips:

• Line out everything up-front on both the client and integrator sides beforehand, so you’re on the right track.
• Verify that only approved applications have access to your product by applying security measures that apply permissions and restrictions within the code.
• Check That Functionalities Remain Intact Following Integration and Prior to Upgrading.

2. User Experience

User experience is a very integral part of an eCommerce platform. The segmentation and flow of the platform, and the retail personalization of the products to be according to customer’s preferences is of utmost importance. Almost 70% of users abandon carts and exit websites for the User Experience was not smooth and didn’t live up to their expectations.

Mitigation Tips:

• Have a clean fuss-free design so customers can navigate through easily
• Have clear CTAs (call to action) so that the customers know exactly what to do.
• Navigation bar should be simple, coherent, compatible, and concise.

3. Mobile Responsiveness

In today’s digital era almost everyone connects to the online realm through mobile phones. A study shows that a whopping 70% of web traffic comes from mobile phones. Hence, your eCommerce platform should be highly responsive and device-agnostic with fast loading time. Your website should maintain the integrity of its contents but, while adapting to the specifics of different devices, all the while making it more user-friendly, and if the website takes too long to properly load, the customers will have no hesitation in leaving and going somewhere else.

Another factor to keep in mind to prevent downtime of the website at the time of high traffic is choosing the right server hosting. Shared hosting is mostly the cheapest package offered by companies and can actually be the ideal choice of hosting provided yours is a relatively newer website that does not handle a lot of sensitive information. However, if your website gets tons of traffic and requires a lot of resources a dedicated server would be the ideal choice as you won’t be sharing resources with anyone else, and your website can handle the max traffic allowed by the server. A dedicated server provides you a high level of autonomy, keeps your file system and database private, and completely secure.

Mitigation Tips:

• The practice of conditional loading is the best way to eradicate your responsive site’s loading stress, it loads only those page elements that the end-users need.
• The design should be ‘Pixel Perfect’, which can be done by having a ‘design system’ made prior to development, it’ll save a lot of developer’s time as well. And a pixel-perfect design automatically ensures mobile responsiveness.
• Instead of having to choose between dedicated and shared servers, there is Virtual Private Server hosting, a VPS, that is like a middle ground between shared and dedicated hosting, in which all the server’s resources are dedicated to running your website. VPS hosting is the best way for new eCommerce websites to have consistently fast loading. Also, VPS hosting is more secure and gives you more control.

Challenges in eCommerce Management

Ready to launch your online business? Now comes its management challenges. Your managers need to be wary of the following challenges to improve business results.

1. Driving Ample Traffic

It is indispensable to use quintessential channels that ensure the most apt traffic for each eCommerce site. With the rising trend of online shopping and increasing online consumers, it’s more important than ever to attract high-potential website visitors. But it’s easier said than done!

Here are five ways to drive traffic to your online store without flutes:

• Shopping Security_ your store should ensure navigation security framework, and display antivirus seals and warnings.
• Quality content_ expand your marketing material by incorporating blogs, newsletters, case studies, catalogs, brochures etc.
• SEO Marketing_ invest in a proper SEO marketing strategy and boost your online store’s performance.
• Social media_ social networks are great traffic drivers; Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, Instagram, Reddit and more.
• Email marketing_ send emails with promotional coupons etc when launching new products or on holidays.

2. Payment gateways and delivery options

An eCommerce platform requires an efficient payment gateway and multiple delivery options in order to add the safety of payments that would lead to customer loyalty and increased profits. Providing multiple delivery options at the point of purchase builds brand differentiation and loyalty using personalized delivery options, including cash on delivery, online bank transfer, pay in installments, and collect and pick-up networks.

Some of the benefits of implementing payment gateways are:

• Easy Checkout_ Payment gateway enables swift and seamless checkout experience and makes online shopping as easy as possible.
• Impulse purchase_ Being provided with an easy payment option will undoubtedly make an increase in sales.
• Security_ Payment gateways provide secure transactions as they are often compliant with security standards like PCI DSS.

Payment gateways also integrate with your shopping cart, provide faster payment processing, and provide customers the option of multiple payment options, chargeback prevention, fraud management, and prevent recurring billing.

3. Inventory Management

Another pressing issue is keeping track of the overall inventory. You should make sure you have a running report every day to understand where your inventory stands. Your platform should allow you to quickly change an item to Out of stock and a product ID system to get a real-time view of your prices, especially on sales things are likely to get messed up. Keep an inventory of safety stock for when your sales exceed expectations. Always Look at past purchases to predict future stock. CRMs and inventory management systems are two of the tools you should carefully consider for your business.

4. Providing Best Customer Service

Customer satisfaction is one of the biggest challenges of running an online store. You wouldn’t want your customers to go on putting bad words about you on the internet, people are always just one step away from doing it lest a minor inconvenience occurs. All businesses manage to get the shipping of products to the end-user rightly done, but here’s the crux of the matter; refund policy. All customers want is hassle-free returns, after all the customer is trusting you with their money. Keep your policies transparent, provide various options for payment and shipping, if the product is in less than perfect condition or if the shortcoming is on your part, be bold enough to accept it and put measures to make the customer happy and they’ll be more than willing to shop again.

The Next Steps

Once you have achieved up to the mark eCommerce development, you’ve made a fresh start out in the market, now it’s time to amalgamate the business. This would inculcate constantly improving the platform’s functionalities to stay upright with the ever evolving market trends, and offer the smoothest shopping experience to customers. It’s time to develop a proper marketing strategy to adapt to certain business needs. As your business is created you should now focus on optimizing the results and make way for a steady growth in the market in order to survive.

A comprehensive development process is of foremost importance. If you have a spectacular development process, the rest of the things start falling into place slowly. So, stop looking around, what are you waiting for, Visnext provides top-notch eCommerce development services where you don’t have to worry about staying with the technology curve as we include the best and most technologically advanced solutions every step of the way! Take a look at one of our recent eCommerce products.