Ziffity Solutions
Ziffity Solution is one of the leading Magento Ecommerce development company in United states. Having 100 plus fortune clients across the world.
Source: https://ziffity.com/
Partnerships are the bedrock of a successful eCommerce business. Outsourcing your eCommerce development project can help you focus on crucial areas that demand undivided attention like sales and marketing.
However, finding the right eCommerce agency is a tough task as there are hundreds of agencies providing development services no matter which platform you choose.
In this blog, we will be walking you through 8 simple steps that could help you find the best partner for your scope and budget. Before we get started, there are a couple of prerequisites to narrow down options faster.
A – HAVING A SCOPE DOCUMENT
At least at a high level, you need to define what you’re looking for so that it’s easier for the agency to understand.
You can do it by preparing a list that consists of details like technology stack, outcomes you are expecting from your project, staffing resources, if any, areas to build, areas for improvement, and operational bottlenecks.
In stages where you think you have a potential partner, you can disclose further information like competitor challenges, buyer personas, existing customers’ experience, use cases, analytics, operational protocols, and so on.
B – HAVING A CRITERIA CHECKLIST FOR SELECTING THE AGENCY
On what parameters are you going to select the agencies? You need to define those ahead of time. It could be the size of the agency, local presence, timezone overlaps, capabilities across design, technology and marketing, B2B / B2C eCommerce experience, payment gateway, ERP integration experience, pricing, and few others which could be specific to your needs and business.
Developer certification is a crucial factor that shouldn’t be overlooked. It vouches for the credibility of the developers of an agency you are looking to sign up. Certified developers are evaluated based on various criteria like technical-know how, coding skills, ability to identify gaps, and so on. Such a resourceful team member can add value to your eCommerce project.
Now let’s get started with the process.
STEP 1:
Talk to the eCommerce platform providers. It could be Magento, Hybris, Demandware, Shopify, or any other.
Get four to five agency partner names which they think will fit the bill for the scope of work you have and the budget for the project. However, this will work if you are looking for an Enterprise version or a premium version of a platform.
If you’re looking for an open-source version, Google for the top eCommerce agencies in the platform you are looking for. Also, try service-based keywords like Managed services and Magento Implementation alongside the platform name to identify more potential service providers.
STEP 2:
Perform an online pre-qualification for all the agencies. Understand how big they are, the number of consultants they have, service offerings, number of certified developers in the platform you are looking for.
Check on their case studies, reviews, ratings, pricing, FAQs, if it’s available on their website, and also see if you can find some testimonials. Once you’re satisfied with what you see, go ahead and reach out to them. In this tab, you need to eliminate two of the five agencies you have.
STEP 3:
Get on a call with the agencies. Once the introduction part is done and if you have seen some of their work and you’re satisfied with the answers, provide your scope document to them so they can provide you a proposal.
In the whole process, see if they are receptive, responsive, asking good questions, coming out as experts in the eCommerce field, and trying to understand your challenges and aspirations. Also, see if they are identifying growth opportunities that you haven’t realized and suggesting areas for improvement.
Feel the experience they have provided you so far and compare that with other agencies. This process might take more than a couple of calls with each agency.
STEP 4:
Evaluate agencies on all the criteria you have. Go through the proposal and see if the scope is well defined, pricing, timeline, and deliverables from the discovery phase are clear, project approach and communication plan is mentioned, and milestones are well established as well.
Also, in this phase, you should be having an idea about their project development process and average turnaround time. Agile development methodologies best suit eCommerce projects as they result in better project control, reduced risks, faster ROI, stable releases. These factors ensure continuous growth and innovation.
When it comes to average turnaround time, don’t be deceived by the idea that an agency that delivers in a short time is the best. What matters to you is whether the development agency has a practice of sticking to a timeline. Agencies driven by the Agile development process will be able to deliver projects in sprints at a constant pace.
Based on your evaluation, you need to boil down to two agencies now.
STEP 5:
Ask for a reference customer to whom you can speak and know more about the agency. When it comes to reference checks, always read between the lines on what their existing customers are saying. Ask open-ended questions than pointed ones.
Examples – What has been your end to end experience working with XYZ agency? What made you sign up with them? Did they deliver on the promises they made during the sales process? Etc
STEP 6:
By now, you would know whom you want to go ahead with. Before you finalize, answer these questions.
In spite of you meticulously choosing the agency, what if you
Don’t like the work of the agency, three weeks into the engagement?
How do you de-risk yourself?
What if you are not happy with the particular team members allocated to you?
How would you stay in the loop about the project update?
Know how change requests will work if there is a scope change.
Get to know the single point of contact from the development side to discuss your opinions when it comes to changes, progress or updates. A well-structured eCommerce development team generally has a dedicated project manager to deliver updates to stakeholders.
Also, for escalations, ask the development firm for their Escalation Matrix. An Escalation Matrix includes people in different roles, like project managers, directors, and so on. The team will be the set of people to contact in case there is an alert. As a stakeholder, it will be helpful for you to hold the development agency accountable for its shortcomings, if any.
Get answers for these questions before you move forward.
STEP 7:
Contract part. Your legal finance team can help you in this process. This might take some time, and if you wish to start the work early, check with the agency if they can start with an email approval. Check the team composition, how the hours of billing are split on a daily and hourly basis.
Understand how the SOW works and its terms. Know how change requests will work if there is a scope change.
STEP 8:
Step eight. Now, you’re all set. Form a project team at your end, and you’re ready to kick off.
We hope that the tips mentioned above will help in bettering your vendor selection skills.
Ziffity, being an Adobe Silver partner, helps brands in their Digital Transformation journey with Adobe’s cluster of products. Here are some of Adobe’s products which can help you: Digital disruption has been in the know for more than a decade now. Almost every organization is thinking of adopting digital technologies to help them operate and fulfill customer needs better.
Brick and mortar stores now rely on digital storefronts while the service industry is trying to reach their audiences through web, mobile-based applications. Manufacturing, on the other side, is improving operational efficiency through automation and IoT technologies.
For every business, big or small, the way of going about digital transformation differs, but the inevitable challenges are budget, time, and effort involved.
It is important to have a clear approach to justify the cost of transformation and predict possible risks. This blog highlights a 5-step framework for retailers and distributors to create a well laid out plan to ensure successful outcomes.
STEP 1: START WITH STRATEGIC OBJECTIVES
Digital transformation is not just finding a technology solution to empower a single process or a system in your organization. Instead, it is conceived as a process to revamp the entire business process and develop new competitive advantages.
To start with, determine the objective and scope. For instance, you might want to reduce operational costs, automate repetitive manual processes to release talents for more critical tasks, explore cross-border selling, reach customers across different digital touchpoints, and so on.
In this phase, the leadership team consisting of the board members, CEO, and the management have to group to reimagine your business process and service delivery for digital transformation.
STEP 2: GET YOUR OPERATIONAL TEAM ONBOARD
Rope in your operational team not only to align them with the digital transformation goals but also to set goals based on their inputs.
Your operational teams include warehouse staff, fulfillment staff, finance, and so on. Explain to them, plans like ‘What’s in it for them?’ ‘What are you transforming to?’, ‘How will their capabilities improve?’ and ‘How the revenue landscape will undergo a transition?’. Gather inputs like their operational challenges and areas that can be automated.
Objections could be raised relating to compatibility with existing management tactics. By the end of this phase, you should be ready to chalk out a staff training plan to get them performing faster, post your digital transformation project.
STEP 3: DEFINE SHORT-TERM AND LONG-TERM GOALS
Once the teams and management share the same vision, it is time to set up goals. People heading all the departments have to work coherently to enable the rest of the eCommerce ecosystem. Agree upon the topline vision and start working on creating a process to make that happen. In other words, define your short and long-term goals.
For instance, let’s consider improving customer experience with content (product data) as your topline goal. Work on the long-term and short-term goals that can help you get there. In this case, your short-term goal could be perfecting the product information you accumulate from various third-party vendors, creating a content format for every channel, and delivering it with ease.
Using a PIM system can be a classic example. With PIM, you can create a centralized repository for all product-related information, including images, videos, specifications, and descriptions.
You can involve multiple internal teams like design, content, and marketing to collaborate and work on improving data consistency and channel-specific content. Such a collaborative environment will improve team productivity and product discovery across web, mobile, and social channels, ultimately leading to enhanced customer experience through content.
STEP 4: FINDING THE RIGHT TECHNOLOGIES AND IMPLEMENTATION PARTNERS
New technologies with old processes are just a way of replacing your existing system with an expensive alternative that doesn’t bring any significant improvement that you aim for. Now that you have defined your process and goals, finding the right technologies and implementation partners is all you have to do.
For retailers and distributors in an eCommerce landscape, the following are the systems that need to be considered for digital transformation.
ERP / WMS – try to see if you can move from a legacy to a modern ERP, a modern architecture that helps you with better integration and flexibility.
Centralizing your customer and product data.
Better customer experience using new age eCommerce and content management platforms.
Agile sales and support – which includes CRM and customer support system.
Omnichannel marketing automation – Achieve consistency in messaging across all channels.
Robust Cloud infrastructure along with data security.
Deep data analytics.
And finally, powering the entire ecosystem using AI and Machine Learning data models.
STEP 5: ZERO IN ON THE TECHNOLOGIES AND IMPLEMENTATION PARTNER
The first thing to do while choosing an implementation partner is to eliminate bias. Just because you’ve worked with a technology partner before doesn’t mean that they will be the appropriate choice for your digital transformation project.
You’ll have to consider questions like ‘Do they have the technical expertise?’, ‘Do they have prior experience working on similar use cases like yours?’, ‘What results have they achieved using technologies for similar companies?’ and so on.
Look out for partners who have a deep understanding of your pain points and strengths so that they suggest the right technologies to make your digital transformation project a success.
HOW CAN ZIFFITY HELP?
Ziffity, being an Adobe Silver partner, helps brands in their Digital Transformation journey with Adobe’s cluster of products. Here are some of Adobe’s products which can help you:
CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE
CREATIVE MARKETING
ECOMMERCE
ANALYTICS
The retail and eCommerce landscape in the UK is changing. It’s not entirely because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The political scenario, the rise of online marketplace stores, changing consumer demands, and Gen Z Consumer Activism, all have a hand in dictating new trends. As a retail business owner, it is imperative to consider these trends to keep winning despite their impact.
Our blog discusses the top 5 trends that would disrupt eCommerce beyond 2020. We’ll also discuss the challenges and opportunities they provide to help you align your business to the changing market.
Before we get into the trends, let’s have a look at UK’s retail eCommerce market scene in 2019 to understand the changes happening, better:
UK retail sales in 2019 grew 3.4%, reaching £394 billion, despite the uncertainty of Brexit and contentious elections. Over the past 10 years, online sales have grown by an impressive 324% and now account for 19% of total retail sales, making the UK the third-largest online market in the world and the biggest in Europe.
Such a strong eCommerce market that has seen tremendous growth year-over-year has been tested by multiple challenges like the pandemic, Brexit, to name a few. And more challenges are adding up.
#1 COVID-19
On the evening of March 23, Boris Johnson announced lockdown measures as an attempt to stem the spread of COVID-19.
Panic buying and stockpiling ensued immediately. As per a survey conducted by Blacktower Financial Management Group, shopping in the UK increased by £361.4 per week. However, the boon was short-lived. The British Retail Consortium (BRC) estimated that the lockdown meant a hefty £1.8 billion in lost sales each week for non-food shops, and warned that many might be shut permanently.
However, the long term impact is expected to be in favor of online retailers. Many who traditionally resisted e-commerce now have no choice in the matter. A survey by Retail Economics found that two-thirds of UK shoppers said they had switched to purchasing products online that they have always purchased in-store before the pandemic.
#2 BREXIT
For decades UK retailers enjoyed free access to shoppers across Europe, but those sales will face new constraints as a result of Brexit. To begin, sellers will need to adhere to EU standards and wider trade policies and regulations.
Differences in UK-EU policies and standards will almost certainly increase compliance costs and product lead times for UK retailers, which in turn, may make them less competitive. They’ll also need to address issues with EU labeling.
On the other hand, research on long term impact suggests that Brexit will boost online sales. Markets and Research report – eCommerce, which already accounts for 19% of total retail in the UK, will see a boost as a result of Brexit. The report says, by 2023, more than one-quarter of the UK’s overall retail sales could be online.”
#3 THE RISE OF ONLINE MARKETPLACES
According to GlobalData’s UK Online Marketplace Retailing 2019-2024 report, spending via online marketplaces, such as Amazon and eBay, reached £26.2 billion in 2019 and will climb another £13.1 billion over the next five years.
Amazon sales in the UK are particularly strong, outperforming the rest of the retail market in 2019.
Though this appears to be a challenge for retailers, they can turn it to their favor by creating a marketplace strategy. For many consumers, product discovery begins on Amazon. So, starting to sell on Amazon could prove to be an excellent strategy for retailers to acquire more new customers.
Also, brands can provide a limited selection of their product catalog on the marketplace, luring audiences to check out more on their exclusive online stores.
#4 ECOMMERCE DOMINANCE
The lockdown has cemented the dominance of eCommerce in retail sales. According to the Office of National Statistics, online sales in May 2020 accounted for an astonishing 30% of total retail sales.
As fears of second and third waves of the virus mount, consumers are likely to continue favoring the online channel, and ultimately change their behavior permanently.
eCommerce retailers are also innovating at a rapid pace to provide all the convenience that consumers experience in in-store shopping while buying online. With advanced marketing tools, AI-powered recommendation engines, chatbots, mobile wallets, and flexible payment models, both personalization and buying convenience have significantly improved, blurring the lines between online and offline shopping.
#5 CONSUMER ACTIVISM
From green manufacturing to fair wages paid to factory workers, consumers are demanding more from a brand than just selling quality products.
74% of British consumers say brands should take responsibility for the practices their suppliers engage in when manufacturing their products. Half of all UK consumers say they’d pay more for a product if it avoids plastic packaging.
Gen Zers and millennials are those who are leading such activism largely.
The implications of consumer activism on brands is real and urgent. When critics of the Black Lives Matter movement threatened to boycott Yorkshire Tea, the brand responded by asking them to stop buying their tea and tweeted its stand on racism.
Retailers will feel pressure to ensure the well-being and economic practices of their supply chains, as well as make them more transparent for consumers.
FINAL WORDS
UK consumers are shifting towards online sales, and their mindset is changing. In May 2020, UK’s online sales spiked from 20% to 30%. In parallel, stories of racial injustice, appalling conditions in factories, cruel treatment of animals, among many other social issues, are prompting shoppers to “vote with their pounds.”
The successful brands and retailers in the next five years will be those that can provide shoppers with a personalized and engaging shopping experience, along with transparency into the supply chains and sustainability practices.
If you are a retail brand curious to spruce up your eCommerce presence, Ziffity can help. Talk to our eCommerce consultants to plan your roadmap.
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Considering replatforming your eCommerce site? Migrating to a platform like Magento Commerce 2 is an excellent way to enhance your site’s performance, benefit from best-in-class security, and add all of those bells and whistles you’ve longed to implement on your website.
Choosing the right platform to migrate to is a huge decision and one that will have far-reaching and long-lasting impacts on your business. Here are five factors to consider when replatforming.
1: STATE OF YOUR ECOMMERCE SITE
Like many brands, your site has been on your current platform for five years or more, and it has a lot of baggage. Promotions and products that were all the rage five to seven years ago no longer resonate with today’s customers.
A crucial first step is to make a list of the features to take with you and which ones to leave behind. Now add all the features and functionality you’ll need to grow your business over the next five to seven years.
Once you have your list sort them into three buckets:
Table stakes – These are the features, like product configurators and product filtering, that are essential to the people who buy from you. All of these features must be in place on the day your new site goes live.
Round 2 Features – Once your site is deployed and stabilized, you’ll have a chance to enhance it with the features and functionality that are important but could wait a month or two after the initial launch.
Future Releases – These are the features you know that you’d like to have someday, such as a custom sales rep mobile app or a customer-facing PWA app. It’s essential to include this wishlist in your initial platform evaluation process so that you can pick a provider that can meet your future needs as well.
2: OMNICHANNEL SUPPORT
Change is a hallmark of eCommerce, and more broadly, the tech industry, and nowhere do we feel its effects than how customers choose to engage with brands. 5G will soon be available worldwide. Meanwhile, COVID-19 has made many people afraid to shop in-store.
Omnichannel support is essential to any brand whose goal is to keep up with the consumer. Look for a platform with broad omnichannel support, such as mobile-friendliness, PWA support, flexibility to integrate third-party marketplace websites, the ability to buy online and pick up in-store, select which location to pick up and order, ship to multiple locations, support for social commerce and so on.
3: THIRD-PARTY INTEGRATIONS
Make a list of all the third-party integrations to backend systems and apps you’ll need to get your online store and digital marketing initiatives up and running. You’ll need to assess the work, time, and expense required to integrate your new platform with these things. Critical backend integrations include your ERP, CRM, and marketing automation platforms, as well as your payment gateway and security systems.
Some platforms have connectors to major third-party backend systems that streamline the process. If not, partners like Ziffity have extensive experience in integrating eCommerce platforms with backend systems, so it’s not at a disadvantage if you have, say, a homegrown ERP. It’s more a matter of building these integrations into your launch timeline and budget.
4: DATA MIGRATION
Data migration is often the culprit for missed launched dates and all-night coding sessions. It can be a messy process to move data from one system to another. Data munging — synchronizing field names, the way dates are displayed, eliminating redundant records, etc. — is often time-consuming and frustrating. For this reason, identify and document your data migration needs early in the process.
DATA SOURCES
There are a lot of decisions to make around which data sources to bring over, and how much historical data needs to migrate to the new site.
CATALOG
How much of your existing product catalog do you want to bring over? Chances are you have products you no longer sell hiding within your catalog. (it frustrates users when they search for an item, go to the PDP only to be told it’s no longer sold).
CONTENT PAGES
Replatforming is a good time to look at your content pages and cull what’s no longer relevant.
ORDERS
Many eCommerce teams assume that they should migrate their complete order history, but is that necessary? Remember that data will still be available in your ERP system. The only order data you should bring over is that which helps you understand a current customer’s or prospect’s needs.
CUSTOMERS
You’ll want to migrate customer data for your active customers. A case can be made for including lapsed customers, especially if you’re going to send them custom messages when they return to your site after a long absence (e.g., “Welcome back! We’ve missed you.”) How far back to go is dependent on your brand, sales cycle, price point and so on.
PROMOTIONS
Over the years, you’ve built a ton of great promos and offers into your site, but times have changed. Migrate only those that are relevant to your customer experience today.
REVIEWS
Reviews are a great conversion tool, but when they’re old, they can work against you. Pick a cutoff date that’s right for your brand, and leave the rest behind.
5: MULTINATIONAL SUPPORT
Finally, there have been a lot of technological advancements that streamline selling overseas, and you may need to look outside of the country to find new customers if, say, the US suffers a prolonged recession.
Look for an eCommerce platform that will allow you to grow internationally. Must-have features include support for multiple languages, prices displayed in the local currency, relevant taxes and duties, and critical shipping information, including costs and estimated delivery.
Remember, you don’t need to do all these alone. Ziffity’s migration team can help you document your needs and put a plan together to migrate your eCommerce store successfully.
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Ziffity is a full-service digital commerce agency focused on providing eCommerce solutions to B2B and B2C brands. With our 100+ task force, including certified professionals, we help businesses to ...
