Forget impulsive launches: e-commerce sites need real integration

Full version of the article published in the “digital transformation” supplement of Trends in June 2022.

1. Did COVID push every business to take the plunge?

The companies that best limited the damage, or even grew their turnover, were those that were already well established online.

Unfortunately, a high-performing e-commerce site cannot be built in a few weeks: launching an online store has to be the outcome of careful thought, a strategy, competitor analysis and so on. If the only goal is to sell the odd item now and then, the seller is better off offering it on social media (e.g. Facebook) or on a marketplace such as Amazon or eBay.

Established online sellers, however, use these two channels only as a secondary way to draw in visitors or give their sales a modest boost. They focus most of their efforts on running their own e-commerce site efficiently.

Besides transaction fees that are much lower than on marketplaces, building or improving your own website above all raises your profile and credibility, and lets you stand out from your competitors by showcasing your work, offering specific tools or tailoring the user experience to your industry.

4. Tools that are sometimes out of step with business needs

When a company decides to start selling online, several questions arise: custom development, choice of software vendor, buying the future e-commerce site or renting it monthly. Retailers are offered a wide range of solutions (Wix, Shopify, WooCommerce, PrestaShop, Magento, …), and businesses new to online selling do not always find it easy to work out which one best fits their needs and goals.

We also meet many new clients who already run an e-commerce site with substantial turnover, but who realise after a while that they are held back by the technical choices made at the outset. To avoid these limits on performance and features, WiMakeIT works exclusively with Magento (which allows custom development and offers countless modules), available not only as a licensed edition but also as an open-source edition (i.e. free to use, with no licence fees).

5. Magento: why, and for whom?

Used by major brands such as Nike, Nespresso, Coca-Cola, Ford and Louboutin, Magento is the world leader in e-commerce solutions.

Highly powerful, Magento makes it easy to synchronise catalogues of tens of thousands of products and offers, among other things, a wide range of APIs to connect to third-party systems (ERP, CRM, etc.) and fit efficiently into the company’s IT ecosystem.

Because Magento is used all over the world, Magento agencies are constantly developing and selling a huge number of extensions. So when a client with a Magento website wants to add a feature, it is already available on the market: a considerable gain for the client, who can use the extension straight away instead of paying for custom development, which is always more expensive.

As a widely used, standard open-source solution, Magento is also a safe choice, because the client is dependent neither on the web agency nor on the software vendor’s commercial policy.

The WiMakeIT team builds Magento e-commerce sites for large companies and for sole traders with barely ten products alike, in every sector (fashion, mechanics, pharmaceuticals, metalworking, DIY, etc.). So the client’s size is not what decides the choice of Magento; what matters is its specific short- and/or long-term needs and its plans for connecting systems.