If you are ready to raise your business online profile & start generating income from ecommerce, then you need right ecommerce partner. You need him more than just a simple shopping cart and a few buttons he will bring success for your venture. If you are serious about online business, then you have to be serious when choosing your ecommerce partner. So how do you start looking for the right one?
Do they have to be local?
Your ecommerce solutions expert or right ecommerce partner doed not necessarily have to be just down the road. You can choose an online partner from anywhere in the world. The important consideration is not proximity, but ability. If you ask to see a portfolio of their work, they can just as easily email it to you as give you a face to face pitch.
So you can pick an ecommerce solutions provider from any one of the thousands of experts advertising their services online. But before you outsource your requirements to someone across the globe, do consider the response times involved in negotiating the right deal. Ecommerce solutions sometimes require a quick turnaround on development, agreement on strategies and even reworking content before it goes ‘live'. An ecommerce expert on the other side of the world may also not understand the demographic you're aiming at or cultural differences in sales techniques, effective regional marketing or other subtleties. So while your provider doesn't necessarily have to live next door to you, it helps if they are at least in the same country.
Your ecommerce partner ethics are same as yours?
Business has become much more ethical since the ‘Greed is good' culture of the 1980s. Does your ecommerce solutions expert have the same business ethics as you? Do you speak the same language and does he or she understand what you want to achieve from an ecommerce website? Branching out into ecommerce isn't just a matter of tacking a shopping cart onto the end of a website. It involves complex data mining of your intended demographic, developing and if necessary changing an existing marketing strategy and ensuring that your ecommerce solutions fit in with the rest of your business plan.
What is their track record?
An ecommerce solutions provider or ecommerce partner should have a proven track record of successful partnerships, particularly with businesses that are similar to your own. If they have already worked for companies in your field, then you can be sure that they understand that particular marketplace in detail and are familiar with techniques and tactics that could be beneficial to your business. You are not just looking at page layouts, but how the ‘business end' of your website interacts with the rest of the site. Can your ecommerce partner develop strong calls to action on your other pages, laying out a clear roadmap for customers to follow? Is the ecommerce solution they offer secure? Ask these questions at the beginning of the process because you can be sure that these are the kind of questions that your customers will be asking when they visit your site.
Is every aspect of your ecommerce solutions handled in-house?
It is important to know whether your ecommerce solutions provider is going to handle all aspects of your project in-house, or if they are going to outsource any areas of the contract, such as content development or web design. While there is absolutely nothing wrong with using an ecommerce agency that outsources its content creation, for example, it is important to establish clear timelines to prevent delays in delivering the final product.
Choosing the right ecommerce solutions partner isn't always easy, but once you have established a good working relationship with an effective and professional agency, your online business can flourish and you can keep your business moving forward in what is a highly competitive marketplace.
