When looking to have a customized Ecommerce website built, many businesses in the past have hired a team of developers (whether outsourced or in-house) to build it from scratch. That was the only option for those wanting serious customization and professional outputs.
Today, the open source software industry is producing more and more professional and extensible frameworks that are in turn shaking up the website development business. Full service Ecommerce agencies, rather than the typical development house of the past are leveraging these frameworks to provide value added services on top of a solid and reliable (and free) Ecommerce framework.
There is no point in hiring someone to reinvent the wheel when a free and extensible platform is likely to provide 90% of the functionality you are looking for, with the bugs already ironed out. A good Ecommerce agency will take this platform and run with it. Since the agency will be doing less development work, they will be able to focus more on what will really be generating income for your business – marketing and strategy.
Some agencies specialize in Ecommerce. The experience and knowledge these agencies have will help you to make the most of the overwhelming set of functionality that often comes with an open source Ecommerce framework. A website based on an open source framework (such as Magento Commerce) can be expected to include such functionality as:
- Installation and setup of an analytics package for guiding future marketing decisions
- Promotional tools such as coupons, sales and customer discounts
- Scalable catalog and order management systems.
- Upsells, Cross-sells and recommended products.
- Flexible pricing rules. Integration with other platforms.
