When you’re building up your Magento eCommerce website approach it just like you would when building a brick and mortar store. You’d hire an architect to make the blueprint for your store, ensuring it will have everything you need, but not too much extra. You’ll need to hire specialist contracts to do the construction, lay the electrical work, and handle the plumbing. Last, you’ll need some interior decorators to put the final touches on your store layout, paint and carpeting, and decorations.
This is exactly what you’ll need to do for your digital storefront as well. Here are 7 detailed reasons why you will want to bring in an expert Magento eCommerce development company.
1. You Need Their Diverse Skill Sets
So you’re considering just taking on the setup of your Magento Commerce platform yourself. Maybe you have a generalist developer who is familiar with the front and back end, along with some of the customizations. That’s definitely a great skill to have on your team for ongoing tweaks and maintenance, but having one generalist take care of your whole setup simply won’t work.
Knowing a bit about a lot means they’re not necessarily specialized in one area. This is going to lead to messy architecture. Conversely, if your in-house developer is specialized in one particular area, they’re not going to be knowledgeable in the other necessary domains.
Magento website development has so much to offer in terms of capabilities that you want to ensure you’re getting the most out of it.
2. It Takes a Whole Development Team
Since you do need a diverse set of skills to accomplish an eCommerce website development, ensure it has an optimum user experience, and make sure it’s all working optimally from the get-go, you need a big group of people. You’re simply not going to be able to find one or two unicorns to hire who will manage this by themselves.
Successful Magento development service agencies, like 121eCommerce, generally have teams of 9 eCommerce developers working on each development project. They usually include the following roles:
- Front end developer
- Back end developer
- Designer
- Full stack
- QA manager
- Project manager
- Release manager
- Dev ops manager
Years of setting up eCommerce platforms for various businesses resulted in this optimal team setup. Having one or two fewer roles, means the process is less efficient and gaps emerge. If you try to bring this all in house, decide you can do without the Project and QA managers, you’ll have problems right off the bat.
Your team’s communication, logistics and coordination will be disjointed, making everything take longer. Your team will have to quality check their own work as they go, slowing them down and also reducing the number of people involved. The more eyes on a product during QC the fewer bugs later on.
A typical team for a Magento project done by 121eCommerce has the following structure to ensure all bases are covered throughout the process:
- Magento Certified Solutions Specialist
- Magento Developer Plus
- Magento Certified Cloud Developer
- Magento Certified Front-end Developer
- Magento Certified Javascript Developer
- QA Manager
They also run New Relic to ensure there are no blind spots and the site is optimized from the start.
A compartmentalized and specialized team is an efficient and powerful one. Don’t cut corners at the beginning and you won’t have to worry down the line.
3. You Need Their Experience in the Field
When you do choose a team to work with you on building your store, just like with the brick and mortar example, you’re going to want people who know what they’re doing. Experience in construction and experience in eCommerce development is key.
The more projects they have under their belt, the better equipped they will be to do the quickest and quality job they can. If they have worked with companies that had similar needs to yours, they will be able to offer insight into best practices. What worked for their previous client may work well for you.
You and your team may already have an idea about the various Magento extensions and customizations you want and need for your site. But since the Magento development company lives and breathes Magento solutions full-time, they will likely have suggestions on improvements that you may not have even considered.
When you build your online presence, you want to ensure it’s built up right from the beginning. Take advantage of the expertise of an experienced team that has launched Magento for many other clients over the years.
Let’s face it, trying to figure it out yourself can be pretty time consuming and even challenging to some. You’ll probably find yourself looking for a rescue which will end up costing you more time and money than you wanted to spend in the first place. In this situation, it’s better to go with the safer, more trusted option and leave it to the experts.
4. You’ll Get Up and Running Quicker
In business, time is money. The difference between launching next month or the month after can have a huge impact on your bottom line. You want to be up and running as quickly as possible, but with a quality product. The best way to ensure that happens is to hire a whole team of experts through a Magento web development company.
They have the process down to a science. No guessing and checking
5. You’ll Minimize Your Risk
When launching an online store, it’s important to make sure you launch a high quality page. If your first customers experience issues they likely won’t be coming back. Your competitors are only a click away on the web. It’s a lot harder to gain the competitive edge online, so make sure to make the most of every opportunity to attract and keep visitors on your website.
If you try to manage the launch and testing of your site completely in-house, you open yourself up to a higher risk level. You’ll likely encounter many issues along the way, some of which you’ll only start to discover as customers email you with complaints. So who knows how many just left after encountering the same difficulty before you were even alerted to it? This is not a great way to start off.
Further, cybersecurity is a major consideration with all websites, but especially among eCommerce businesses. The last thing you want is your company’s name associated with a hack where customer data was compromised. Ensure you have the proper security and encryption in place to protect your site from hackers and viruses. This is exactly the kind of thing you don’t want handled by an amateur.
Minimize the risk to your new online business by ensuring your Magento eCommerce site is set up properly by the professionals who specialize in this field.
6. Magento 1 End-of-Life
With Magento 1 approaching its end-of-life this summer, you need a team that is well-versed in Magento 2 setup. The differences between the two are big enough that someone who is familiar and experienced with only Magento 1 launches will have a tough time building up a whole eCommerce store site on the upgraded Magento platform.
You’ll definitely want to bring in the Magento experts, especially if you are still using Magento 1. An experienced team can ensure you upgrade to the new version with ease and that you have access to the new features and tools available. Time is running out for you to upgrade and only an expert team has the know-how and experience to ensure you’re fully migrated in time.
7. It Will Save You Money
This is pretty much the main reason and puts all the previous ones together into a nutshell. Sure, hiring a whole team of experts for a few months to work on building your Magento eCommerce platform is going to be an investment. The same would apply to a team of builders constructing a physical location for your store too. You wouldn’t skimp out on quality materials and expertise for your building foundation, so why do so for your digital infrastructure?
Hiring a team will ensure your site is built correctly from the start. They will be able to gauge your business needs, formulate a detailed plan of attack, and get to work efficiently. You won’t have to spend your valuable time searching for developers on your own, opening yourself up to the risk of things breaking on the front end, deadlines not being met, or necessary customization not being done properly.
Repeated slowdowns, micromanagement, or insufficient skill levels will all result in one thing: a big waste of money. If your site isn’t up and running, you will not be selling your products online. Especially if you have no brick-and-mortar presence, this means you aren’t making a profit. Starting off a business with a suboptimal setup will cause many more problems down the road as well, resulting in abandoned shopping carts, poor reviews, and customers who won’t be coming back.
Summary
Do yourself a favor and save you and your team the headache of trying to hack it on your own. Bring in the experts, let them do what they do best, and you use your time to do what you do best: running and growing your business! Magento eCommerce solutions is a big, powerful and complex bulldozer. It can do a lot for your eCommerce business, but only if you’re able to get it up and running from the start.
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