Most of us know how to drive a car. Be it a Smart Car, a standard sedan, or a minivan—once you learn how to drive it’s basically the same for all of these. But what if you needed to haul away some huge rocks and the only way to do it was with an excavator? Well, you might need some help figuring out how that works.
The same applies to a powerful enterprise level eCommerce platform like Magento. It’s really able to do so much, but only if you know how to use it properly.
Since Magento is so versatile and can work well across any industry—automotive, pharmaceutical, B2B manufacturing, or FMCG—it’s going to be very generic straight out of the box. This is where the expert eCommerce development team comes in. They bring the knowledge, experience, and skill set needed to create an eCommerce site specifically for you being a part of the Magento enterprise.
Below, we’ll dive into what Magento is and why it’s a good idea to not try to tackle this with just your in-house team. Let’s get into why you need to call in the Magento community experts when starting out with Magento.
Time is Money
There is a pretty simple reason you want the experts to handle a big task like setting up your Magento system: it will save you money.
When you first install Magento, it’s not going to be like downloading Microsoft Office. You’re not going to be able to sit down and just set it up with the basics in a few hours. Just like with the excavator, you’ll be pretty overwhelmed with the levers and knobs. It would take you and your in-house team a while to make sense of the functions, to set up the look and feel of the customer-facing side of the platform, while also building up the back end that your team will use for order management, inventory, and fulfillment.
It’s also important to note, even if you and your team are well-versed in PHP, tweaking the Magento website and infrastructure on your own still might not be a great idea. If something breaks, you’ll likely spend a lot of work hours trying to debug and find where the issue originated. It’s best to not take huge risks, especially when you’re just starting out.
You’ll waste a lot of time and money just to get started, which is far from optimal. The best choice would be to hire an expert, or better yet a team of experts, like 121eCommerce, who have done this exact thing countless times.
You’ll be able to not only have them set up the system you need and want, but also leverage their experience. A team of Magento developers knows the ins and outs of the platform and all have years of experience building Magento eCommerce websites across many sectors. They will be able to make recommendations on best practices or let you know what has worked well with past customers who tried to accomplish similar goals. They will be able to advise you on functions that may not have even occurred to you to use.
Outsourcing your Magento launch to certified experts will ensure you start off right. You don’t want to get that excavator going just to have it stall out five minutes later. This brings us to our second key reason for letting an outside team build your site: your site will make or break your eCommerce business.
The Dollar Value of Your Customer Journey
Doing it all with your in-house web development team might sound like a good way to save some money at the outset, especially if time is not as critical in your situation. Things might start off working well, but as you grow your customers may start running into issues. If your platform was not expertly put together by a Magento certified developer, they may not have set everything up optimally. This means things will likely break and break often.
If things don’t work smoothly, like checkout bugs if someone isn’t logged in, errors in accepting payment methods such as Paypal or specific credit cards, not using certain search engines such as Google, or hard to navigate catalogs, you’re going to end up losing customers. With eCommerce it’s a lot harder to attract and keep users active than with brick-and-mortars—your competitors are just a couple of clicks away. A rough user experience, shopping experience, or even a poorly designed home page is going to have a direct negative impact on your shopping cart abandonment, sales, and ultimately your profits.
A good Magento website development agency will ensure that everything is set up properly from the start and offer eCommerce solutions that make a difference. Sure there will always need to be updates and upgrades as you grow and expand, but ensuring a quality build and extensively testing the journeys will ensure proper functionality from launch.
Keep in mind that Magento development services are not just eCommerce website development. What an agency will do is much more detailed and involves a higher level of expertise. They will look at your specific company goals, what makes your products or services unique, and build a popular eCommerce platform around that to make you stand out against the competition. The website is completely customizable so they will strip away the unnecessary bits that don’t relate to your particular business situation, leaving a clean admin platform for your employees that only has the tools you actually use.
When you attract those first few customers, you want them to tell all their friends how great your products on your product pages and site are. The opposite would be quite damaging, especially for a new company. Make sure your excavator is running smoothly. After all, people are watching!
Maintenance
Once you have your site built (built well of course) you don’t want to keep going back to your developer or Magento agency to ask questions while you learn step-by-step. There are certain things an expert team will ensure you and your team are able to do easily in order to manage the day-to-day tasks of running your online business. These include things like:
- Updating your page content and domain name
- Adding new images from your social media
- Updating basic web designs and layouts
- Adding or modifying products and their descriptions
- Changing prices or worry about conversion rates
- Check on Magento Extensions
- Adding and removing categories
- Updating product pages
- Running various reports
- Managing and editing orders
- Creating coupons or discounts
You’ll also need to have some control over various administrative rules on the backend. These are things that will likely involve your financial or administrative staff, so they will need to be able to go into the admin panel and edit certain settings with ease as operating Magento will likely not be their primary job function.
Administrative rules would be things like:
- Setting up tax amounts
- Adding new payment options
- Regulating shipping and tracking
Let’s say you’re expanding your shipping outside your own state lines and also bringing on a whole new line of products. This is something your in-house team will easily be able to set-up. A proper Magento installation and launch of your original Magento platform will ensure the day-to-day updates and minor changes are not requiring you to call in the big guns each time.
Having your own team be able to manage most of the regular updates to the inventory and content will ultimately save you a lot of money. This is why it’s so important to make sure you get started off with a quality Magento setup. If you do something, make sure it’s done right the first time.
However, sometimes you’ll need something upgraded and changed. You’ll start off at one point, but over time as your business develops you’ll need to bring in new features. This is the beauty of Magento: it scales with you.
You don’t have to worry about outgrowing the platform, but you will have to make regular improvements to keep up with your expanding needs. Having a Magento development agency in your back pocket will ensure these upgrades are made smoothly and efficiently. Since they will be the ones who set up your site from the beginning, their team will already be familiar with your infrastructure and needs.
So you don’t need to hire or train someone in-house for Magento specifically. You’ll set up the platform once, your team will keep up with daily updates to products and content, and once in a while, you’ll call in the experts to make some more involved changes. Overall, the experts will be able to save you money by ensuring things are done properly the first time.
Let Your Talents Shine
You’re an entrepreneur who is trying to sell some great new products online. You might be new to the eCommerce game or revamping your presence. Either way, why are you trying to learn how to operate the excavator on your own?
Running a business is hard work as it is. You have business development to work on, product lines to expand, and marketing to operate. Is it really the best use of your team’s time to learn how to put together a complex eCommerce platform? Spend your time doing things that will grow your eCommerce store and ensure you expand your customer base and turn a profit.
Like with a standard construction project, you’d call in the hard hats to build your storefront. Why do it any differently for your online store.
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