Ecommerce entrepreneurship is a business that is full of success stories, epic failure and great tales about businesses all over the world. Some entrepreneurs stumble into it, by creating a unique product or cornering a rich market.
Others see it as a way of virtually expanding, turning their real-life store into a virtual display case for the entire world to see. You may be interested in joining the fray as a small business owner. You may be thinking of taking your brand nationwide. You may be expanding internationally -- because business is booming.
No matter what your business or product is, one of the first decisions you will be making will be about hiring a professional web development team to create or update your website. This is a valid consideration whether you are a member of a larger ecommerce network or are setting up your own website under your brand's domain name.
Professionals Do This For a Living
Professional custom programming can save you a lot of time and money, when you know how to do it right. Sure, you have had moderate success by joining sites like Etsy or using Tumblr, a blog or a platform website to advocate your brand but an ecommerce website is a different story. Many of these platforms allow users to tweak programming and functionality, but rely on their ease-of-use so users can simply join in without hassle.
An ecommerce site takes a lot more than that. You need to consider the look, feel and functionality of not just your catalogue, but your shopping cart, payment gateways and more. A great web development team will make this for you, easy. They can incorporate your favorite free-to-use websites. They can make your site look great. After all, they do this for a living.
Save Time
Even professional web developers need a team to help them, simply because no one can specialize in one thing. You are looking at a site that is going to take a lot of work to do: someone needs to write content, take photographs and develop your SEO. Someone else has to create the programming and make sure it works the way it is supposed to.
When it comes to catching your market, time is of the essence. You need to get that site up as quickly as possible, with minimum errors. The only way to do that (besides coding everything yourself) is to go through a professional team of web designers.
Money Matters
For any ecommerce entrepreneur, an attractive, functional and easy-to-use website should be the secondary investment after product. Why? Because your products will not move without a great website to showcase them in and your website will not matter if your products are shoddy.
When you work with a professional team, you invest your money. You know you are going to get a good product out of it, no matter what. In many cases, web design teams offer guarantees, maintenance assurances or upkeep packages to help you over time. Remember that your website is not a static object. It is like an entity that constantly needs care, feeding and time.
This quality assurance is not something you may get from a bunch of freelancers (and think about this, you will probably need to hire multiple freelancers to develop your site). In fact, you might end up paying more if you hire multiple parties rather than rely on a set team who can do everything from hosting to content writing for you.
If you work with people who do not have the expertise, chances are you will end up retooling your site again and again, and lose more money than you initially saved.
Working with a web development team does not just save you time and money, it also means that you can free up your mind to work on other things that are important to your ecommerce business, such as acquiring products, negotiating shipping deals or hiring employees.
Think of it as hiring a licensed architect and interior decorator for your physical store. Think of it as delegation. Just as you delegate important tasks to qualified people within your company or team, delegate your online sales platform to a team of experts. Avoid letting unprofessional handle the future of your business and by extension, your future.
