How to Outsource Mobile eCommerce Development

An article on startup or eCommerce web development is usually a story of success, results and prominent figures that enlighten beginning entrepreneurs. Fine, though there aren't many materials on what is behind starting a small or medium size business. What Quartsoft team sees from the outsourced developer's point of view is a startup's strive to match multiple criteria in time and budget, thoroughly plan the workflow and get a user-friendly tool that enables more sales according to the individual business model. This article is a story of what's behind an eCommerce project development.

Catching the target audience and converting into customers has always been in priority for merchants. In the age of mobile it became vital for an eStore to match the mobile clientele's capabilities according to the developer's guide. In February 2015, Google started to roll out an algorithm that gave a ranking priority to mobile-friendly pages for searches on mobile devices. No wonder Google had to introduce an algorithm like this. After all, the company cares about high-quality search results which mobile unfriendly sites cannot provide to smartphone and tablet users. Google thought it would be frustrating for mobile searchers to land on pages with unreadable text or have to scroll too much in all directions to be able to get the necessary information. Since this change of the Google's algorithm, the issue of website mobile incompatibility has become even more problematic for eCommerce businesses.

Statistics show that 80% of the Internet users own a smartphone and 47% of them have a tablet. The mobile traffic accounted 15% of all Internet traffic in 2013 and it rapidly grows year over year. More online shoppers prefer to make purchases from their mobile devices. It's a no-brainer that eCommerce businesses need to pay serious attention to mobile trends to withstand the competition. New online stores can be built using responsive design to automatically adapt their layout and content to mobile device screens. Older websites, designed without the further mobile boom in mind, need a more complicated approach to increase conversions and sales, to attract shoppers purchasing things from their smartphones and tablets. There are at least three ways to improve situation for the non-mobile-friendly eCommerce websites:

• Creating a separate mobile website
• Redesigning the existing website to make it responsive
• Building a native mobile app

Although both responsive design and a mobile site can optimise eCommerce businesses for mobile visitors, sometimes redesigning an old-school online store may take too much time and money especially when it comes to revamping complex websites. And since native apps have very limited search engine crawlability and a high development cost, a mobile site can be the wisest, cheapest and fastest solution to provide user-friendly access to your products for mobile visitors referred by search engines.

Sophia’s Style Boutique is one of QuartSoft’s clients for whom we have created a mobile website. The company selling children’s clothing addressed our web designers and developers to expand its web presence.

QuartSoft created a mobile website with Channel Advisor integration for Sophia’s Style Boutique to optimize the eCommerce business for better sales

Building a mobile website for this clothing retailer was only a part of a bigger plan that involved the integration of their eCommerce business with ChannelAdvisor platform. So not only a separate mobile site has helped Sophia's Style optimise sales for mobile visitors, but it also served as a bridge between an online boutique and ChannelAdvisor. The ChannelAdvisor platform promises to increase chances of selling to more customers. Integration with Channel Advisor makes products visible across multiple channels to a range of potential buyers. This solution connects sources of demand to one point of administering sales: on a website itself, on multiple marketplaces and digital marketing platforms. Moreover, the store with this solution integrated enables presence in comparison shopping engines, social media sites and also breaks sources of traffic and sales into reports for better decision-making and sales strategy planning.

Quartsoft's eCommerce developers have used a variety of technologies to optimise Sophia’s Style business for better traffic and conversion performance including Magento, Zend, ChannelAdvisor, PrototypeJS, Nginx to the benefit of this business.

In the majority of cases, QuartSoft creates mobile-friendly eCommerce websites from scratch. However, our web designers and developers are ready to help businesses adapt their old-school online stores to the current mobile era to drive even more leads from smartphones, tablets, and marketplaces.

Might you need to redesign an existing eCommerce solution, or create a new one, our team can help you with the design and development process as well as expert advice on matching your time and budget, choosing a development platform, payment gateways integration, accountancy or marketing solutions. Refer to this article when contacting us for a project cost estimate and get 20% discount for the project preparation phase.