Ecommerce Development Solutions That Take Sites from Glitch to Growth

No one today starts an ecommerce business because it’s easy. Thrilling? Yes. Fulfilling? Sure. But easy? Not always. This is particularly true if your ecommerce site is suffering from common early-stage problems, like low conversion rates. Or maybe you’re dealing with consistent site bugs, customer complaints, slow load times or downtime, or high cart abandonment rates. All of these things cause ecommerce businesses to struggle.

At the same time, you could be contending with site backend issues, too. Perhaps your internal operations are inefficient, such as when your team has to do the same administrative tasks over and over again. These inefficiencies add up, leading to less time being spent on higher-level work.

If any of this sounds familiar, you may be in a tough spot. The good news is a longterm dev partnership allows you to partner with our team who deeply understands the challenges associated with bottlenecks and unstable, inefficient tech systems.

At Command C, we classify ecommerce sites into three different states: Challenge, Equilibrium, or Growth. Your site’s specific needs determine the best monthly package for your business. It’s important to note that there’s no one-size-fits-all solution in retainer agreements. With this in mind, here’s how we help you develop your unique plan and guide you through these stages, our Stability-to-Scale process.

Optimizing an Ecommerce Site to Achieve Consistent Uptime

Ecommerce site problems, like those described above, cause sales to go down and operations to bottleneck. In turn, customers may not trust the site and therefore become hesitant to engage. Things are just – to put it simply – not working well. In the Command C model, you’re in the Challenge state.

Ecommerce retailers with these issues typically need to frontload development work to help them out of crisis mode and get them moving towards Equilibrium. The goal is to work quickly and solve the retailer’s most glaring issues ASAP. Resolving these big issues typically mean big improvements in conversions.

It takes good old-fashioned elbow grease to move a site out of this stage. In Challenge, it’s often clear what the pain points are. How quickly things progress (the velocity of the project) is determined by a couple of things:

1. How many hours a month the dev team is allotted
2. How available your team is for feedback, answering questions, and reviewing work

It’s a good idea to expect frequent and iterative communication at this stage. If we discover a new issue that takes precedence along the way, we may need to regroup, reprioritize, and pivot with your team.

When a site is in Challenge mode, your team and our development teams are working in tandem to assess and address issues. Sometimes the best approach is to identify the biggest pain points and go from there. Other times it’s to knock out all the low-hanging fruit before tackling more complex problems. Either way, the teams should communicate consistently to determine the best course of action and move through the work.

Communication is essential to navigating Challenge mode successfully. Further, effective project management and frequent meetings are necessary to ensure mutual team alignment.

Establish Goals and Priorities for Ongoing Ecommerce Support

A site moves into Equilibrium once it has consistent uptime, complaints have been minimized, established development workflows are in place, and mission critical issues have been resolved (plus most minor issues). Once in Equilibrium, the site is stable and identifying issues becomes less obvious. This is a good time to shift the focus to strategizing about site enhancements and ongoing testing. At this point, you may decide to engage us with a smaller amount of monthly hours, as your site has stabilized.

At this stage, your team may need to connect more internally around priorities. When the site was in danger, it was easy to know what needed to be fixed and to convey those priorities. But when the site has fewer issues, it might not be as clear what to tackle next. With this in mind, you need to take special care to articulate your core strategy, priorities, and goals to our dev team.

There’s a certain paradox in achieving Equilibrium: once you do, it can become less clear what site priorities are. The tide has turned for the site, customers are placing orders, and complaints have slowed to a less than a trickle. Great! So now what? Once the fires are out, it can be tough to know which direction to move in. In this stage, the focus tends to shift toward deciding where to go next and streamlining internal communication.

Setting a Course for Ecommerce Conversion Optimization

Once your site establishes Equilibrium, you are poised to move on to Growth (assuming you want and are positioned to grow.) In the Growth stage, merchants are:

• Adding new features
• streamlining operations further
• Optimizing automation
• Running active advertising campaigns
• Potentially doing A/B testing, heatmap and/or user testing

When we work with clients that are ready to grow, we help by implementing tools that will increase conversions on the site, increase average order value, and help to retain repeat customers. We work with you to determine your company-specific strategy for site growth. Every merchant will take a unique approach depending on their goals and target audience.

The Growth stage centers around implementing strategy. In Equilibrium, time is spent defining strategy, but in Growth, effort is put towards implementing that strategy.

Whether you are at the Challenge, Equilibrium, or Growth stage, there are substantial benefits to gain from an ongoing development relationship through a longterm dev partnership. These partnerships represent a consistent engagement level for both our development team as well as your store – which ultimately, when done right – leads to efficiency and high velocity.

Working with an outside agency, like Command C, as your development partner is often more cost effective. For a fraction of the cost of hiring an equivalent team in-house, you gain access to a team of various experts dedicated to their project. Best yet, at any stage, these partnerships can be tailored to your site’s specific needs.

Ready to learn more? Reach out and we can see what stage your store is at and how our development team can best help.