Ecommerce Agencies
How can your business benefit from partnership with a specialist?
From time to time in the course of managing a business, it may happen you find yourself in a stagnant phase. Your sales may be satisfactory but you feel you should be doing something more, or that you’re missing out on something. You’ve been trying hard to build a successful brand and keep step with current eCommerce trends, but you find you’re too busy to manage the entire process by yourself.
If you want to be more than just a random seller, desire to produce high quality products with accompanying additional services, but don’t want to engage in a big overhaul or another hiring process, there are eCommerce specialists who can help you fill the gap and reestablish your brand. Try outsourcing some of the problems or challenges to a third party service and save hours of work and stress that you can devote to the things that matter.
This post is about eCommerce agencies and designed to explain how they work and some of their benefits in regards to eCommerce in general and your own business.
How Can a Specialist Help Your Business?
An eCommerce agency is essentially a team of professionals who can help you in any area you might find yourself struggling.
After you explain your business idea or issue they can take on the problem or offer suggestions. These specialists are familiar with complicated digital tools you may not be fluent in unless you’re a programmer. They can also give professional advice about business strategies, communication, and finances customized for your own store.
Main areas where eCommerce agencies operate
1. SETUP & LAUNCH your store
Setting up an online store is easy, and something we’re all capable of doing. But with the help of agency you can immediately upgrade it to the next level without having to spend long hours of learning code or fidgeting with graphics; eCommerce specialists can handle the entire setup of your new store, help with all configurations, and show you tricks that can make the daily running of your store or business that much easier. You might also decide to convert your established store to another platform and this is something agencies also specialize in doing.
2. CUSTOM DESIGN
Worldwide shopping platforms offer plenty of beautiful themes that can perfectly fit your business idea or produce line. Some of them are free, and others have certain costs attached. First impressions matter a lot and it’s absolutely essential to come off as memorable to your customers. If building strong and unique brand is your intention, don’t hesitate to engage in consultation with designers.
Their work starts from creating a logo, determining a color scale and fonts, right up to creating an overall design and visual identity for your store. To follow current trends is a safe bet because people are familiar with what they see. Moreover it’s temporary thing — creating new, specific designs may be a bit risky, but fortune favours the bold.
We could also like to mention Visual Trends 2017 to give you some inspiration in respect to what to discuss and what sorts of things you may require from a designer.
3. STRATEGY & MARKETING
Whether you’re starting or wanting to upgrade your business to the next level, you don’t want to make mistakes or waste a sales opportunity and money. Before you invest your budget into randomly created campaigns, think about the best strategy that can help you reach your goals.
Market research, competitors, customer preferences, inventory management, social media usage and possible marketing tools are important factors you need to be aware of before making the next business decision. If you’re ambitious, you can try this by yourself. It’s not unrealistic as a goal, but be mindful of the time you spend on this. At the same time, eCommerce experts, with tons of experience from previous solutions and projects, can make it much faster and deliver results that fit your specifications.
These specialists can also optimize your SEO and customer experience by focusing on the proper channels for your marketing, and can give an idea of what sorts of content may fit with your business model — all with aim of converting your visitors into customers.
4. DEVS WORK
Some enhancements to your store may need a little programming. You can ask for help from a dev friend or hire a freelancer. But if there’s a complex problem, the advantage of working with an agency is their proper understanding of the eCommerce industry. They know how things work together and what actions may influence one another, as well as some of the more common traps and mistakes that business owners tend to fall into.
Their goal is on delivering solutions across the board, from social presence and mobile accessibility, to inventory and order management, omnichannel processes, enterprise integrations, and many others.
If you consider selling via mobile app, you should definitely consider asking an expert to help you with settings such as the ‘Buy Button’ (or the code for providing sales) and leave nothing to chance. The same applies if you’re going to incorporate POS software.
How Much Does It Cost?
Agencies provide services in many other areas, but the four mentioned above are building blocks for your business and you may benefit from them the most.
Services of these specialist are not cheap as they routinely work as a team on long-term projects. The final prices are derived from the complexity of problem you want to fix and the periodicity of cooperation. The good thing is that these are often disposable contracts but contribute to a long-lasting impact that makes up for its expenditure in the long run.
To get a better idea let’s look at some common prices among Shopify Experts
- Setup and Development tend to be around $150 per project per hour — $5,000 monthly on average.
- Design and Theme Customization, Marketing starts from $3,000 up to $20,000 monthly,
- while Ongoing Support and Conversion Optimization is usually $2,000 monthly.
According to the size of your business (and of course the revenue) you should always do your own research via forums and communities, consider what are you able to do by yourself or with help of friends, and what elements to consider hiring an agency to do.
Why they can do it better than you?
Fact #1 — Hundreds of similar challenges solved — they know what works
Fact #2 — Access to in-depth analytics and reporting tools
Fact #3 — Highly skilled — save your time
Fact #4 — Know your next steps — how to maximize your ROI
Fact #5 —They know people who know other people.
Never underestimate the power of networking. Agencies often have connections with specialists in other business areas such as app developers, fullfilment partners, POS software providers, creative agencies, reporting and analytics tools developers, and can recommend other resource if they’re incapable themselves.
Here we recommend 10 eCommerce agencies working over India, US and Europe. They are focused mostly on marketing strategies and custom website design but applying unique approach each. Take a look at their work and find some inspiration or contact them for further consultation.
They all are more or less partnered with Shopify, which ensure a very high quality of provided services.
- Binary
- BlueFish
- Microapps
- Milk Bottle Labs
- oBundle
- Sustain Creativity
- UnderWaterPistols
- Vinofy
- We Make Websites
- Whole Design Studio
Summary
The eCommerce industry is a huge community with a continually evolving environment. New technologies change the forms of communication and sales rapidly in a way we can barely follow, and as a result different businesses require different stages of engagement in order flourish. The bigger they are, the greater effort needed to stay competitive. Finding a trustful and professional eCommerce partner can help you tap into this growing omnichannel sales strategy and keep your business up-to-date and prepared for the future.
