The Williams Commerce team have been creating ecommerce websites since 2009.
In fact, Founder and CEO Robert Williams developed his first ecommerce platform WCommerce as early as 2005, powered by Microsoft dot net and still used widely today across businesses like Benross, Bonnington Plastics and Sporting Wholesale.
The Williams Commerce business has since evolved in line with demand to now offer a wide range of ecommerce technologies across Magento Enterprise, Demandware, NetSuite, WordPress and the most recent innovation; B2B Cloud, an exciting new cloud based ecommerce software that is based on an affordable monthly subscription.
With this insight, Robert Williams talks from experience about the evolution of ecommerce and what businesses need to consider when considering replatforming their online business.
“Now in 2016, there are number of rapidly evolving considerations businesses need to take into account as they consider a new web-build or a replatforming of their existing website. Firstly, the growth in mobile. It’s no longer an option, it’s considered essential to survival and even in more traditional industries and the B2B sector, we are continuing to see year on year double digit growth from mobile. Our processes have now moved in line to offer mobile first design for our clients, in many instances.
Secondly, site speed. The average attention span of shoppers is now 5 seconds, and this holds true across both B2B and B2C. Websites needs to be lightning fast to meet the needs of ever demanding shoppers. In order to help deliver on speed KPIs, we are recommending a simplified, pared back ecommerce experience that focuses on the customer journey and a streamlined buying experience through fantastic search, strong navigation and filtering capabilities and a superb checkout. Being ruthlessly focused on these factors can make all the difference.
There’s a few other very good reasons why a stripped back ecommerce platform is now more necessary than ever. Take for example Magento. The open source platform is fantastically flexible, companies are able to draw upon literally thousands of modules and third party extensions to enhance the online experience. However, this can also be a double edged sword in today’s increasingly sophisticated security environment.
We’ve inherited a number of older Magento websites, where we see in some instances over 80 or more plug ins and third party modules. This vast number of extensions can have serious repercussions when the need arises to upgrade a Magento website or apply a security patch. It can make what should usually be a straight-forward process into a hugely time consuming, overly complex task, that many clients do not have budget allocated for. If not maintained, at worst this can leave a website vulnerable and exposed to security breaches. In this context, keeping functionality tightly focused, can contribute to important factors like overall speed success and whilst making the maintenance, security and upkeep of your website far easier.”
Want to talk to one of our ecommerce experts? Call the Williams Commerce team on 0116 326 1116, who would be delighted to have a conversation.
