When to leave loyalty behind: What your clients want from their platform

Building loyalty with a service-provider takes time and investment. It also means their service has to be up to scratch, fostering transparency and continual improvement for their clients. In eCommerce, it’s the latter that often becomes a problem for many platform providers. Their services stagnate, while newcomers to the market come with fresh perspectives and fresh technology. 

Over time, their site, with its poor performance and unsatisfactory customer experience, loses them sales. Your clients often know they need a better platform but they cling to their existing one for fear of change. If you can highlight how their old platforms may no longer be the best choice and offer ones with better features, this will give them a push in the right direction for a more profitable business. It will also help you ensure you’re offering your clients the best service designed to help them which in turn will help you assert yourself as a go-to in the industry. 

What your clients want out of their platform

Competition in eCommerce is fierce. Something as small as a few milliseconds difference in loading time can be the difference between success and failure. But all your clients want platforms that offer them these fundamental things to ensure they’re competitive, profitable, and reputable.

Scalable features

Scalability is essential in eCommerce, an industry that will grow continually, with 30% of sales coming through eCommerce by 2024. With more leads, customers, sales, and growth forecast for eCommerce companies, businesses want a platform that grows with them. This means having access to features that function just as well with huge volumes of traffic as it would with the bare minimum. The tools should, by design, make the business’s processes simpler, ensuring even with high levels of growth their processes are efficient, simple, and fast. 

Hosted platforms often do this more effectively than self-hosted platforms as they offer access to a complete set of features for a price. With self-hosted sites, consumers may need to spend more on extra web development to ensure their website grows with them. These are costs that can add up. However, while hosted platforms are scalable, only some offer affordable scalability, which leads us to the next point. 

Affordability

Clients are often willing to spend between £10,000 and £50,000 developing their websites on platforms like Magento and WooCommerce. Yet, it’s unlikely they’d be as happy to shell out thousands building a website from scratch if they knew there were other, more effective, cheaper options available to them. 

Hosted platforms remove some of the high overheads associated with self-hosted platforms like web-development, security, and hosting costs. But those like Shopify and BigCommerce offer scalability using a tiered pricing model. This means the more you pay, the more features you’re able to access, and the more competitive your site becomes with improved functionality. But, with this model, growth becomes unaffordable, particularly for smaller businesses. Even a small level of growth – such as a single increase in the number of staff users – could increase the annual price of your software from a few hundred pounds to thousands. 

Pay-as-you-go hosted platforms with unlimited features offer scalability at an affordable price for all users. The price your clients pay depends on their site traffic without limiting their access to essential features. This means no matter the size of the business, your clients can benefit from a platform with a price that grows in tandem with their business, vastly reducing their overheads and widening their profit margin. 

Security 

As cyber threats become more sophisticated, security is more important than ever to protect your clients and their customers. They want a platform which makes ensuring customer safety simple so they can grow their business without stress and worry. 

Magento and WooCommerce have both been under fire for severe security issues. 300,000 online retailers were at risk on Magento alone because of a security flaw which enabled attackers to take control of eCommerce sites and use card-skimming tactics.  

Your clients want a platform that will protect their livelihoods and allow their customers to shop with confidence and ease. This should be a top priority. 

Often, eCommerce clients ask for web development on some of the most popular platforms like Magento, WooCommerce, and Shopify. Like with many industries, sometimes we assume popularity equals being the best.

However, the huge variety of platforms on the market are testing these platforms to see if their service is up to serving modern eCommerce businesses. The suitability of a platform often depends on a business’s unique needs. But these unique needs shouldn’t come before scalability, functionality, affordability, security, and support. 

Shopit combines these essential features into one business-boosting platform. We offer a new way to achieve scalability and affordability with our pay-as-you-go pricing for unlimited features available to every client. We also offer a customisation service so the platform fits every unique client like a glove. To see what other amazing features we offer, take a look at our website.