• COVID-19 forced 79% of Retail Leaders to set up online presence and launch Digital Commerce
• According to Statista, Revenue in the eCommerce market is projected to reach US$4.11tn in 2023 and resulting in a projected market volume of US$6.35tn by 2027.
• According to Gartner 86% of Marketing Leaders Believe Digital Commerce will become the most important Sales Channel within the next two years.
• 70% of customers believe Market Places are the most convenient way to shop

As Benjamin Franklin said, “Out of adversity comes opportunity” and during COVID, organizations across verticals, not to let go of the opportunity, were in a rush to land an eCommerce platform in some way or other– be it B2C /B2B/D2C. Ultimately their goal was multifold and to ensure:

• To have a scalable platform
• To create business tools that empower business to perform operations (Ex: set up products, set up promotions & festive banners etc) with minimal IT intervention
• To leverage their current infrastructure and data
• To integrate with their inhouse systems (read legacy)
• The ability to operate internationally

which brought the million Dollar question for every CIO – Should I build or Should I buy, my eCommerce platform?

The choice of eCommerce platform- Build vs Buy, depends on many factors. In general, building an eCommerce platform from scratch is a very time-consuming exercise, fraught with risks and is best suited for very mature organizations.

Below table shows some considerations for the Build vs Buy choice:

Here are the top 5 considerations that can help determine a Build vs Buy choice.

• Time to Market and accelerated Global Rollouts

Faster time to market should be the most important consideration to launch an eCommerce website. Organizations want a transactional platform, where their end users can place orders. In this case a Most Viable Product (MVP) launch is the best strategy. Once the site stabilizes, they can go for a multisite global roll out, (in case of multiple brands), maintaining the same codebase but different branding and local integrations. eCommerce platforms such as Adobe Commerce on Cloud (erstwhile Magento) and SaaS platforms like BigCommerce, Commercetools can accelerate these roll outs, compared to a bespoke platform.

• Organization Budgets and Cloud Strategy

Worldwide IT spending is projected to total $4.6 trillion in 2023, an increase of 5.1% from 2022. “Enterprise IT spending is recession-proof as CEOs and CFOs, rather than cutting IT budgets, are increasing spending on digital business initiatives,” said John-David Lovelock, Distinguished VP Analyst at Gartner. While the trend shows an increase, Small Medium Businesses have limited IT budgets. Adoption of COTS eCommerce platforms incur significant costs. Most of the eCommerce software providers charge on parameters such as Order Lines or GMV (Gross Merchandise Value) or pricing based on a specific set of features. The costs may include a one-time signing fee and a monthly/yearly license fee. Additionally, Organizations typically need to engage a System Integrator, to customize, brand, integrate and launch their website. Also, most organizations have a preferred cloud provider and would like to have their eCommerce website also hosted on the same cloud provider. Building a bespoke platform, may go light on budgets in terms of license fees, but would still incur cloud hosting charges.

• User Experience – Headless and Composable Commerce

According to Forrester, improving UX experience can increase conversions upto 400%. Mobile devices account for ~70% of all user traffic to websites. Add to that, according to Google, probability of a user leaving a website goes up by ~30% if there is an increase in page load time. All this highlights the importance of building a superior User Experience.
Of late Progressive Webapps are preferred over separate Mobile apps.

Organizations can focus on best practices such as

• Headless Commerce – where the frontend UI (Ex: React js, Next js) is decoupled from backend services (Ex: REST Services) in order to provide a diverse experience based on the eCommerce channel or device. This may be used in conjunction with a Content Management System (CMS)
• Composable Commerce – which involves choosing Commerce components and combining or ‘composing’ them into a custom application built for specific business needs

Platforms such as Adobe Commerce, BigCommerce provide native support for Headless/ Composable Commerce. When building a bespoke platform however, a lot of additional effort is needed on the UX part and support for Headless and Composable Commerce

• Organization Maturity and inhouse eCommerce IT expertise
  In case of Organizations that are very mature – in terms of enterprise-wide adoption of cloud and latest technology stacks – and have a very strong IT team inhouse or partnering with a System Integrator – defining and building a bespoke platform following MACH (Microservices based, API first, Cloud-native and Headless) principles is the preferred option.
• Support for B2B

B2B market is not as mature as B2C. However, B2B eCommerce sales reached $1.2trillion, as per eMarketer. Increasingly Organizations are expecting B2B features on their eCommerce platforms – such as Quotes, CPQ, Punch out, Custom pricing, ERP Integration etc. Platforms such as HCL Commerce, SAP Commerce Cloud, Adobe Commerce come bundled with many of these features along with B2C features on a common codebase and can accelerate B2B rollouts. Building B2B features on bespoke platforms is quite complex.

References: Gartner, Forrester, eMarketer, Statista, Sitecore

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1. Place users in control of the interface
2. Make it comfortable to interact with a product
3. Reduce cognitive load
4. Make user interfaces consistent

But before a designer embarks on this journey, it’s essential to execute some prerequisite processes that will help ensure the UI is truly exceptional, and their design services are worth the investment. This article takes a deeper look at these prerequisite processes that form a roadmap to the ideal UI/UX design for your specific product. The roadmap to designing a beautiful, intuitive user interface should consist of the following elements:

User Research & Analysis

Empathy is at the heart of design. Without the understanding of what others see, feel, and experience, design is a pointless task. —Tim Brown, CEO, IDEO

This quote perfectly sums up why User Research is an indispensable part of your design roadmap. Even though it is often treated as a good-to-have, and ignored, it essentially lays the foundation for every design decision.

To do effective research, designers need to put themselves in the user’s shoes – this gives designers a true feel of what users see, feel, and want – it is necessary for them to do user research as often as possible, and depending on their time and budget, as deep a dive as possible.  As the famous saying goes, not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted – therefore a mix of qualitative & quantitative analysis would be the ideal way to go about things. 

Design Strategy

Having a design strategy in place ensures you don’t waste any precious time or resources on the misunderstandings that can crop up because a plan wasn’t laid out at the get-go. While formulating a design strategy, you are pre-defining every aspect of the UI/UX before initiating the designing – thereby giving the designers a clear direction in which to take every design decision. 

While it is good to have a short, crisp strategy to roll out, it is also important to be flexible. It’s perfectly acceptable to tweak your strategy depending on the dynamic market condition.

Wireframe & Prototype

Wireframes are to websites or products that blueprints are to construction sites – they paint a clear picture that can be used as a reliable reference. Wireframes give everyone an idea of what goes where, and with the right interactions and additions, have the potential to turn into a dream house. 

Prototypes are simulations of your finished product – they show you how your website or product will look, what it can do, and how your users might interact with it. They are extremely useful because they allow designers to see new ways in which a final cohesive design can be arrived at – it is usually at this phase that most designers come across their Eureka! moment. 

Interaction Design

As the name suggests, Interaction Design is nothing but the design of interactions that happen between a user and a product. The goal of ID is to ensure that a user’s objectives while using your solution are met as seamlessly as possible. 

For instance, some of the questions Interaction Designers might ask are :  

• What can a user do with their mouse, finger, or stylus to directly interact with the interface?
• What feedback does a user get once an action is performed?
• What about the appearance (color, shape, size, etc.) gives the user a clue about how it may function?
• Do error messages provide a way for the user to correct the problem or explain why the error occurred?

At this point in the journey, you are ready to begin design and development.  Armed with the information you gathered up until this point of the journey, you can now design an interface that customers will enjoy engaging with. This is the point where you need to start thinking out-of-the-box and customize your design to suit your specific business needs. 

Once you have arrived at what you believe is the perfect UI/UX design for your solution, there is one more crucial step to follow, that will ensure your UI is truly fool-proof. 

User and Usability Testing

User and usability testing helps you determine if the assumptions you made about your solution are correct. During user testing, you get a representative set of users to use your prototype and see if those assumptions are correct. 

Christopher Murphy, in his guide to User Testing, says it best – “Remember: Design is an iterative process. There are always improvements to be made, informed by your testing. In short: User testing should be happening at every point in the process as an integral part of an iterative design process.”

User and usability testing help you identify the maximum amount of feedback at the very beginning of your process before you invest too much money into the final build. It’s too late and will be too expensive, to leave your user testing for after the solution is built. 

At Experion, we enjoy crafting intuitive user experiences. We work with enterprises, SMEs, and startups around the world to create web and mobile applications, across industries, using a wide range of tools. Above all,  our design services are about creating amazing products that end-users will love.

Work with us to make the best version of your vision come to life. Drop a mail to sales@blackrockdxb.com

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