The events of recent months have pushed ecommerce to the front and center of business strategies. It is no longer just desirable but essential for many SMEs and big businesses to pivot from the traditional brick-and-mortar stores to the digital retail space.
However, you or your team may not know how to best build a website and make the necessary integrations in ecommerce. It is no wonder that many businesses seek out ecommerce consultants and developers to help them transition and leverage the advantages of going digital.
But surely, you don’t just want to survive but also thrive. Because the ecommerce industry is highly competitive, you have to continue pushing the envelope by way of optimized performance. Apply these five tips to boost your ecommerce developer productivity— and soar in the digital marketplace.
#1. Choose your platform before picking your developer
To ensure optimal developer performance, you first need to have a platform. This is critical because your choice of platform will be your basis for snagging the best person or team for the job. If you hire developers straight away, competent though they may be in writing codes, they may not have the skills or experience for the specific platform that your business or company needs. You most likely will end up with one that your developer is well-versed in and not the platform that can meet your requirements and satisfy the needs of your customers and partners.
Yet picking a platform isn’t the easiest of tasks either, especially when you can’t afford to allocate many hours on research. Your best bet would be to find an experienced ecommerce development advisor with a solid reputation in the industry, who can thoroughly present and explain each of the available platform options and help you find the best fit for your business needs. Once you have a platform in place, you can look for the right developer with the skills and know-how to work that platform for your goals and objectives.
#2. Check out Requirement Engineering software
Requirement Analysis, or Requirement Engineering, is the process of determining the needs and desires of stakeholders to assess the required software systems, then translating what these needs mean in terms of design. The rationale of Requirement Engineering is that user requirements are at the heart of the design and evaluation process, making it less linear than it is collaborative.
Using the techniques of requirement engineering can help your team reduce project chaos, have less rework, and fewer product defects and unnecessary features. More importantly, you are assured of high stakeholder satisfaction.
#3. Apply Agile Methodology principles
Many developer teams have found the agile software effective in continuous development projects.
The agile methodology is based on the iterative development of needs and solutions as independent cross-functioning teams collaborate. Its principles, such as independence, engagement, and customer satisfaction, can help the dev team engage the stakeholders to be more flexible with their needs and requirements.
You can still have some kind of structure to your process while allowing room for suggestions and adjustments as the build progresses. At the onset, establish a general outline of the specs and the intended end product. As you go along, you can modify or remove features to match evolving needs as the project progresses. To ensure efficiency in a flexible workflow, ensure that your dev team has some level of mastery over the agile project management principles. Training may be required to ensure that your team can run with everything. You can also engage the services of a scrum master to lead the dev team in using the techniques of agile technology and hasten their learning curve.
#4. Conduct regular SEO audits
If your business is already running, an SEO audit can help you ascertain how well your web presence measures up to industry best practices. To create the best implementation strategy, your ecommerce dev team first needs to gain an in-depth understanding of your website’s performance. That way, they can pinpoint opportunities and areas for improvement from the get-go.
A competent SEO audit team can identify shared goals with your dev team and other stakeholders. They can also clarify SEO priorities so the dev team can incorporate the tasks in their workflow. A structured list of SEO must-haves (e.g., schema codes, tap button specs, h1 tags, etc.) is another relevant output of an SEO audit. Make sure these audits are conducted regularly, so you can keep enhancing your website’s capabilities and relevance.
#5. Use time-tracking and productivity tools
Time-tracking and productivity tools, such as project management trackers, can give the dev teams and other stakeholders comprehensive visibility over every step of project development. In addition, with productivity software, you can determine the running costs of each project.
These tools also produce reports and statistics that detail the output of each employee. You can then ascertain if too much time is being spent on low-priority items and help the teams redirect their focus and energy as necessary. Time and productivity tools can also work in conjunction with URL and app tracking tools to keep distractions at work to a minimum.
Article By: Kat Sarmiento Follow her on Twitter @KatSarmiento007
