In the digital age, eCommerce ventures are thriving more than ever. From their favorite dishes and groceries to high-end electronic gadgets and furniture, customers are able to purchase almost everything off the internet. This has given a great impetus to the eCommerce industry to thrive and prosper.
However, running an eCommerce venture requires you to build robust software to handle your operations. From order management to targeted marketing, your online storefronts help you establish your brand in the market.
For this, eCommerce businesses are moving towards custom software development. Companies are choosing to build their own business-specific storefronts to cater to their audiences in the best way possible. Instead of purchasing and configuring an off-the-shelf software application, eCommerce ventures choose to build their own customized software from scratch.
So, why is customized software developed by eCommerce merchants?
Let us explore the important reasons why the eCommerce industry is turning to custom software development:
Building A Unique Brand
In 2022, eCommerce ventures face tough competition in the market. There are multiple online supermarkets, food delivery applications, and businesses selling the same or similar products/services. This makes it important for a brand to create its unique identity.
Custom software development helps your online storefront stand out from the clutter. It makes your brand visible in the sea of similar offerings. Working with a custom software development company will help you design your virtual stores differently from your competitors. Once you have established a unique brand image, it becomes easy to grab your audience’s attention.
Personalized Tools And Features
Buying off-the-shelf software leaves little room for personalization. Even if you configure such software, you cannot make the storefronts completely your own. Custom software development services gives you complete freedom to personalize your store’s tools and features.
When you build a customized software application, you can design the cart, order workflow, product displays, and other aspects of your online storefront according to your preferences. With more freedom of choice, you can add tools and features that resonate with your audience, encouraging them to engage with your business.
Moreover, seamless personalization helps you build healthy customer relations as it makes them feel special and cared for by the online stores they visit.
Managing Unique Shipping Options
Product shipping is an important element in the order management workflow. Most online sellers work with multiple vendors that offer different shipping options. Off-the-shelf software may limit your scope by restricting the shipping options you can opt for.
On the other hand, custom software development helps you manage highly specific operations, including adding more shipping options to your workflow. As you have complete control over the design and development of your software, you can always make changes to your shipping options according to your vendors’ needs.
Offering Customized Discounts And Coupons
Most eCommerce ventures prefer offering personalized offers to their customers to boost their sales. Buying an off-the-shelf eCommerce solution is likely to restrict the app’s functionality to create customized discounts and coupons.
With custom software development company such as IntelliSource, you can choose to generate offers according to specific customers, products, services, banks, vendors, etc. Here, there is no limit to the extent to which you can customize your online storefront to attract more visitors and customers.
Smooth Integrations
Companies often integrate their online storefronts with suitable third-party applications and services to expand their functionalities. Integrations provide the end-users with the benefit of using different applications without switching between multiple platforms.
eCommerce solutions are often integrated with payment gateways, CRMs, ERPs, and other applications that increase their efficiency. As off-the-shelf software is pre-coded and less flexible, third-party integrations become tedious and expensive.
Building custom software applications help you integrate your online stores with the right applications and services hassle-free. As you have full control over the code and programming, software integration becomes much easier and faster.
Customized Reports And Analytics
Your customers may need to see a snapshot of their orders and/or wish lists while using your application. This involves creating customized analytical reports based on specific metrics. Off-the-shelf software often restricts the customization of such reports, limiting the experience you offer to your customers.
On the other hand, custom software development provides your customers with detailed reports and analytics based on their orders, searches, wish lists, and other metrics according to their preferences. You can also make necessary changes to these metrics without facing any bottlenecks.
High Scalability
eCommerce solutions should be as scalable as possible to accommodate changing circumstances. Being more rigid than customized applications, off-the-shelf software solutions offer limited scalability to your online stores.
Custom software development lets you build applications whose scale can be changed according to specific circumstances. You can scale your application down if you want to limit your products or the traffic visiting your store. On the other hand, you can scale your application up to accommodate more traffic and add more products to your stock.
Increased Security
Data holds the utmost importance in managing an eCommerce venture, as all your processes depend on effective data management. Off-the-shelf software limits your app’s security as it uses consistent code across the board, making it easier for hackers to infiltrate. This makes web hosting and maintaining comprehensive app security difficult.
When you build a customized application, you can have your own security standards and protocols to keep your data secure and more manageable. This keeps threats like unauthorized access, data leaks, cyberattacks, hacker attacks, etc., at bay. Moreover, custom software development helps you comply with important data compliance regulations to ensure the secure handling of the information collected from your customers.
Adhering to global data compliance regulations such as GDPR, CCPA, HIPAA, and more helps your gain your customers’ trust as they provide you with valuable information.
The Final Word
These were some of the most important reasons why the E-Commerce industry is turning to custom software development. Embracing digitization has become a common norm to thrive in all major industries, and online sellers can optimize the latest tech trends by building business-specific storefronts.