Did you know that in 2020, consumers spend $1 out of every $5 on online retail stores?
Surprised?
Don’t be! Because the pandemic brought a paradigm shift in the buying habits of customers.
Today, it’s impossible to imagine a world without e-commerce. It’s an area of the digital economy that keeps increasing every year with no sign of stoppage.
But creating a successful e-commerce platform is an uphill battle because it requires thorough care even after launching the website. You require a perfect developer team from constant updates to positive user experience to bug fixing and support.
A skilled and qualified developer’s team can have a long-lasting impact on your e-commerce website.
In this article, we explore how to build a perfect developer team.
Building a perfect developer team for your e-commerce
A one- or two-person developer or IT Team will not effectively maintain your eCommerce website. You require a team of front-end and back-end developers, full-stack developers, and JavaScript framework developers. Here are a few tips for hiring a perfect team that can make a difference to your bottom line.
1. Know the developer’s experience.
Launching an e-commerce platform is more complicated than developing a standard website.
Building an eCommerce platform requires a breadth of technical skills. So, before hiring a developer, know the developer’s experience.
When building a developer team, focus on professionals with HTML, Javascript, CSS, JQuery, Larvel, .Net, adobe photoshop, Shopify store, react native, and API development knowledge.
You can know a developer’s experience using various technical tests. For instance, you can test Shopify dev skills using TestGorilla. Using this test, you can hire Shopify developers who can handle the needs of a Shopify platform.
Such an online assessment can help you test a candidate’s skills in developing and managing a store, advanced code customization, and application usage to extend Shopify functionalities. You can even use Codility’s online assessment to test a candidate on their coding and programming skills.
2. Identify your eCommerce project’s requirements.
Before hiring a web development team, knowing your project’s requirements is essential; the first step in understanding your project’s requirements is deciding on a goal you want to achieve.
Understand the key features that you require for your website. Then, after knowing the features you want, get rid of unnecessary functionalities.
The truth is that if you want to build an eCommerce website from scratch, you require developers who are well-versed in different programming technologies. Otherwise, the result might be the opposite of what you hoped.
You can even hire a specialist to add new functions or redesign an existing website.
3. Decide on a budget
Developing an online store is a good source of income in the long term, but it requires a significant initial investment. Every penny counts! So, it’s essential to match your requirements and the developer’s experience to consider your eCommerce store development pricing.
So, plan a budget and hire website developers based upon that.
Depending on your budget, you can choose an entry or senior developer to build and maintain your e-commerce store. Luckily, as the IT market grows, you’re likely to find developers with varied experience levels. When starting your eCommerce store, consider hiring remote workers and assembling a global team.
A global team is likely to bring a fresh perspective and help you create a user-friendly and attractive eCommerce website.
Also, when deciding on your budget, remember that the price and quality must complement each other rather than be mutually exclusive.
4. Check portfolio and references.
Consider checking out the developer’s previous work experience before hiring them. If you’re hiring a fresher, look at their portfolio or mock projects they completed during their education.
A portfolio can help you understand whether your expectations fit the developer’s design pattern.
Check the user’s experience and client satisfaction on portfolios a developer presents.
Through portfolios, you can understand the coding skills through personal projects. It also helps you know a candidate’s development level, career goals, and skills they want to acquire.
When checking a portfolio, look out how a candidate describes the context of each project.
Understand how they integrated with other tools and libraries. Understand whether the developer worked on unfinished projects by collaborating with other developers.
To better understand a developer’s skillset, look at their GitHub account. This account works as an online showroom where developers can work on open-source projects and contribute to someone else’s initiatives.
5. Expertise in user experience design
User experience is emerging as a critical differentiator between eCommerce platforms in today’s digital world. As a result, an eCommerce platform with a friendly user interface will likely attract more customers.
UX is important for your eCommerce platform because it influences every development and customer acquisition process. In addition, the UX ensures high usability that provides a customer return to your eCommerce website.
So, focus on hiring someone who knows about creating a seamless UX or has an eye for understanding what works with customers.
6. Understand the developer’s work strategy
For creating an effective eCommerce development team, understanding the work strategy of team members can help in successful collaboration.
Does your development team prefer using a waterfall or agile methodology? Which approach is suitable for your project? Discuss this question with the developer to understand their work strategy.
Knowing their work strategy can help you set realistic and achievable development goals. Also, hire developers who create a product prototype before building the original product. Before using the design, prototyping can help a developer understand what features and applications a customer requires.
7. Know the time to market your website
Remember that your time = money!
You don’t have to wait for years to launch your website. A professional development team can implement your project relatively quickly. In addition, hiring committed professionals can help launch a bug-free website.
Before hiring a developer’s team, ask for a statement of work to understand the project-related tasks and the timeline for delivering the tasks.
This will ensure that you streamline your eCommerce website development and ensure that you complete a project on time. Also, when project cost increases, it can result in higher development costs.
Downtime can affect your eCommerce’s reputation and result in customer losses. So, it’s essential to understand the time your development team might take to reduce the downtime.
8. Choose the right communication channel.
Communication is the key to eCommerce development, with most employees working from home. Determine how you’re going to communicate and remain in touch with your development team.
Effective workplace communication plays a vital role in understanding your requirements resulting in better development and management of an eCommerce website.
With clear communication, developers can create websites that precisely conforms to your requirement. Also, choosing the right communication channel is imperative, and you require it before developing every module of your website.
Discussions must take place before continuing with the next phase.
You can choose Slack’s communication channel for your developer’s team.
The right communication channel can help you create a collaborative team that delivers the intended results.
9. Find someone who fits your organization’s culture.
To build a great development team, focus on hiring a team that fits your company’s culture. Use your company’s value in the hiring process and ask potential candidates how they would embody and demonstrate those skills.
For understanding whether a candidate fits the organization’s culture, use panel interviews. This allows all panel members to hear the same answer from a candidate. This can help them decide if a candidate fits the organization.
10. Ask for website maintenance and support.
The development team’s work does not end with your eCommerce platform up and running. Maintaining an eCommerce website is more challenging than building one from scratch.
With slow loading websites resulting in $2.6 billion revenue loss each year, maintaining your eCommerce website could mean the difference between a successful and unsuccessful website.
So, hire a development team ready to provide seamless maintenance services. Ensure that they provide support to solve any website or e-commerce store-related issues in the shortest time possible.
Hiring a new development company can cost more money. It might be difficult for a new team to understand the website’s layout. Additionally, you might have to repeat the whole hiring process to hire a support development team. Using the same development team for maintenance and support is essential.
Choosing the perfect developer team
Finding the right eCommerce developer that adds value to your team can be challenging. One of the best ways to hire an efficient and skilled developer is to test their skills and knowledge about eCommerce development.
Apart from their skills, give importance to their experience, their cost, and check their references and portfolios to make an informed decision.
Keep the advice from this blog in your mind when hiring your next developer team. Use these tips to eliminate assumptions and know for sure whether they’re a savior of your eCommerce website.
