eCommerce Design & Development

AndMine is a leading Australian eCommerce, e-Tail, e-Marketing company that specialises in design, development and ongoing marketing services. We’ve built standalone stores and worked with franchise businesses to develop multinational and multi-language platforms. This sector has advanced by leaps and bounds in the past decade, and while we’ve built tons of eStorefronts, the ones with the best and most stable return and growth come from the following 4 platforms:

From Great Design to Perfect Functionality

You can easily meet style guides and common functionalities with any platform. Design is simply a reflection of your creative budget, as all platforms have the flexibility to take your design where it needs to go. The key question, however, is which to choose and when (your choice of platform has an enormous bearing on success). We also tackle ‘switching platforms’ (call us on this), but for a new build, consider the options below;

Basic with benefits;

Woo Commerce is great, fast to install and is built on top of Wordpress. You will benefit from what the supercharged, 10-year-ahead content marketing platform has built in. So it’s most ideal when you want the 2-in-1 solution and spend a chunk of your marketing activity on content publishing. However, it starts to fall over when you push Woo commerce to do more than out-of the-box configurability. We also build WooCommerce for clients who want a simple solution on top of an existing Wordpress site with strong organic traffic.

Obvious to Enterprise; 

The “Hosted” SaaS platform leaders for configurable out-of-the-box eCommerce are BigCommerce and Shopify. Some clients pre-choose the platform based on how they like the advertising (fair enough), but it really comes down to how much more you want the site to be out of the box. They are both brilliant, have hundreds of features out of the box (many of which you may never use) and have extensions through dedicated APP stores. To choose one over the other, the devil is in the detail. We say “obvious” as they are obvious eCommerce choices for most companies. You get a lot of bang for your buck. We say “to Enterprise” because both platforms have enterprise pathways which we have extended enormously for clients, including pushing the system past configurable to custom, and building custom apps. This includes everything from syncing custom ERP and accounting tools to Visual Merchandisers, and everything in between. One note though, once you move to enterprise on these platforms, your budget and maintenance will enter an enterprise level as well.

Enterprise;

Magento2 is our preference for Enterprise eCommerce. It is a step-up from the obvious SaaS, out-of-the-box hosted platforms. In a programming sense, we can edit the core database, while the other platforms will be locked down.  This provides the greatest flexility between configurable out-of-box functions. The line between Obvious to Enterprise and Enterprise, or Woo / Shopify / BigCommerce OR Magento2 will again, come down to the specific function or functions required, and your budget. If a single 10% function will chew up 50% of the budget, will it make 50% of the returns or save 50% of the ongoing resources? If not, consider simplifying the build and adding on to it once you achieve certain goals.

Before you Build.

We encourage companies to look carefully at the phases in each project, to not over-invest, and to consider the functional requirements vs. benefits before build. There will be either an obvious discussion or a small investment upfront to ensure you get the best out of your eCommerce launch. And if you need to build upon, switch or scale; locally, nationally or globally, we’ve done that for our clients too.

Finally, our end-to-end approach means we can build the eCommerce storefront, then optimise it for profitable returns for you. There is no point building a store that doesn’t yield profit, and to touch audiences in every way possible, you must structure your sites in ways that benefit from cross-promotions from day one.