Creating the website of dreams is one thing. Creating the website of dreams that you can actually work on yourself is a significant step up from that.
A vital part of our approach is to work with customers so they enjoy the benefits of getting involved and managing the day-to-day aspects of their online business in-house.
In theory, managing your own website is fine, especially if you have a tech savvy member of your team to call on. But how about if you need a sophisticated solution to update and navigate with limited IT capability? It’s one of the reasons we at Digital by Default gravitate towards Shopify when we’re putting online retail solutions together. Shopify is made for business owners, not the tech team.
Online retail is fast moving for all sorts of reasons – stock updates, new products, sales, changing descriptions, regular marketing communications and more. The part of your home page where people get their first hit of information is your most valuable real estate for offers, news, and links. You don’t want to rely on an external agency to be responsive to rapid and regular change requests – even if they’re great, accurate and offer a quick turnaround. Online business is 24/7 and most web companies aren’t.
An agency like ours plays its role at various points of your ecommerce journey. We can work with you at the beginning; if you are migrating from another platform; or indeed if you need some inspiration, a change of direction or a set of recommendations to supercharge your customers’ shopping experience. The team can also design and integrate specific functionality at any stage. We have expertise across the board so can be on hand for these kinds of projects – whether they are straightforward or more complex.
5 great benefits of managing your own Shopify business
Control
Update as and when you need to, in your own time, round the clock. You can assess the effectiveness of any adjustments you make in real time and respond accordingly.
Freedom
When you know your way around your website comfortably, you can experiment a little – change the price across specific products for 24 hours and assess the impact, for example. Flash sales suddenly need less planning and become very do-able.
Cost
Not having to consider whether every change you make is worth the cost and effort of the request to your agency is a huge motivator in taking over the reins of your own day-to-day website admin.
Ease
With absolutely no coding or technical knowledge, you can take your beautifully designed and fully functional site and run with it, secure in the knowledge that you can support your business with the more general tasks.
Support
Between your knowledge, our knowledge and the shared knowledge provided by Shopify (videos, tutorials, support line and similar), you are completely covered. And we can also restore your website to an earlier saved version if it does all go awry!
Once you have a comfortable grasp of the inner workings of your ecommerce site, you can add other functionality such as sending automatic emails out to people who have abandoned their shopping at the point of payment or email offers to specific groups of customers. You can look at auto-replenishment on stock items. You can take information from the reports available for your website to make improvements or trial new things.
There’s a lot to learn – or not. You can flex that option according to your capacity and appetite to get involved.
It’s worth mentioning that this isn’t always the case with many complex online sales platforms. We work across many different ecommerce solutions, some requiring high levels of developer input and specialist coding. For the kinds of clients we work with – owner managers in creative and design-led businesses – we tend to take on the web development, technical work and ecommerce advice – leaving the business management to our clients.
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