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10 Features Your eCommerce Store Doesn’t Need
Online shopping is enormously popular, however, not all eCommerce sites are equal. While some cater for a pleasurable, informative, and straightforward shopping experience, others seem to do just about everything to stop people from making a purchase.
Have you ever been on an eCommerce site wishing to make a purchase but ended up leaving the site because it was all just a bit too painful? Most people have, and when planning the design of an eCommerce website, you should do so from a customer’s perspective.
In essence, the easier the shopping process, the better. Everything from conducting a product search, to finding information, right through to checking out must be Childs play.
Essential Features of a Good eCommerce Website
The design of your eCommerce website can have an enormous impact on your sales. Some features are essential in providing customers with the tools required for easy, pleasurable shopping, including:
• Clear design and company logo
• Stunning product images, preferably several for each product
• Special offers and free shipping deals
• Quick checkout
• Clear information on product, payment, and delivery
• Good product search feature
• Features on most popular products
• Easily accessible shopping cart
• Multiple payment options
• Social media links
• Customer reviews
• Online chat facility
• Store locator
• Trust marks and media appearances These are the essential features of a profitable online store, with a clear priority placed on ease-of-navigation throughout your website.
Features of a Bad eCommerce Website
Online shopping is enormously popular, however, not all eCommerce sites are equal.
There are plenty of poor eCommerce sites, and most of them share a poor design quality. Too much text features strongly, as do a lack of style and design uniformity. Some sites lack one or more of the above-listed essential features, while other site overkill with a plethora of pretty useless features, including:
1. Sneaky Ads: Though it may be tempting to disguise ads using services like AdSense, customers in general find ads irritating and are less likely to shop on your site on a regular basis. Your short-term gain may turn into a long-term loss.
2. Pop Ups: Pop ups interrupt the shopping flow and detract from the shopping experience. Because many people use pop-up blockers anyway, you may as well just drop them.
3. Music, Uninformative Videos, and Flashing Images: Don’t “jazz up” your eCommerce site with irrelevant or poor-quality videos. Don’t feature music or irritating flashing images. The calmer the shopping environment, the greater the likelihood of shoppers making an actual purchase.
4. Information Overload: While it is important to provide plenty of product information, limit this content to essential information. An excessive amount of text will only put customers off. If you would like to give in-depth information, give customers the option to either see this information or opt out.
5. Image Overkill: Some eCommerce site feature little apart from admittedly stunning product images. Unfortunately, customers may find it difficult to purchase a product without finding out essential information.
6. Too Many Product Recommendations: Most sites feature a “You may also like…” section and that is perfectly acceptable provided these recommendations do not distract or detract from the chosen product.
7. Sign up Hell: Under no circumstances should your customers need to create and account to make a purchase. Don’t feature irritating sign up forms and provide customers with the option of opting in rather than forcing them to subscribe.
8. Poor Navigation: Customers will leave your site if they frequently get stuck on yours or find it difficult to navigate between the different sections.
9. Horizontal Scrolling: Make sure customers do not need to scroll horizontally, no one likes it!
10. Hard-to-Read or Fancy Fonts: Legibility is enormously important. Select font, size, and color carefully, focusing on creating an enjoyable shopping experience.
Less Is More
Provided your eCommerce website has all essential features and an attractive design, people’s shopping experience will be positive, and your business will perform well. Using useless features serves no purpose and will only hamper a straightforward shopping experience.
Visiting plenty of eCommerce sites will quickly allow you to experience the difference between good and bad sites.
June 8, 2017Have you ever been on an eCommerce site wishing to make a purchase but ended up leaving the site because it was all just a bit too painful? Most people have, and when planning the design of an eCommerce website, you should do so from a customer’s perspective.
In essence, the easier the shopping process, the better. Everything from conducting a product search, to finding information, right through to checking out must be Childs play.
Essential Features of a Good eCommerce Website
The design of your eCommerce website can have an enormous impact on your sales. Some features are essential in providing customers with the tools required for easy, pleasurable shopping, including:
• Clear design and company logo
• Stunning product images, preferably several for each product
• Special offers and free shipping deals
• Quick checkout
• Clear information on product, payment, and delivery
• Good product search feature
• Features on most popular products
• Easily accessible shopping cart
• Multiple payment options
• Social media links
• Customer reviews
• Online chat facility
• Store locator
• Trust marks and media appearances These are the essential features of a profitable online store, with a clear priority placed on ease-of-navigation throughout your website.
Features of a Bad eCommerce Website
Online shopping is enormously popular, however, not all eCommerce sites are equal.
There are plenty of poor eCommerce sites, and most of them share a poor design quality. Too much text features strongly, as do a lack of style and design uniformity. Some sites lack one or more of the above-listed essential features, while other site overkill with a plethora of pretty useless features, including:
1. Sneaky Ads: Though it may be tempting to disguise ads using services like AdSense, customers in general find ads irritating and are less likely to shop on your site on a regular basis. Your short-term gain may turn into a long-term loss.
2. Pop Ups: Pop ups interrupt the shopping flow and detract from the shopping experience. Because many people use pop-up blockers anyway, you may as well just drop them.
3. Music, Uninformative Videos, and Flashing Images: Don’t “jazz up” your eCommerce site with irrelevant or poor-quality videos. Don’t feature music or irritating flashing images. The calmer the shopping environment, the greater the likelihood of shoppers making an actual purchase.
4. Information Overload: While it is important to provide plenty of product information, limit this content to essential information. An excessive amount of text will only put customers off. If you would like to give in-depth information, give customers the option to either see this information or opt out.
5. Image Overkill: Some eCommerce site feature little apart from admittedly stunning product images. Unfortunately, customers may find it difficult to purchase a product without finding out essential information.
6. Too Many Product Recommendations: Most sites feature a “You may also like…” section and that is perfectly acceptable provided these recommendations do not distract or detract from the chosen product.
7. Sign up Hell: Under no circumstances should your customers need to create and account to make a purchase. Don’t feature irritating sign up forms and provide customers with the option of opting in rather than forcing them to subscribe.
8. Poor Navigation: Customers will leave your site if they frequently get stuck on yours or find it difficult to navigate between the different sections.
9. Horizontal Scrolling: Make sure customers do not need to scroll horizontally, no one likes it!
10. Hard-to-Read or Fancy Fonts: Legibility is enormously important. Select font, size, and color carefully, focusing on creating an enjoyable shopping experience.
Less Is More
Provided your eCommerce website has all essential features and an attractive design, people’s shopping experience will be positive, and your business will perform well. Using useless features serves no purpose and will only hamper a straightforward shopping experience.
Visiting plenty of eCommerce sites will quickly allow you to experience the difference between good and bad sites.
How We Work with Our Clients
You want to build a software product but don't have a dedicated team? Or perhaps your team is not large enough? It shouldn’t be a problem. At Interactivated, we fit our services to the needs of our clients. Discover how.
We Can Develop a Minimum Viable Software Product Together
We can build together a product from scratch. This model is good when you know where you want to get, and want to get there fast. It's also suited for projects where you don't mind passing on the task to a service provider, either because you want to focus your energy on other projects, or because you don't have a technical team that can build the product for you. Essentially, this strategy is for a project that's intended to be a short-term collaboration, rather than an ongoing commitment.
When it comes to price models, you can choose between a Fixed Price Model (FPM), and a Time and Material pricing model, with milestone estimates.
The key benefits of this model are expert advice and guided development. You will benefit from transparent cost calculation, fast product delivery, and exclusive ownership of the finished product.
We Can Offer You a Dedicated Team
With this engagement plan, a dedicated team of developers work with you over a period of time. They begin by understanding your objectives and use their experience and skills to deliver the services you require.
This approach to project development is ideal for businesses that are gradually expanding and want to do so in an effective way. This approach can also save you money and increase cost efficiency compared to the single-project, MVP approach. For long-term projects that require maintenance and development, it's a more than inspired solution.
The pricing model that goes with this project is Time and Materials. It's possible to switch later on to a Cost-based pricing model, though.
The key benefit is that a team of developers will focus on your project. You get to choose the size of the team, and manage it.
To start a project based on this model, you have to share with us your project outline and tell us how many specialists you need. We will put together a team for you that can focus on your project. Right from the outset, we are careful to determine who will be leading and supervising the team.
Together we determine the workload and payment and sign a contract. The team leader will ensure that the project proceeds at the desired pace and reports to the management. With this model, you are in charge of managing and scaling the team depending on your business needs and objectives.
We Can Provide Developers on Demand
With this approach, you can hire an expert to help with your in-house development. Our experts include experienced web developers, mobile app developers, eCommerce shop developers, and more.
You want to build a software product but don't have a dedicated team This approach works well when you need an additional member on your team or only want assistants for a short-term project. It's also viable when you need a specific expert for a specific project. You have the opportunity to work with the same specialist on an ongoing basis for continuity and maximum performance.
Pricing for this approached is based on the Time and Materials used and can be agreed upon as a monthly payment.
With a developer on demand, you can strengthen your team, save time on the practicalities of hiring and accounting, and ultimately, enjoy a more reliable solution than if you'd just seek out a freelancer.
This model works in a simple way. After contacting us with your request, we find the right expert for you and do the job and time accounting. We use a billing cycle and send the invoice.
It's that easy.
If you're not sure which of these approaches is best for your project, you can always contact us. Together we can find the best solution. Call us now.
May 29, 2017We Can Develop a Minimum Viable Software Product Together
We can build together a product from scratch. This model is good when you know where you want to get, and want to get there fast. It's also suited for projects where you don't mind passing on the task to a service provider, either because you want to focus your energy on other projects, or because you don't have a technical team that can build the product for you. Essentially, this strategy is for a project that's intended to be a short-term collaboration, rather than an ongoing commitment.
When it comes to price models, you can choose between a Fixed Price Model (FPM), and a Time and Material pricing model, with milestone estimates.
The key benefits of this model are expert advice and guided development. You will benefit from transparent cost calculation, fast product delivery, and exclusive ownership of the finished product.
We Can Offer You a Dedicated Team
With this engagement plan, a dedicated team of developers work with you over a period of time. They begin by understanding your objectives and use their experience and skills to deliver the services you require.
This approach to project development is ideal for businesses that are gradually expanding and want to do so in an effective way. This approach can also save you money and increase cost efficiency compared to the single-project, MVP approach. For long-term projects that require maintenance and development, it's a more than inspired solution.
The pricing model that goes with this project is Time and Materials. It's possible to switch later on to a Cost-based pricing model, though.
The key benefit is that a team of developers will focus on your project. You get to choose the size of the team, and manage it.
To start a project based on this model, you have to share with us your project outline and tell us how many specialists you need. We will put together a team for you that can focus on your project. Right from the outset, we are careful to determine who will be leading and supervising the team.
Together we determine the workload and payment and sign a contract. The team leader will ensure that the project proceeds at the desired pace and reports to the management. With this model, you are in charge of managing and scaling the team depending on your business needs and objectives.
We Can Provide Developers on Demand
With this approach, you can hire an expert to help with your in-house development. Our experts include experienced web developers, mobile app developers, eCommerce shop developers, and more.
You want to build a software product but don't have a dedicated team This approach works well when you need an additional member on your team or only want assistants for a short-term project. It's also viable when you need a specific expert for a specific project. You have the opportunity to work with the same specialist on an ongoing basis for continuity and maximum performance.
Pricing for this approached is based on the Time and Materials used and can be agreed upon as a monthly payment.
With a developer on demand, you can strengthen your team, save time on the practicalities of hiring and accounting, and ultimately, enjoy a more reliable solution than if you'd just seek out a freelancer.
This model works in a simple way. After contacting us with your request, we find the right expert for you and do the job and time accounting. We use a billing cycle and send the invoice.
It's that easy.
If you're not sure which of these approaches is best for your project, you can always contact us. Together we can find the best solution. Call us now.
Shopify VS Magento
ECommerce platforms come in many shapes and sizes. New ones keep emerging every year, at a pace that can leave one with the impression that, in this industry, everyone’s copying everyone else.
Shopify and Magento are two of the names that have been standing out for many years in the dynamic world of eCommerce. At Interactivated, we have always appreciated Shopify’s ease of use and rich array of features. So much so that recently we have become a Shopify partner.
We know how difficult it can be to choose an eCommerce platform, which is why we've prepared for you an in-depth comparison of Shopify and Magento. We'll be covering everything you need to know to create a site, including installation, features, ease of use, extensions, and price.
Shopify
Shopify has grown into one of the most popular and accessible eCommerce platforms, with over 400,000 users worldwide. It's essentially a web store builder that lets you create a professional store even if you don't have any coding knowledge. It integrates with a wealth of extensions for accounting, reporting, sales and forecasting, inventory and more.
The biggest difference between Shopify and Magento is that Shopify is delivered as a paid service. Shopify technicians handle all the code for you. At the same time, you have full access over the code, should you choose to customize it.
Shopify makes the most of the what you see is what you get (WYSIWYG) web design principle so that you can customize your eCommerce site and the shopping experience it provides using simple options and visual cues. You access all features via a dashboard through which you can change all the essential elements of your website design, including layout or pages.
Advanced Integration
One of Shopify's advantages is advanced integration. For example, you can integrate it with Amazon to create a sales channel that tracks all your Amazon sales. You can then use the built-in forecasting and analytics to optimize this channel. Shopify also integrates beautifully with Facebook, allowing customers to browse your products using a Shop section on your Facebook page.
What's more, with Shopify you can enable customers to discover and even buy products using Messenger. Customers can also ask questions using Messenger, and in return, they receive automated responses, get automated order tracking, and more.
User-Friendly Thanks to its drag and drop interface and simple theme editing, Shopify is remarkably user-friendly. This is in fact why so many people have adopted it as their main shopping tool. The Shopify dashboard or backend is one of the best-polished dashboards you can find. It's simple, intuitive, and a pleasure to use.
There are no redundant settings or unnecessary menus so that you can find your way around it with ease, whether you want to change how your site looks, generate a sales report, or review your inventory. From the initial setup down to the minute design changes you can make to your site, Shopify remains user-friendly throughout. You probably won't even need the manual to use it.
The frontend, or the shopping experience your customers get, is just as smooth.
Integrated POS Shopify's POS system enables you to run a brick-and-mortar and SEO shop at the same time without any difficulties. It integrates smoothly your online and offline operations to improve customer satisfaction. This means using the same inventory for both stores, doing customer segmentation, and more.
It does this without the need for a massive investment in hardware or new dependencies. If you don't have a POS system already, or if you're not happy with it, Shopify offers you a viable alternative.
Free to Try For Two Weeks You can try Shopify for free for 14 days, during which you can access all of its features. Fourteen days is more than enough to get a feel for what Shopify is capable of and explore its whole range of features. Ideally, you want to try running your store with it to get a sense of its true power.
In terms of pricing, Shopify isn't the cheapest eCommerce platform around, but considering its wide range of features, it offers good value for the money. Shopify pricing is subscription-based and starts at $29 per month, plus a 2,9%+30 cents credit card rate. The credit card rate may make you uneasy, but on the other hand, you can manage an unlimited number of products with Shopify regardless of the subscription you choose.
The major difference between different subscription plans is in the number of accounts you can use -- from 2 to 15 -- and some more advanced features like abandoned cart recovery, advanced reporting, or third-party shipping rates calculator. There is no setup fee, and hosting costs are covered. Keep in mind that, depending on where you live, you may have to pay some extra sales taxes. If you pay your plan upfront, you get a 10% discount for an annual payment and a 20% discount for a biennial plan.
SEO-Optimized Shopify comes out of the box with all the essential search engine optimization your store needs to rank well in Google and other search engines. With Shopify, it's easy to edit tags and meta descriptions, customize pages URLs and file names, and add ALT tags to product images. Other SEO benefits that come with choosing Shopify are fast, fully-responsive themes, mobile support, and excellent social media integration, all of which can give your search engine ranking that boost that often makes the difference between a sale and a failed deal. For an online shop, SEO optimization can be a time-consuming process, which is why Shopify gets bonus points for making it so much easier.
Professional Templates The nine free themes that Shopify offers come with plenty customization options, including different layouts, header and banner support, and customizable sidebar. This enables you to give your site a unique identity without a massive investment in a professional theme. Still, Shopify features a theme store with plenty of professional themes you can choose from. At $140+, Shopify themes aren't cheap, but you do get quality for what you pay.
That said, you shouldn't expect from Shopify themes, not even premium ones, unlimited customization options. If you're very specific about theme customization, you may come across at some point over a theme limitation that will make you regret you're not using Magento. Shopify themes, and the platform as a whole is designed to be user-friendly, and that comes at the cost of limited options.
Customer Support Shopify provides 24/7 customer support through phone, live chat, and email. Judging by the reputation of its customer support team, you can count on Shopify to fix any issue that may be interfering with your customer experience or the way you manage your shop. Shopify support is quite responsive, and won't be running you through a long or frustrating ticketing process. Considering that site errors in the world of eCommerce can ruin the reputation of any shop, the prompt and reliable support service Shopify is known to provide brings you peace of mind. If your business is too small to maintain a dedicated customer support team, Shopify is a great choice, as their technical team takes care of all the technical issues for you.
Magento
Magento is one of the most powerful and flexible eCommerce platforms ever developed. It allows for an unprecedented depth of customization, which means you can turn your online store into anything you want. It does not have the limitations that Shopify or other eCommerce platforms have. With it, you can change the essential code on which your site is based and customize every aspect of it, from the size of your main menu and product description images to how social media is integrated into your site.
The downside to all this is that Magento isn't the most user-friendly eCommerce platform around. While a web developer or site builder won't have a hard time finding its way around all of Magento's features, a store owner of business manager will hit a technical barrier pretty soon. Even though there are plenty of tutorials and help guides online, it's very difficult to take advantage of Magento's true power to craft a custom site that customers will love returning to. Unlike content management systems like WordPress and other site builders, Magento is built specially for eCommerce. Here are the key benefits you can expect from Magento.
Open Source Magento Community Edition is free to download and use. There are no subscription fees, monthly fees, or any other costs beyond web hosting and what you pay for development if you choose someone to develop your site for you. Many of the Magento extensions -- and there are thousands of them -- are free to download, so you can extend the functionality of your site in any way you need to. Excluding setup and technical maintenance costs, Magento can prove to be a more affordable web store solution that Shopify, which comes with monthly costs and heavy transaction fees.
Magento is also available as paid Enterprise-grade software. Enterprise Edition and Enterprise Cloud Edition both build upon the core features of the platform a richer user experience optimized for large catalogs of products and advanced marketing and analytics. To find out how much these editions cost, you can contact Magento for a quote. For most businesses, though, the Community Edition is more than sufficient.
Full Customization In terms of customization, Magento is truly exhaustive. With it, you can create a customer experience that offers unrivaled eCommerce functionality. Go beyond layout and design customizations to change the way customers discover and view your products. You can integrate advanced marketing functionality and customer segmentation, optimize your site for search engines and mobile users, create and manage sales and promotions, and more, all this without any heavy dependence on a particular extension or add-on.
Great Built-in Checkout
Since the launch of Magento 2, the platform provides a two-step checkout that's much faster than the old checkout. This is a crucial feature for any web store. Magento has made the checkout process as simple as possible, enabling even customers who are not logged on a site to order products. This can make all the difference between a customer that changes his mind in the last moment, and a new order ready for processing. The checkout is also mobile friendly.
Remarkably Extensible Magento is powered by a large community of enthusiastic developers who maintain a large collection of plugins and extensions. Out of the box, Magento Community Edition comes with all the basic functionality you need to create a rich web store experience with a fast checkout and an easy navigation. But its true power comes from its beautiful integration with a wealth of extensions that offer social media integration, barcode scanning systems, advanced marketing tools, shipment tracking, and more. These extensions are by no means cheap -- expect to pay up to a few hundreds of dollars for the more advanced ones -- but they deliver on their promises.
Great SEO In terms of SEO functionality, Magento is probably the best eCommerce platform around. But there's a catch. You have to do most of the SEO configuration yourself, on each page of your site. For those who are not initiated to basic SEO, this process can be challenging. You need to be familiar with more than the basic principles of SEO to harness the power of the SEO functionality that Magento offers. But if you do have the time and the knowledge for this, Magento helps your maximize your on-page SEO to rank higher in Google and other search engines.
Shopify and Magento Side By Side
Now that we've taken a look at the strong points of both Shopify and Magento, let's compare them side by side for key considerations such as Ease of Use, Customer Support, Features, or Price.
Ease of Use Shopify is designed to be easy to use. While Magento's dashboard and interface have gotten a lot better since the release of the latest version, the platform continues to have a steep learning curve due to its high number of features. If you're looking for the simplest possible user experience, with a mostly automated setup and a drag and drop site builder, Shopify is the way to go.
Functionality Magento brings you all the features you could expect from an eCommerce platform. Shopify, on the other hand, strikes a good balance between features and ease of use. It can't provide the same deep functionality that Magento has without losing its ease of use, and that's something you should keep in mind. Shopify isn't just a cloud alternative to Magento -- for all its extensions, it's lighter and may make a web developer feel limited by the freedom and options it gives him.
Features One of the main reasons both Shopify and Magento are so popular is their wealth of features. These two eCommerce platforms really have it all, from smooth shopping carts to in-depth social media and marketing integration. In terms of essential features, you can expect the same level of quality from both. But in terms of raw power, Magento wins the contest, unsurprisingly so, since it was built for providing web developers with all the features they need to create rich web stores.
Customer Support Shopify offers a dedicated customer support team that solves your problems quickly and effectively. Even if you ask them questions that are not strictly their domain, they may offer you guidance. With Magento, things are different. The free, Community Edition does not include any dedicated support. Instead, you can use the many free resources available to solve your problem. You can browse the web for solutions or ask in specialized forums and groups.
Considering just how big and dedicated to Magento the community behind it is, finding a solution to your problems won't be too hard. But searching for one will take time and may prove frustrating at times -- it's good to factor that in before using Magento. One way to overcome that problem is to use a managed Magento installation service. At Interactivated, we know how nagging technical problems can be, which is why our expert Magento developers are always ready to come to your assistance.
Installation Since Shopify is delivered as software as a service, you don't have to install it. All you have to do is build your site with a drag and drop creature and configure a few essential things about it. With Magento, however, you shouldn’t expect the same easy installation. If you're not a web developer or site builder, you will need a bit of time to complete the installation process. With the latest installment, the platform has simplified installation as well, but it's still not as user-friendly in this regard as Shopify.
Pricing Shopify isn't free -- it's not even cheap. The monthly subscription may not seem so big, but purchase fees can easily add up, leading to substantial costs every month. With Magento Community Edition, on the other hand, you only have to pay for web hosting and any plugins you may buy. That said, thinking of Magento as free isn't necessarily a good idea, as many users end up spending money on extensions and professional maintenance for their installation. How much Magento will cost you depends ultimately on what you want to do with it.
Who Is Shopify For?
Shopify is ideal for shop owners and managers who want a streamlined solution to managing their online shop. It's for people who don't know coding and who don't have any time to waste on technical issues. It's also for users who want scalability without sacrificing features or functionality. The users who can benefit from Shopify the most include...
• Small business owners who don't have the resources or the time to create and manage the code that powers their online presence
• Businesses who are growing and need a scalable eCommerce solution
• Local shop owners who also sell products online
• One-man businesses who don't need to develop complicated online store experiences
• Any business that prefers to have its online shop managed by a dedicated team
• Businesses who want a mobile-responsive experience
• Stores who sell their products to a mobile audience
• Businesses with stores in different countries and that sell products in multiple currencies
• Businesses that want to integrate their store experience beautifully into Facebook and other social networks
Who Is Magento For?
Magento is for businesses that want maximum eCommerce functionality and are not daunted by the technical issue this entails. It's for businesses that don't want to be limited in any way by their eCommerce platform. And since it's open-source, stores can use it to keep their eCommerce platform costs in check, enjoying all the features they need without sacrificing functionality. It's ideal for...
• Medium-sized and large businesses who want to develop outstanding shopping experiences for their customers
• Shop owners that want to implement specific features or functionality into their stores without any limitations
• Businesses active in competitive markets who want to develop stores that truly stand out
• Shop owners who want maximum control over all SEO aspects of their website
• Any company that has the resources to cope with the technical challenges that come with managing a Magento store in the long term
• Businesses who want to cut down eCommerce platform costs by embracing open-source philosophy
• Web store owners with technical knowledge or who are familiar with the principles of web development
Wrapping It All Up
In the battle between Shopify and Magento, we don't have a clear winner. In fact, it's not necessarily a battle, more like two lions nearing the border of each other's territory and prowling around it cautiously, wary of their foe yet not ready for an attack. While Shopify and Magento are both eCommerce platforms with a host of overlapping features and can be used with equal success, they differ in several regards. Both of them are highly customizable in terms of the final shopping experience customers will get, but Shopify stops well above Magento.
Magento is arguably the most customizable shopping platform of its kind, but the price users have to pay is a difficult interface and plenty of setup procedures that will daunt the average user. It's not that a Magento installation is hard to set up or use, but it was built for web developers and site builders who want maximum power and optimal performance. It's intended to be that way and its developers have not taken any shortcuts to provide site builders with all the complex functionality they need to craft compelling web stores.
Shopify and Magento are both complete eCommerce solutions for businesses big and small. Whether you choose one or the other, you can expect a polished and reliable platform with all the functionality you need to run and grow a successful store. They are powered by vibrant communities and live up to their promises in a way that not many other shopping platforms do. But they ultimately target different audiences, and that makes direct comparisons between them somewhat forced.
Shopify is for people who want to set up a professional online shop fast and run it without worrying about the backend. It's for small stores, local businesses, startups, and any business that needs a user-friendly platform. It knows after what features to draw a line to keep the platform clean and well-organized. Ultimately, it offers a web store model that has been proven to work time and time again and that can be hard to resist for store owners who want their stuff to be shared online.
Magento is for building unique stores with advanced features. It's not so much about usability as it is about customization. In this sense, it's more a platform for web developers and site builders than for the average business owner, who may easily get lost among its many and varied features. Magento adds a depth of personalization to the store-building experience that no other eCommerce platform can. More than just a piece of software, it's a suite of tools that tech-savvy store owners can use to get their message across and sell more products.
If you're not sure whether to choose Shopify or Magento, you should try them both and see which one you feel most comfortable with. Just because Magento offers more customization options, or Shopify makes running an online store so easy doesn't mean that you can't use one for the other successfully. Try Shopify for free for 14 days and download Magento Community Edition to get started with them now. With these great eCommerce shopping platforms on your side, selling online has never been easier, or more fruitful.
If you already use Shopify or Magento, or want to switch to a managed plan, we can help you create the web store you envision. Tell us your ideas and let us transform them into a beautiful shop experience that people will continue to come back to.
May 28, 2017Shopify and Magento are two of the names that have been standing out for many years in the dynamic world of eCommerce. At Interactivated, we have always appreciated Shopify’s ease of use and rich array of features. So much so that recently we have become a Shopify partner.
We know how difficult it can be to choose an eCommerce platform, which is why we've prepared for you an in-depth comparison of Shopify and Magento. We'll be covering everything you need to know to create a site, including installation, features, ease of use, extensions, and price.
Shopify
Shopify has grown into one of the most popular and accessible eCommerce platforms, with over 400,000 users worldwide. It's essentially a web store builder that lets you create a professional store even if you don't have any coding knowledge. It integrates with a wealth of extensions for accounting, reporting, sales and forecasting, inventory and more.
The biggest difference between Shopify and Magento is that Shopify is delivered as a paid service. Shopify technicians handle all the code for you. At the same time, you have full access over the code, should you choose to customize it.
Shopify makes the most of the what you see is what you get (WYSIWYG) web design principle so that you can customize your eCommerce site and the shopping experience it provides using simple options and visual cues. You access all features via a dashboard through which you can change all the essential elements of your website design, including layout or pages.
Advanced Integration
One of Shopify's advantages is advanced integration. For example, you can integrate it with Amazon to create a sales channel that tracks all your Amazon sales. You can then use the built-in forecasting and analytics to optimize this channel. Shopify also integrates beautifully with Facebook, allowing customers to browse your products using a Shop section on your Facebook page.
What's more, with Shopify you can enable customers to discover and even buy products using Messenger. Customers can also ask questions using Messenger, and in return, they receive automated responses, get automated order tracking, and more.
User-Friendly Thanks to its drag and drop interface and simple theme editing, Shopify is remarkably user-friendly. This is in fact why so many people have adopted it as their main shopping tool. The Shopify dashboard or backend is one of the best-polished dashboards you can find. It's simple, intuitive, and a pleasure to use.
There are no redundant settings or unnecessary menus so that you can find your way around it with ease, whether you want to change how your site looks, generate a sales report, or review your inventory. From the initial setup down to the minute design changes you can make to your site, Shopify remains user-friendly throughout. You probably won't even need the manual to use it.
The frontend, or the shopping experience your customers get, is just as smooth.
Integrated POS Shopify's POS system enables you to run a brick-and-mortar and SEO shop at the same time without any difficulties. It integrates smoothly your online and offline operations to improve customer satisfaction. This means using the same inventory for both stores, doing customer segmentation, and more.
It does this without the need for a massive investment in hardware or new dependencies. If you don't have a POS system already, or if you're not happy with it, Shopify offers you a viable alternative.
Free to Try For Two Weeks You can try Shopify for free for 14 days, during which you can access all of its features. Fourteen days is more than enough to get a feel for what Shopify is capable of and explore its whole range of features. Ideally, you want to try running your store with it to get a sense of its true power.
In terms of pricing, Shopify isn't the cheapest eCommerce platform around, but considering its wide range of features, it offers good value for the money. Shopify pricing is subscription-based and starts at $29 per month, plus a 2,9%+30 cents credit card rate. The credit card rate may make you uneasy, but on the other hand, you can manage an unlimited number of products with Shopify regardless of the subscription you choose.
The major difference between different subscription plans is in the number of accounts you can use -- from 2 to 15 -- and some more advanced features like abandoned cart recovery, advanced reporting, or third-party shipping rates calculator. There is no setup fee, and hosting costs are covered. Keep in mind that, depending on where you live, you may have to pay some extra sales taxes. If you pay your plan upfront, you get a 10% discount for an annual payment and a 20% discount for a biennial plan.
SEO-Optimized Shopify comes out of the box with all the essential search engine optimization your store needs to rank well in Google and other search engines. With Shopify, it's easy to edit tags and meta descriptions, customize pages URLs and file names, and add ALT tags to product images. Other SEO benefits that come with choosing Shopify are fast, fully-responsive themes, mobile support, and excellent social media integration, all of which can give your search engine ranking that boost that often makes the difference between a sale and a failed deal. For an online shop, SEO optimization can be a time-consuming process, which is why Shopify gets bonus points for making it so much easier.
Professional Templates The nine free themes that Shopify offers come with plenty customization options, including different layouts, header and banner support, and customizable sidebar. This enables you to give your site a unique identity without a massive investment in a professional theme. Still, Shopify features a theme store with plenty of professional themes you can choose from. At $140+, Shopify themes aren't cheap, but you do get quality for what you pay.
That said, you shouldn't expect from Shopify themes, not even premium ones, unlimited customization options. If you're very specific about theme customization, you may come across at some point over a theme limitation that will make you regret you're not using Magento. Shopify themes, and the platform as a whole is designed to be user-friendly, and that comes at the cost of limited options.
Customer Support Shopify provides 24/7 customer support through phone, live chat, and email. Judging by the reputation of its customer support team, you can count on Shopify to fix any issue that may be interfering with your customer experience or the way you manage your shop. Shopify support is quite responsive, and won't be running you through a long or frustrating ticketing process. Considering that site errors in the world of eCommerce can ruin the reputation of any shop, the prompt and reliable support service Shopify is known to provide brings you peace of mind. If your business is too small to maintain a dedicated customer support team, Shopify is a great choice, as their technical team takes care of all the technical issues for you.
Magento
Magento is one of the most powerful and flexible eCommerce platforms ever developed. It allows for an unprecedented depth of customization, which means you can turn your online store into anything you want. It does not have the limitations that Shopify or other eCommerce platforms have. With it, you can change the essential code on which your site is based and customize every aspect of it, from the size of your main menu and product description images to how social media is integrated into your site.
The downside to all this is that Magento isn't the most user-friendly eCommerce platform around. While a web developer or site builder won't have a hard time finding its way around all of Magento's features, a store owner of business manager will hit a technical barrier pretty soon. Even though there are plenty of tutorials and help guides online, it's very difficult to take advantage of Magento's true power to craft a custom site that customers will love returning to. Unlike content management systems like WordPress and other site builders, Magento is built specially for eCommerce. Here are the key benefits you can expect from Magento.
Open Source Magento Community Edition is free to download and use. There are no subscription fees, monthly fees, or any other costs beyond web hosting and what you pay for development if you choose someone to develop your site for you. Many of the Magento extensions -- and there are thousands of them -- are free to download, so you can extend the functionality of your site in any way you need to. Excluding setup and technical maintenance costs, Magento can prove to be a more affordable web store solution that Shopify, which comes with monthly costs and heavy transaction fees.
Magento is also available as paid Enterprise-grade software. Enterprise Edition and Enterprise Cloud Edition both build upon the core features of the platform a richer user experience optimized for large catalogs of products and advanced marketing and analytics. To find out how much these editions cost, you can contact Magento for a quote. For most businesses, though, the Community Edition is more than sufficient.
Full Customization In terms of customization, Magento is truly exhaustive. With it, you can create a customer experience that offers unrivaled eCommerce functionality. Go beyond layout and design customizations to change the way customers discover and view your products. You can integrate advanced marketing functionality and customer segmentation, optimize your site for search engines and mobile users, create and manage sales and promotions, and more, all this without any heavy dependence on a particular extension or add-on.
Great Built-in Checkout
Since the launch of Magento 2, the platform provides a two-step checkout that's much faster than the old checkout. This is a crucial feature for any web store. Magento has made the checkout process as simple as possible, enabling even customers who are not logged on a site to order products. This can make all the difference between a customer that changes his mind in the last moment, and a new order ready for processing. The checkout is also mobile friendly.
Remarkably Extensible Magento is powered by a large community of enthusiastic developers who maintain a large collection of plugins and extensions. Out of the box, Magento Community Edition comes with all the basic functionality you need to create a rich web store experience with a fast checkout and an easy navigation. But its true power comes from its beautiful integration with a wealth of extensions that offer social media integration, barcode scanning systems, advanced marketing tools, shipment tracking, and more. These extensions are by no means cheap -- expect to pay up to a few hundreds of dollars for the more advanced ones -- but they deliver on their promises.
Great SEO In terms of SEO functionality, Magento is probably the best eCommerce platform around. But there's a catch. You have to do most of the SEO configuration yourself, on each page of your site. For those who are not initiated to basic SEO, this process can be challenging. You need to be familiar with more than the basic principles of SEO to harness the power of the SEO functionality that Magento offers. But if you do have the time and the knowledge for this, Magento helps your maximize your on-page SEO to rank higher in Google and other search engines.
Shopify and Magento Side By Side
Now that we've taken a look at the strong points of both Shopify and Magento, let's compare them side by side for key considerations such as Ease of Use, Customer Support, Features, or Price.
Ease of Use Shopify is designed to be easy to use. While Magento's dashboard and interface have gotten a lot better since the release of the latest version, the platform continues to have a steep learning curve due to its high number of features. If you're looking for the simplest possible user experience, with a mostly automated setup and a drag and drop site builder, Shopify is the way to go.
Functionality Magento brings you all the features you could expect from an eCommerce platform. Shopify, on the other hand, strikes a good balance between features and ease of use. It can't provide the same deep functionality that Magento has without losing its ease of use, and that's something you should keep in mind. Shopify isn't just a cloud alternative to Magento -- for all its extensions, it's lighter and may make a web developer feel limited by the freedom and options it gives him.
Features One of the main reasons both Shopify and Magento are so popular is their wealth of features. These two eCommerce platforms really have it all, from smooth shopping carts to in-depth social media and marketing integration. In terms of essential features, you can expect the same level of quality from both. But in terms of raw power, Magento wins the contest, unsurprisingly so, since it was built for providing web developers with all the features they need to create rich web stores.
Customer Support Shopify offers a dedicated customer support team that solves your problems quickly and effectively. Even if you ask them questions that are not strictly their domain, they may offer you guidance. With Magento, things are different. The free, Community Edition does not include any dedicated support. Instead, you can use the many free resources available to solve your problem. You can browse the web for solutions or ask in specialized forums and groups.
Considering just how big and dedicated to Magento the community behind it is, finding a solution to your problems won't be too hard. But searching for one will take time and may prove frustrating at times -- it's good to factor that in before using Magento. One way to overcome that problem is to use a managed Magento installation service. At Interactivated, we know how nagging technical problems can be, which is why our expert Magento developers are always ready to come to your assistance.
Installation Since Shopify is delivered as software as a service, you don't have to install it. All you have to do is build your site with a drag and drop creature and configure a few essential things about it. With Magento, however, you shouldn’t expect the same easy installation. If you're not a web developer or site builder, you will need a bit of time to complete the installation process. With the latest installment, the platform has simplified installation as well, but it's still not as user-friendly in this regard as Shopify.
Pricing Shopify isn't free -- it's not even cheap. The monthly subscription may not seem so big, but purchase fees can easily add up, leading to substantial costs every month. With Magento Community Edition, on the other hand, you only have to pay for web hosting and any plugins you may buy. That said, thinking of Magento as free isn't necessarily a good idea, as many users end up spending money on extensions and professional maintenance for their installation. How much Magento will cost you depends ultimately on what you want to do with it.
Who Is Shopify For?
Shopify is ideal for shop owners and managers who want a streamlined solution to managing their online shop. It's for people who don't know coding and who don't have any time to waste on technical issues. It's also for users who want scalability without sacrificing features or functionality. The users who can benefit from Shopify the most include...
• Small business owners who don't have the resources or the time to create and manage the code that powers their online presence
• Businesses who are growing and need a scalable eCommerce solution
• Local shop owners who also sell products online
• One-man businesses who don't need to develop complicated online store experiences
• Any business that prefers to have its online shop managed by a dedicated team
• Businesses who want a mobile-responsive experience
• Stores who sell their products to a mobile audience
• Businesses with stores in different countries and that sell products in multiple currencies
• Businesses that want to integrate their store experience beautifully into Facebook and other social networks
Who Is Magento For?
Magento is for businesses that want maximum eCommerce functionality and are not daunted by the technical issue this entails. It's for businesses that don't want to be limited in any way by their eCommerce platform. And since it's open-source, stores can use it to keep their eCommerce platform costs in check, enjoying all the features they need without sacrificing functionality. It's ideal for...
• Medium-sized and large businesses who want to develop outstanding shopping experiences for their customers
• Shop owners that want to implement specific features or functionality into their stores without any limitations
• Businesses active in competitive markets who want to develop stores that truly stand out
• Shop owners who want maximum control over all SEO aspects of their website
• Any company that has the resources to cope with the technical challenges that come with managing a Magento store in the long term
• Businesses who want to cut down eCommerce platform costs by embracing open-source philosophy
• Web store owners with technical knowledge or who are familiar with the principles of web development
Wrapping It All Up
In the battle between Shopify and Magento, we don't have a clear winner. In fact, it's not necessarily a battle, more like two lions nearing the border of each other's territory and prowling around it cautiously, wary of their foe yet not ready for an attack. While Shopify and Magento are both eCommerce platforms with a host of overlapping features and can be used with equal success, they differ in several regards. Both of them are highly customizable in terms of the final shopping experience customers will get, but Shopify stops well above Magento.
Magento is arguably the most customizable shopping platform of its kind, but the price users have to pay is a difficult interface and plenty of setup procedures that will daunt the average user. It's not that a Magento installation is hard to set up or use, but it was built for web developers and site builders who want maximum power and optimal performance. It's intended to be that way and its developers have not taken any shortcuts to provide site builders with all the complex functionality they need to craft compelling web stores.
Shopify and Magento are both complete eCommerce solutions for businesses big and small. Whether you choose one or the other, you can expect a polished and reliable platform with all the functionality you need to run and grow a successful store. They are powered by vibrant communities and live up to their promises in a way that not many other shopping platforms do. But they ultimately target different audiences, and that makes direct comparisons between them somewhat forced.
Shopify is for people who want to set up a professional online shop fast and run it without worrying about the backend. It's for small stores, local businesses, startups, and any business that needs a user-friendly platform. It knows after what features to draw a line to keep the platform clean and well-organized. Ultimately, it offers a web store model that has been proven to work time and time again and that can be hard to resist for store owners who want their stuff to be shared online.
Magento is for building unique stores with advanced features. It's not so much about usability as it is about customization. In this sense, it's more a platform for web developers and site builders than for the average business owner, who may easily get lost among its many and varied features. Magento adds a depth of personalization to the store-building experience that no other eCommerce platform can. More than just a piece of software, it's a suite of tools that tech-savvy store owners can use to get their message across and sell more products.
If you're not sure whether to choose Shopify or Magento, you should try them both and see which one you feel most comfortable with. Just because Magento offers more customization options, or Shopify makes running an online store so easy doesn't mean that you can't use one for the other successfully. Try Shopify for free for 14 days and download Magento Community Edition to get started with them now. With these great eCommerce shopping platforms on your side, selling online has never been easier, or more fruitful.
If you already use Shopify or Magento, or want to switch to a managed plan, we can help you create the web store you envision. Tell us your ideas and let us transform them into a beautiful shop experience that people will continue to come back to.
Minimum Viable Product - The Smart Strategy for Software Development Startups
If you have an idea for a new software product but are unsure whether to invest all your time and effort in it, fear not. There is a perfectly viable way to “start your business without actually starting it”. The concept of a minimum viable product is gaining in popularity, simply because it's a complete win-win strategy. With minimal funds, you can start earning, test your products, find fans, and even start making some money. All the while, your newly acquired customers help you to develop and perfect your product until you are ready to make a considerable time and money investment. With an MVP, you’ve got nothing to lose and everything to gain.
What Is Minimum Value Product?
Product developers who start off with an MVP, create a version of their product, featuring all the elements of the fully developed product, without investing all the time and money to build the finished product. To give you a “non-software” analogy, let’s say, you would like to open a bakery. Instead of finding premises, buying costly equipment, and hiring staff, you start by baking cakes at home and selling them at the local market. The costs involved are minimal, in fact, because you are selling your cakes, you are likely to make more than you’ve invested. What is more, you will gain valuable market research information from your customers and determine whether there is a market for your product. Customer feedback will allow you to perfect your recipe over time. Once you are happy with your MVP revenue, you can start thinking about getting actual business premises, equipment, and staff.
The process of creating a software MVP is much the same. Rather than investing tons of money in fully developing your product, you produce a “lean version” for people to try. You do so by using a variety of existing MVP tools which we are going to describe in detail later on.
Benefits of the MVP Concept
The MVP strategy comes with a plethora of benefits, including:
● Early Product Testing: By making an early version of your product available, you will on one hand find customers or what are often called “early adopters”. On the other hand, they will test your product and provide you with valuable feedback. This can all happen without you having to invest much cash or time.
● Product Development: The MVP concept is focused around product development, i.e. as you make the product available and start getting feedback, you keep on developing it with the help of early adopters. You build a “lean version” of your product, measure the results of the initial launch, learn from customer feedback, and go on to create your final product.
● Market Research: Once your MVP is available, you start gathering information about the appeal of your product in an effort to determine whether there is a market for your product. Because you are already interacting with customers, you soon get an idea of the viability of your product.
● Quick Launch: Because you are making a lean product available, you can do so quickly and without investing too much time and money.
● Cost and Time Efficiency: Fully developing a product requires a lot of financial and time resources, MVPs on the other hand don’t.
How to Create a Software MVP
There are a few considerations necessary when creating a software MVP. Obviously, you need to have an idea for a product, however, you are going to have to carry that idea through the following development stages:
1. Unique Selling Point / Unique Value Proposition: To start with, you will need to determine whether you are offering something unique or a better version of an existing product. Unless you have something new or improved to offer, there is little point in continuing your venture.
2. Identifying a Customer Base: Identify who your potential customers are and define their reasons for buying your product. Who are you producing the product for? Why would they want to buy it?
3. Customer Needs: Identify the need your product is going to meet.
4. Provide Minimum Viable Solution: Your MVP ought to provide a minimum viable solution to your customer’s problems.
5. Delivery Channels: How are your customers going to get your product? How are you going to deliver it?
6. Who Are Your Competitors: Examine the market you would like to get a foothold in and identify your competitors. Continue by asking yourself in what way your MVP is more innovative or better than your competitor’s product.
7. Costings: Do up some figures, calculate your input costs and potential earnings and see if the figures add up.
8. Revenue Stream: Establish ways of collecting cash from your customers.
9. MVP Process Data Collection: Determine methods by which you are going to gather customer behavior and market research information. Measurables are vitally important and will ultimately form the basis of your full product development.
Creating and Developing a Product
When creating an MVP, set your priorities as illustrated in the project management triangle of time-cost-scope. The process don’t need to take all that much time, especially if you are using a tool like the Agile Software Development Product. The benefits of using Agile include:
● Fast Development: Potentially, you can develop your product within two weeks.
● Flexibility: Agile allows you to tweak your product over time until you reach perfection.
● Feature Prioritization: With Agile, you can prioritize features for your lean MVP ● Collaboration: When using Agile, you will take everyone’s needs into consideration, the business’s, the early adopters’, and the MVP developers’.
● Minimum Effort: Your developmental efforts will be minimal when using Agile.
The buzzword around creating an MVP is “lean”, because it describes the fact that you are investing the least possible resources when it comes to time and cash. Some of the “lean MVP development strategies include:
● Cloud Services Are Cost-Effective: By using cloud services you save yourself a pile of cash. Once you have established a good customer base, you can invest in your own platform, while continuing to use cloud services for excess traffic.
● Lean Product: Start off with a product that has few, but strong features. Companies like Google, Dropbox, and Craigslist initially made a slimline version of their product available, Customers tend to prefer simple and easy-to-use products.
● SaaS: Rather than creating your own data collection, monetizing, and customer support service, outsource it to third party services. This way, you can remain focused on the development of your product which is the most important part of your project.
● Most Popular Platforms and Browsers: Start off by making your product available on the most popular browsers and websites rather than all of them.
● Open Source CMS: Platforms like WordPress are cost-effective and come with a plethora of data analysis and measurement tools.
Finding Customers
Once you have developed your lean MVP, you will be keen to make it available to as many people as possible. But how do you build a customer base? Where do you find early adopters? How will you convince them to go beyond just trying out your product and become your regular customers?
Your approach will vary depending on whether you are launching an entirely new product or whether you are making an improved version of an existing product available. For the former, you will need to educate and enlighten your potential customers. When doing so, you will have to highlight an existing, previously unmet need, and illustrate and promote the solution you are furnishing. For the latter, you may be able to access an existing customer base and simply highlight the unique selling point of your product.
When developing a customer base and strategy, there are four steps you need to progress through:
● Publicizing Your Product: You can approach potential customers in a variety of ways. A lot of companies create “explainer videos” and upload them on YouTube, some send emails, while others use platforms like Facebook, Quora, or ActiveCampaign. Clickable prototypes are essential because people can get a preview of your product and get a good idea of what kind of product you are launching.
● Turning Early Adopters into Long-Term Customers: Once a few people engage, start a conversation and determine their real needs. Tell them how to get your product, ask them to try it and request feedback. Questionnaires and calls-to-action are a good way of building lasting relationships with customers. At this point, you also need to think about branding and make sure your product makes an impact and stands out.
● Maintain Your Customers, Get More, and Keep them Engaged: Build your online presence, profile, and visibility by creating engaging content. Regularly post on all social media platforms and make sure to start a blog. Use your posts to educate, create interest, and cause a stir. The more evocative, the better.
● Make Them Pay: Don’t give your product away, charge your customers. That way, they will value it more and take you more seriously. You can also make additional features available in exchange for money. Remember, you are a professional and are making a product available that has value.
Top MVP Tools
There are a number of effective MVP launch and development tools that can help you to launch and promote your product, while gathering fans and customers for you.
1. Explainer Videos: Companies such as Dropbox started off with a strong explainer video, illustrating how their product worked. Uploaded on YouTube or published on a high-traffic sight, explainer videos give potential early adopters a glimpse into the use of your product. Simple screencasts can suffice in garnering plenty of attention and attracting lots of customers.
2. Strong Landing Page: A landing page is the page people get to after clicking on a link. Make yours strong, informative, and includes a chat feature to facilitate communication with early adopters. You can use AdWord or similar to drive traffic to your site.
3. Crowdfunding: Launching a crowdfunding campaign on sites like Kickstarter, IndieGoGo, and Rockethub not only publicizes your product, but also potentially raises funds for you. Lots of companies have raised considerable amounts of money this way. Beyond that, you are also building a fanbase and following, and when you do, keep in touch with your fans and regularly communicate with them by email and via social media.
Measuring the Results
Measuring the results of your MVP campaign is essential when trying to decide whether to fully develop your MVP into a product and invest time and money at that point. Website data will go a long way toward telling you about the success or failure of your MVP. Basically, you want to find out how your customers felt about your product, what the market conditions are, and whether the costings add up.
While customer interaction can provide you with valuable information, measurable results as provided by software tools like One Metric That Matters will allow you to analyze your standing in the most solid and detailed fashion.
As part of a business-stage-metric-correlation model, the following elements are factored in:
● Engagement: Determined through customer surveys, quantitative scoring, and interviews ● Stickiness: Measurement of conversion, engagement, downloads, traffic, etc.
● Virality: Tracking likes and shares ● Revenue: Calculating earnings ● Scale: Analyzing scalability and the potential for further growth By carefully examining all the results, you should be able to determine the viability of your project and identify strengths and weaknesses. The gathered information will form the basis of your ultimate business strategy and steer you through the startup of your business beyond the minimum viable product project.
Apart from the data, customer feedback is your most valuable tool and can guide you through the development of a long-term, financially profitable product and venture.
Final Thoughts
No doubt, undertaking a MVP project before deciding to go all out and start a business is an extremely worthwhile exercise. With minimal investment you have the opportunity to test the market, test your product, gain customers, engage with early adopters, raise investments, and make some money.
By the end, you will have a very good idea of whether your idea can one day translate into a successful enterprise.
May 27, 2017What Is Minimum Value Product?
Product developers who start off with an MVP, create a version of their product, featuring all the elements of the fully developed product, without investing all the time and money to build the finished product. To give you a “non-software” analogy, let’s say, you would like to open a bakery. Instead of finding premises, buying costly equipment, and hiring staff, you start by baking cakes at home and selling them at the local market. The costs involved are minimal, in fact, because you are selling your cakes, you are likely to make more than you’ve invested. What is more, you will gain valuable market research information from your customers and determine whether there is a market for your product. Customer feedback will allow you to perfect your recipe over time. Once you are happy with your MVP revenue, you can start thinking about getting actual business premises, equipment, and staff.
The process of creating a software MVP is much the same. Rather than investing tons of money in fully developing your product, you produce a “lean version” for people to try. You do so by using a variety of existing MVP tools which we are going to describe in detail later on.
Benefits of the MVP Concept
The MVP strategy comes with a plethora of benefits, including:
● Early Product Testing: By making an early version of your product available, you will on one hand find customers or what are often called “early adopters”. On the other hand, they will test your product and provide you with valuable feedback. This can all happen without you having to invest much cash or time.
● Product Development: The MVP concept is focused around product development, i.e. as you make the product available and start getting feedback, you keep on developing it with the help of early adopters. You build a “lean version” of your product, measure the results of the initial launch, learn from customer feedback, and go on to create your final product.
● Market Research: Once your MVP is available, you start gathering information about the appeal of your product in an effort to determine whether there is a market for your product. Because you are already interacting with customers, you soon get an idea of the viability of your product.
● Quick Launch: Because you are making a lean product available, you can do so quickly and without investing too much time and money.
● Cost and Time Efficiency: Fully developing a product requires a lot of financial and time resources, MVPs on the other hand don’t.
How to Create a Software MVP
There are a few considerations necessary when creating a software MVP. Obviously, you need to have an idea for a product, however, you are going to have to carry that idea through the following development stages:
1. Unique Selling Point / Unique Value Proposition: To start with, you will need to determine whether you are offering something unique or a better version of an existing product. Unless you have something new or improved to offer, there is little point in continuing your venture.
2. Identifying a Customer Base: Identify who your potential customers are and define their reasons for buying your product. Who are you producing the product for? Why would they want to buy it?
3. Customer Needs: Identify the need your product is going to meet.
4. Provide Minimum Viable Solution: Your MVP ought to provide a minimum viable solution to your customer’s problems.
5. Delivery Channels: How are your customers going to get your product? How are you going to deliver it?
6. Who Are Your Competitors: Examine the market you would like to get a foothold in and identify your competitors. Continue by asking yourself in what way your MVP is more innovative or better than your competitor’s product.
7. Costings: Do up some figures, calculate your input costs and potential earnings and see if the figures add up.
8. Revenue Stream: Establish ways of collecting cash from your customers.
9. MVP Process Data Collection: Determine methods by which you are going to gather customer behavior and market research information. Measurables are vitally important and will ultimately form the basis of your full product development.
Creating and Developing a Product
When creating an MVP, set your priorities as illustrated in the project management triangle of time-cost-scope. The process don’t need to take all that much time, especially if you are using a tool like the Agile Software Development Product. The benefits of using Agile include:
● Fast Development: Potentially, you can develop your product within two weeks.
● Flexibility: Agile allows you to tweak your product over time until you reach perfection.
● Feature Prioritization: With Agile, you can prioritize features for your lean MVP ● Collaboration: When using Agile, you will take everyone’s needs into consideration, the business’s, the early adopters’, and the MVP developers’.
● Minimum Effort: Your developmental efforts will be minimal when using Agile.
The buzzword around creating an MVP is “lean”, because it describes the fact that you are investing the least possible resources when it comes to time and cash. Some of the “lean MVP development strategies include:
● Cloud Services Are Cost-Effective: By using cloud services you save yourself a pile of cash. Once you have established a good customer base, you can invest in your own platform, while continuing to use cloud services for excess traffic.
● Lean Product: Start off with a product that has few, but strong features. Companies like Google, Dropbox, and Craigslist initially made a slimline version of their product available, Customers tend to prefer simple and easy-to-use products.
● SaaS: Rather than creating your own data collection, monetizing, and customer support service, outsource it to third party services. This way, you can remain focused on the development of your product which is the most important part of your project.
● Most Popular Platforms and Browsers: Start off by making your product available on the most popular browsers and websites rather than all of them.
● Open Source CMS: Platforms like WordPress are cost-effective and come with a plethora of data analysis and measurement tools.
Finding Customers
Once you have developed your lean MVP, you will be keen to make it available to as many people as possible. But how do you build a customer base? Where do you find early adopters? How will you convince them to go beyond just trying out your product and become your regular customers?
Your approach will vary depending on whether you are launching an entirely new product or whether you are making an improved version of an existing product available. For the former, you will need to educate and enlighten your potential customers. When doing so, you will have to highlight an existing, previously unmet need, and illustrate and promote the solution you are furnishing. For the latter, you may be able to access an existing customer base and simply highlight the unique selling point of your product.
When developing a customer base and strategy, there are four steps you need to progress through:
● Publicizing Your Product: You can approach potential customers in a variety of ways. A lot of companies create “explainer videos” and upload them on YouTube, some send emails, while others use platforms like Facebook, Quora, or ActiveCampaign. Clickable prototypes are essential because people can get a preview of your product and get a good idea of what kind of product you are launching.
● Turning Early Adopters into Long-Term Customers: Once a few people engage, start a conversation and determine their real needs. Tell them how to get your product, ask them to try it and request feedback. Questionnaires and calls-to-action are a good way of building lasting relationships with customers. At this point, you also need to think about branding and make sure your product makes an impact and stands out.
● Maintain Your Customers, Get More, and Keep them Engaged: Build your online presence, profile, and visibility by creating engaging content. Regularly post on all social media platforms and make sure to start a blog. Use your posts to educate, create interest, and cause a stir. The more evocative, the better.
● Make Them Pay: Don’t give your product away, charge your customers. That way, they will value it more and take you more seriously. You can also make additional features available in exchange for money. Remember, you are a professional and are making a product available that has value.
Top MVP Tools
There are a number of effective MVP launch and development tools that can help you to launch and promote your product, while gathering fans and customers for you.
1. Explainer Videos: Companies such as Dropbox started off with a strong explainer video, illustrating how their product worked. Uploaded on YouTube or published on a high-traffic sight, explainer videos give potential early adopters a glimpse into the use of your product. Simple screencasts can suffice in garnering plenty of attention and attracting lots of customers.
2. Strong Landing Page: A landing page is the page people get to after clicking on a link. Make yours strong, informative, and includes a chat feature to facilitate communication with early adopters. You can use AdWord or similar to drive traffic to your site.
3. Crowdfunding: Launching a crowdfunding campaign on sites like Kickstarter, IndieGoGo, and Rockethub not only publicizes your product, but also potentially raises funds for you. Lots of companies have raised considerable amounts of money this way. Beyond that, you are also building a fanbase and following, and when you do, keep in touch with your fans and regularly communicate with them by email and via social media.
Measuring the Results
Measuring the results of your MVP campaign is essential when trying to decide whether to fully develop your MVP into a product and invest time and money at that point. Website data will go a long way toward telling you about the success or failure of your MVP. Basically, you want to find out how your customers felt about your product, what the market conditions are, and whether the costings add up.
While customer interaction can provide you with valuable information, measurable results as provided by software tools like One Metric That Matters will allow you to analyze your standing in the most solid and detailed fashion.
As part of a business-stage-metric-correlation model, the following elements are factored in:
● Engagement: Determined through customer surveys, quantitative scoring, and interviews ● Stickiness: Measurement of conversion, engagement, downloads, traffic, etc.
● Virality: Tracking likes and shares ● Revenue: Calculating earnings ● Scale: Analyzing scalability and the potential for further growth By carefully examining all the results, you should be able to determine the viability of your project and identify strengths and weaknesses. The gathered information will form the basis of your ultimate business strategy and steer you through the startup of your business beyond the minimum viable product project.
Apart from the data, customer feedback is your most valuable tool and can guide you through the development of a long-term, financially profitable product and venture.
Final Thoughts
No doubt, undertaking a MVP project before deciding to go all out and start a business is an extremely worthwhile exercise. With minimal investment you have the opportunity to test the market, test your product, gain customers, engage with early adopters, raise investments, and make some money.
By the end, you will have a very good idea of whether your idea can one day translate into a successful enterprise.
Interactivated Becomes a Shopify Partner to Help Web Stores Grow
At Interactivated, we've always recognized the power and appeal of Shopify as an eCommerce platform. Now we're proud to announce that, in our effort to deliver the best web store experience possible, we've become a proud Shopify partner.
Shopify has over 400,000 users worldwide. It's more than an eCommerce site builder -- it's a vibrant platform that enables you to run a web store without any hassle. It's user-friendly, beautiful, and easy to customize. While we appreciate the depth of customization that only Magento can offer, we understand that many small and medium-sized businesses want a simpler web store builder and management platform that they can customize to their heart's content.
Benefits of Shopify
Choosing Shopify as your web store platform can be one of the most inspired business decisions you make. Shopify is great for business owners who want to strike a fine balance between cost and value and enjoy maximum flexibility and scalability. Shopify makes running your business so easy that you can focus all your energy and creativity into managing your store.
You don't waste any time setting up, configuring, or maintaining your web store. Whether you sell twenty products or two thousand, Shopify makes it fast and easy.
Here are some of the key benefits you can expect from Shopify
• Simple and easy to use backend with visual editors and tools
• Beautiful, professional themes that you can easily customize
• Quick loading times and optimal site performance thanks to managed hosting
• Social media integration with Facebook and other networks for easy sharing and traffic
• Built-in marketing suite for all your essential marketing needs, plus more advanced marketing tools in the app store
• SEO-friendly out of the box, so you don't have to spend extra time polishing your site for Google
• 24/7 dedicated customer support that helps you fix all your technical problems before they cost you money
• Many add-ons in the Shopify App Store, including inventory control tools, MailChimp integration, and call to action buttons
How We Can Help
While anyone can create a store with Shopify, we understand just how busy business owners and managers are. That's why we've extended our professional web store services to Shopify. We can build from the ground up a great Shopify site for you that faithfully reflects your vision.
We can also take an existing Shopify site and bring it to a whole new level through custom coding, custom web design, and more. We maximize your Google ranking and provide you with a polished web store that your customers will love to explore and return to.
We use a structured approach to web store design using Scum management principles. This ensures that every component of your web store will perform at optimal levels. Our approach can build on your ideas and extend them to create a truly unforgettable web store.
Shopify is amazing, but so many businesses use it today. The competition is tough. That's why we're here. We can make your store stand out.
May 26, 2017Shopify has over 400,000 users worldwide. It's more than an eCommerce site builder -- it's a vibrant platform that enables you to run a web store without any hassle. It's user-friendly, beautiful, and easy to customize. While we appreciate the depth of customization that only Magento can offer, we understand that many small and medium-sized businesses want a simpler web store builder and management platform that they can customize to their heart's content.
Benefits of Shopify
Choosing Shopify as your web store platform can be one of the most inspired business decisions you make. Shopify is great for business owners who want to strike a fine balance between cost and value and enjoy maximum flexibility and scalability. Shopify makes running your business so easy that you can focus all your energy and creativity into managing your store.
You don't waste any time setting up, configuring, or maintaining your web store. Whether you sell twenty products or two thousand, Shopify makes it fast and easy.
Here are some of the key benefits you can expect from Shopify
• Simple and easy to use backend with visual editors and tools
• Beautiful, professional themes that you can easily customize
• Quick loading times and optimal site performance thanks to managed hosting
• Social media integration with Facebook and other networks for easy sharing and traffic
• Built-in marketing suite for all your essential marketing needs, plus more advanced marketing tools in the app store
• SEO-friendly out of the box, so you don't have to spend extra time polishing your site for Google
• 24/7 dedicated customer support that helps you fix all your technical problems before they cost you money
• Many add-ons in the Shopify App Store, including inventory control tools, MailChimp integration, and call to action buttons
How We Can Help
While anyone can create a store with Shopify, we understand just how busy business owners and managers are. That's why we've extended our professional web store services to Shopify. We can build from the ground up a great Shopify site for you that faithfully reflects your vision.
We can also take an existing Shopify site and bring it to a whole new level through custom coding, custom web design, and more. We maximize your Google ranking and provide you with a polished web store that your customers will love to explore and return to.
We use a structured approach to web store design using Scum management principles. This ensures that every component of your web store will perform at optimal levels. Our approach can build on your ideas and extend them to create a truly unforgettable web store.
Shopify is amazing, but so many businesses use it today. The competition is tough. That's why we're here. We can make your store stand out.
Software Product Development Strategies
As a company grows, its software requirements change and develop, and generic software products may no longer suffice in catering to a thriving business. Specialized and customized software products specifically designed to meet a company’s needs can furnish viable solutions and work toward furthering the expansion of a business.
Website redevelopment, the creation of tailor-made software concepts and technology, and the enhancement of existing software platforms can all contribute to the improvement of the day-to-day running and profitability of a company.
While traditionally, software products were developed by using the well-known waterfall methodology, the more flexible agile model has become increasingly popular. Both approaches are worth considering. What model suits your business best depends on your needs and requirements.
Tailored Approach - Needs Assessment First
Before deciding on a methodology and providing a quotation, we assess your company’s needs first. During extensive discussions, we identify your requirements, gather your ideas, determine your budget, and set a time frame. We then continue by introducing you to our methodologies, sharing our expertise, and providing you with a ballpark quotation. By the end of this process, you will have a clear picture of the process involved, our approach, and what to expect.
Our software product developers are highly trained and experienced and do their utmost to furnish a sophisticated software solution geared toward reaching your specific objectives.
Two Approaches to Software Product Development Strategies
We offer two different methodologies: the traditional waterfall design and the more adaptable agile methodology. Waterfall projects are fixed price projects, while agile projects take the time and materials used into consideration and are calculated over time.
During the initial meeting, we jointly determine which approach would cater to your needs in the most effective way.
Waterfall
The Waterfall model is a rather rigid, linear model. This is how software was traditionally developed, and this methodology still represents a viable approach for many businesses.
The stages of the waterfall approach are clearly defined, one step logically follows another, culminating in the delivery of a carefully planned software package.
The waterfall methodology incorporates the following two main stages:
Stage I - Project Planning
During the planning stage, our developers gather all the relevant information on your needs and objectives. They then create a project plan, provide a quotation, design a work order, furnish wireframes, and put together a development team. Our focus is on creating an effective, efficient software product, tailored to the specific requirements of all our clients. Your input is extremely valuable and will equip us with the information we need in the development of a sophisticated software product.
Once you are happy to proceed on the basis of what our development team has put together, the project development can commence.
Stage II - Project Development
After signing off on the work order, we begin with the design of your software product. Subsequently, we make the product available to our clients for user acceptance testing, also known as UAT. During the UAT stage, you will be able to test a prototype of your software and provide us with feedback. At this point, we can implement changes if you so wish. You may, for instance, like to include other features or further customize the software.
As soon as you are happy with the developed software, we deploy it in the production environment.
Advantages of the Waterfall Methodology
The waterfall model has a plethora of advantages, including:
● Straightforward Process: As all the variables are defined during the planning stage, the development process is exceedingly straightforward.
● Customer Not Required to Contribute after Initial Meetings: The development teams takes care of every aspect of the project development, and the client only needs to be present at the planning stage, and during meetings, reviews, and product tests.
● Suitable for Multi-Element Design: At times, several software products are developed simultaneously and can easily be integrated subsequent to using the waterfall methodology.
Disadvantages of the Waterfall Methodology
There are drawbacks to this model:
● Customer May Not Be Able to Visualize the Finished Product: It can be difficult for clients to imagine the finished products and provide the development team with sufficient information.
● Customer May Not Be Happy with the Finished Product: At times, the client may not be entirely happy with the finished product.
Agile Methodology
In the agile approach, the entire process is broken into different segments, also known as sprints. The client is involved in all the sprints and gets an opportunity to review the development thereof. Each sprint lasts approximately one week. At the beginning of each sprint, deliverables are defined and then processed. At the end of each sprint, the development team in collaboration with the client, determine whether the sprint has produced all the deliverables, and at this point, the client can request changes or furnish ideas.
The agile methodology requires a great deal of input from the part of the client.
When all the sprints have been completed, the finished software product is tested, errors are fixed and the perfected software product is then released.
Advantages of the Agile Approach
Undoubtedly, the agile methodology is the most popular choice, particularly in view of its many advantages like:
● Flexibility: The agile method provides more flexibility as the product is developed over time. If changes are necessary they can easily be integrated into the process ● Customer Involvement: The great degree of customer involvement virtually guarantees customer satisfaction provided the client is willing and able to invest the time and effort.
● Quicker Deliverables: Using the agile methodology, software developers can produce basic version for release more quickly.
● More User-Focused: The customer involvement usually ensure the ease-of-use of the product.
Disadvantages of the Agile Approach
The agile methodology has also a few drawbacks:
● Customer Needs to Invest a Lot of Time: The agile methodology’s success depends on the involvement of the client who must be available to invest a lot of time and effort in the process. This may not be possible for busy executives.
● Team Proximity: The agile methodology works best if the team can work in the same premises. Though distant collaboration is possible, this may still represent an issue.
● Sprint Elements Often Not Completed on Time: Quite frequently, the development team may not be able to complete all the sprint deliverables. Consequently, the subsequent sprints need to be redefined and this obviously has repercussions.
● Too Much Flexibility May Lead to Inferior Quality: Because changes can be implemented throughout the process, the overall quality of the product may suffer because there is less coherence and possibly a lack of natural flow. Large projects that require a high level of integration may not “gel” sufficiently.
Our Verdict
There is no generic answer to the question of which methodology is better because both approaches have some merit. The first and most important step is to define your goals and objectives. Secondly, you have to decide whether you would be in a position to invest all the time required in the application of the agile approach.
The size and type of project must also be a deciding factor. Ultimately, your software development company will be able to advise you on the best way forward.
The First and Most Important Step - Choosing a Strategy for Your Specific Needs
The initial exploratory meeting is perhaps the most important step. On contact, you need to tell your software developer precisely what kind of a software product you are looking for and outline how much time you are prepared to invest.
Equipped with plenty of knowledge, expertise and experience, our software developers can advise you on the best approach and furnish you with a top-quality software product tailored to your specific requirements.
We appreciate the value of both approaches, knowing well that both the waterfall and agile methodologies can deliver the tools for effective and efficient software product development. The choice will most certainly depend on your specific needs.
May 24, 2017Website redevelopment, the creation of tailor-made software concepts and technology, and the enhancement of existing software platforms can all contribute to the improvement of the day-to-day running and profitability of a company.
While traditionally, software products were developed by using the well-known waterfall methodology, the more flexible agile model has become increasingly popular. Both approaches are worth considering. What model suits your business best depends on your needs and requirements.
Tailored Approach - Needs Assessment First
Before deciding on a methodology and providing a quotation, we assess your company’s needs first. During extensive discussions, we identify your requirements, gather your ideas, determine your budget, and set a time frame. We then continue by introducing you to our methodologies, sharing our expertise, and providing you with a ballpark quotation. By the end of this process, you will have a clear picture of the process involved, our approach, and what to expect.
Our software product developers are highly trained and experienced and do their utmost to furnish a sophisticated software solution geared toward reaching your specific objectives.
Two Approaches to Software Product Development Strategies
We offer two different methodologies: the traditional waterfall design and the more adaptable agile methodology. Waterfall projects are fixed price projects, while agile projects take the time and materials used into consideration and are calculated over time.
During the initial meeting, we jointly determine which approach would cater to your needs in the most effective way.
Waterfall
The Waterfall model is a rather rigid, linear model. This is how software was traditionally developed, and this methodology still represents a viable approach for many businesses.
The stages of the waterfall approach are clearly defined, one step logically follows another, culminating in the delivery of a carefully planned software package.
The waterfall methodology incorporates the following two main stages:
Stage I - Project Planning
During the planning stage, our developers gather all the relevant information on your needs and objectives. They then create a project plan, provide a quotation, design a work order, furnish wireframes, and put together a development team. Our focus is on creating an effective, efficient software product, tailored to the specific requirements of all our clients. Your input is extremely valuable and will equip us with the information we need in the development of a sophisticated software product.
Once you are happy to proceed on the basis of what our development team has put together, the project development can commence.
Stage II - Project Development
After signing off on the work order, we begin with the design of your software product. Subsequently, we make the product available to our clients for user acceptance testing, also known as UAT. During the UAT stage, you will be able to test a prototype of your software and provide us with feedback. At this point, we can implement changes if you so wish. You may, for instance, like to include other features or further customize the software.
As soon as you are happy with the developed software, we deploy it in the production environment.
Advantages of the Waterfall Methodology
The waterfall model has a plethora of advantages, including:
● Straightforward Process: As all the variables are defined during the planning stage, the development process is exceedingly straightforward.
● Customer Not Required to Contribute after Initial Meetings: The development teams takes care of every aspect of the project development, and the client only needs to be present at the planning stage, and during meetings, reviews, and product tests.
● Suitable for Multi-Element Design: At times, several software products are developed simultaneously and can easily be integrated subsequent to using the waterfall methodology.
Disadvantages of the Waterfall Methodology
There are drawbacks to this model:
● Customer May Not Be Able to Visualize the Finished Product: It can be difficult for clients to imagine the finished products and provide the development team with sufficient information.
● Customer May Not Be Happy with the Finished Product: At times, the client may not be entirely happy with the finished product.
Agile Methodology
In the agile approach, the entire process is broken into different segments, also known as sprints. The client is involved in all the sprints and gets an opportunity to review the development thereof. Each sprint lasts approximately one week. At the beginning of each sprint, deliverables are defined and then processed. At the end of each sprint, the development team in collaboration with the client, determine whether the sprint has produced all the deliverables, and at this point, the client can request changes or furnish ideas.
The agile methodology requires a great deal of input from the part of the client.
When all the sprints have been completed, the finished software product is tested, errors are fixed and the perfected software product is then released.
Advantages of the Agile Approach
Undoubtedly, the agile methodology is the most popular choice, particularly in view of its many advantages like:
● Flexibility: The agile method provides more flexibility as the product is developed over time. If changes are necessary they can easily be integrated into the process ● Customer Involvement: The great degree of customer involvement virtually guarantees customer satisfaction provided the client is willing and able to invest the time and effort.
● Quicker Deliverables: Using the agile methodology, software developers can produce basic version for release more quickly.
● More User-Focused: The customer involvement usually ensure the ease-of-use of the product.
Disadvantages of the Agile Approach
The agile methodology has also a few drawbacks:
● Customer Needs to Invest a Lot of Time: The agile methodology’s success depends on the involvement of the client who must be available to invest a lot of time and effort in the process. This may not be possible for busy executives.
● Team Proximity: The agile methodology works best if the team can work in the same premises. Though distant collaboration is possible, this may still represent an issue.
● Sprint Elements Often Not Completed on Time: Quite frequently, the development team may not be able to complete all the sprint deliverables. Consequently, the subsequent sprints need to be redefined and this obviously has repercussions.
● Too Much Flexibility May Lead to Inferior Quality: Because changes can be implemented throughout the process, the overall quality of the product may suffer because there is less coherence and possibly a lack of natural flow. Large projects that require a high level of integration may not “gel” sufficiently.
Our Verdict
There is no generic answer to the question of which methodology is better because both approaches have some merit. The first and most important step is to define your goals and objectives. Secondly, you have to decide whether you would be in a position to invest all the time required in the application of the agile approach.
The size and type of project must also be a deciding factor. Ultimately, your software development company will be able to advise you on the best way forward.
The First and Most Important Step - Choosing a Strategy for Your Specific Needs
The initial exploratory meeting is perhaps the most important step. On contact, you need to tell your software developer precisely what kind of a software product you are looking for and outline how much time you are prepared to invest.
Equipped with plenty of knowledge, expertise and experience, our software developers can advise you on the best approach and furnish you with a top-quality software product tailored to your specific requirements.
We appreciate the value of both approaches, knowing well that both the waterfall and agile methodologies can deliver the tools for effective and efficient software product development. The choice will most certainly depend on your specific needs.
How to Implement Agile Earned Value Management (EVM)
Agile brings undeniable benefits to project management. But at the same time, it raises new challenges for those who manage software projects on a regular basis. Because Agile embraces change so openly, it increases the difficulties of controlling resources in changing conditions. At the same time, it complicates cost calculations -- if conditions keep changing, how can costs be calculated accurately?
These key challenges may have a direct impact on the expectations of business owners, who normally expect projects to be completed on time and within the available budget. Apart from these eternal expectations, business owners may also want to know how much more time and money the project will require and whether they should allow for a longer development time to achieve the initial project objectives, or scale down the features of the software to finish the project before the deadline.
Benefits of EVM
The Scrum framework on which Agile software development is based isn't very clear about cost control. Metrics such as story points, velocity, feature count, or sprint burndown don't add up to create a clear picture as far as cost efficiency is concerned. For companies, this can prove to be a major gap in an otherwise highly effective software development strategy.
The Earned Value Management approach for Agile comes in to fill this gap. It comes with some important advantages.
• Provides comprehensive metrics for cost, performance, and schedule, allowing you to calculate cost and schedule accurately, make forecasts, and comparisons for planed, earned, and consumed value
• Ties in more abstract valuations like size and complexity with easily observable time and cost metrics
• Reflects scope changes using the Scope Floor variable Earned Value Management (EVM) is a reliable technique for measuring project performance and progress objectively, using the latest data available. EVM is effective at spotting project performance problems early on, giving you enough time to address them, so that the project is completed on time at the desired quality level. Its power lies in its integrated approach to measuring scope, time, and costs -- the project management triangle. EVM has become increasingly popular in recent years, as new studies have found that the principles it uses are reliable predictors of project success.
Another way to understand the benefits of EVM is to consider a project that does not include EVM and one that does.
Project #1:
A project and its spend have been planned in advance, with a detailed spend plan for every element and stage of the project. As the project advances, the cumulative cost is tracked and compared to the predicted cost. During certain weeks the project may appear as either over budgeted or under budgeted. But what the project manager doesn't know is how much actual work has been done during each of these stages.
Project #2:
Same as project one but with EVM, which quantifies accomplished work. With EVM, the manager is able to identify which element of the task has been done. He can then apply the principles of EVM to each of these to determine whether he is on budget or under budget based on the amount of work done.
Understanding Agile EVM
Earned Value Management is an old concept that has been around for over 50 years. Only in the last 10 years or so that it's made its way into Scrum. Its resurrection isn’t an accident. The great thing about Agile EVM is that it starts from using the latest Story Points estimate, rather than initial estimates before the project took off. The result is a much more accurate prediction that reflects the state of things.
Agile EVM comes with a number of key concepts.
• Expected Percent Complete (EPC) - Amount of value planned to be delivered over a certain period
• Actual Percent Complete (APC) - Amount of value actually delivered over the period in question
• Planned Value (PV) - Budgeted cost for the work scheduled to be completed up to a given point
• Earned Value (EV) - Budgeted cost for the work actually completed during a given time period
• Actual Cost (AC) - Budgeted costs in PV for release
• Budget at Complete (BAC) - Initial budget for the release
• Schedule Variance (SV) - Monetary difference between the planned and actual time to complete a certain workload
• Cost Variance (CV) - Monetary difference of value incurred and cost to produce a certain piece of work over a certain amount of time
• Scheduled performance and cost performance indexes (SPI) and (CPI)
• Estimate to complete (EAC) / Estimate at complete (ETC)
• Variance at complete (VAC)
• To complete performance index (TCPI) Don’t worry -- you don’t have to memorize these to make the most of Agile EVM.
How to Implement Agile EVM
EVM includes a wealth of indicators, making it seem daunting at first. In the beginning, though, it's better to focus on its key features to keep things simple. To implement EVM you need, in addition to a project plan, a valuation / budgeted cost of work scheduled (PV or BCWS), and metrics that quantify the work being done, that is, earned value (EV) or budgeted cost of work performed (BCWP).
Initial Preparations for Setting up Agile EVM
1. Gather project work as work items (Story Points)
2. Manage all Story Points in a ordered list (Product Backlog)
3. Determine the Planned Value (PV) of the project by estimating project size compared to other items
4. Establish a definition of "project completion," by listing the criteria a project should meet before it's being listed as complete
5. Give Story Points for each completed project based on its complexity The easiest way to implement Agile EVM is by using a spreadsheet. With a spreadsheet you can automate calculations. But at the same time, you have full control over all numbers, allowing for fast and easy adjustments on all numbers. You'll start from basic estimates for scope, time, and cost. Here are the input metrics you can use.
Release Baseline
• Estimate scope in planned release points (PRP)
• Time in planned sprints (PS)
• Cost in budget at complete (BAC)
Sprint Baseline
• Scope in story points (SP)
• Cost in planned value (PV)
• Time in starting date (SD) and length (L) After each sprint, collect relevant data using the metrics for number of sprints completed, number of story points, actual cost.
Once you have them, you can calculate the following:
• Scope = actual percent complete (APC) against expected percent complete (EPC) to determine how much of the scope has been done
• Cost = earned value (EV) against actual cost (AC) to determine the monetized value earned
• Time (number of sprints done) = cumulative per iteration So what can you actually do with these metrics?
Compare guesses for key considerations such as time, cost, and scope. Determine the efficiency of your planning and performing. Change the baseline on project estimates to reach accurate values.
Find How to Effectively You Are Spending Money and Time
Cost Performance Index (CPI) = Earned Value divided by Actual Cost
• You're on budget if CPI = 1
• You're under budget if CPI = >1
• You're over budget if CPI = <1
Schedule Performance Index (SPI) = Earned Value divided by Planned Value
• You're on schedule if SPI = 1
• You're ahead of schedule if SPI = <1
• You're behind schedule if SPI > 1
Scope Change and What to Do About It
Whether it's due to increase story points or team size changes, scope changes are ultimately unavoidable for Agile projects. But you can factor them into your calculations so that they won't take you unawares. Factoring these into your Agile management strategy and calculating them helps to improve your project management process.
It's important to make the distinction between changes and adjustments. Adjustments don't happen by chance and are not beyond your control. For example, a change is caused by faulty features or product defects that alter the pace at which the project is being developed. An adjustment, on the other hand, is something that you do manually when the developer leaves the team or if a new feature is added.
Agile EVM has a variable known as Scope Floor (SF) which reflects the impact of the scope change on time and cost. Determining the Scope Floor isn't that hard. In Agile EVM, scope is determined by Planned Release Points (PRP), which in turn is calculated based on Story Points added (SP+) and Story Points removed (SP-).
Using Agile EVM to Make Cost and Schedule Forecasts
The power of Agile EVM lies in its ability to accurately predict future and past performance for near-terms. This comes in handy in a number of situations. You can use it to predict the total costs of a project after a scope is changed or the cost that the project will require from the present date until the planned end of the project, as well as discover cost discrepancies between predicted costs for a project and actual costs based on the performance of the project so far. You can also determine the efficiency of a given project. Here’s how you can do all that.
• Not sure how much more money is needed to complete the project from the current day until the deadline, after a scope change?
Estimate at Completion (EAC) = ACcum + BAC – EVcum
• Worried that there is a major difference between the planned costs for a project and the actual costs the project will require?
Variance at Complete (VAC) = BAC – EAC
• Not sure whether to make changes to a project? You can use Agile EVM to predict its projected efficiency/
To-Complete Performance Index (TCPI) = (BAC-EVcum) / (BAC-ACcum)
With all these forecasts, you will be able to make more informed decisions about ongoing Agile projects. You can decide when to release the product, at what cost, and with what features.
Possible Limitations of EVM
As most management methodologies, EVM comes with a number of possible limitations. These may become apparent only in certain contexts. It's important to be aware of them in order to mitigate any risks they may give rise to.
• EVM was not designed for projects that require continuous work, or non-discrete effort (level of effort = LOE). Projects that contain both discrete and non-discrete effort should not be measured using EVM standards, or the results will be inaccurate. For Agile EVM to work, it's crucial to ensure you apply it only to projects that require discrete effort.
• EVM relies heavily on accurate cost data and accurate project accounting. Without this data, it may not be possible to get accurate predictions or even implement EVM at all. The problem is that many smaller companies either don't have this data available, or else they have to hire a professional to produce it. In such scenarios, companies can limit themselves to implementing EVM only for larger, more important projects.
• EVM may also be vulnerable to data timing errors. If the data is not up to date and in sync with the actual progress in development for the project -- whether as a result of slow reporting or misreporting -- EVM calculations will be off the mark. By the time the analysis is delivered, the results may be behind the actual results and thus unreliable.
The Bottom Line
While implementing Agile EVM is not without its challenges, it can be used even by small software companies as a means to better manage the development of their products, make better predictions about key aspects of their projects, and ultimately, create better products.
On the plus side, Agile EVM implementation is not costly and does not require any massive changes in the way a company manages projects. There's no need for costly software or hardware. That said, Agile EVM does rely on accurate data and good math. Mistakes can creep into Agile EVM, which in turn can lead to poor project management decisions that defeat the whole purpose of its implementation.
Ultimately, Agile EVM is a reliable methodology for businesses that want to make the most of Agile while filling in the gap that the former leaves in terms of cost control. EVM complements Agile, making it a more reliable and ultimately more accurate way to manage projects and release successful products.
May 20, 2017These key challenges may have a direct impact on the expectations of business owners, who normally expect projects to be completed on time and within the available budget. Apart from these eternal expectations, business owners may also want to know how much more time and money the project will require and whether they should allow for a longer development time to achieve the initial project objectives, or scale down the features of the software to finish the project before the deadline.
Benefits of EVM
The Scrum framework on which Agile software development is based isn't very clear about cost control. Metrics such as story points, velocity, feature count, or sprint burndown don't add up to create a clear picture as far as cost efficiency is concerned. For companies, this can prove to be a major gap in an otherwise highly effective software development strategy.
The Earned Value Management approach for Agile comes in to fill this gap. It comes with some important advantages.
• Provides comprehensive metrics for cost, performance, and schedule, allowing you to calculate cost and schedule accurately, make forecasts, and comparisons for planed, earned, and consumed value
• Ties in more abstract valuations like size and complexity with easily observable time and cost metrics
• Reflects scope changes using the Scope Floor variable Earned Value Management (EVM) is a reliable technique for measuring project performance and progress objectively, using the latest data available. EVM is effective at spotting project performance problems early on, giving you enough time to address them, so that the project is completed on time at the desired quality level. Its power lies in its integrated approach to measuring scope, time, and costs -- the project management triangle. EVM has become increasingly popular in recent years, as new studies have found that the principles it uses are reliable predictors of project success.
Another way to understand the benefits of EVM is to consider a project that does not include EVM and one that does.
Project #1:
A project and its spend have been planned in advance, with a detailed spend plan for every element and stage of the project. As the project advances, the cumulative cost is tracked and compared to the predicted cost. During certain weeks the project may appear as either over budgeted or under budgeted. But what the project manager doesn't know is how much actual work has been done during each of these stages.
Project #2:
Same as project one but with EVM, which quantifies accomplished work. With EVM, the manager is able to identify which element of the task has been done. He can then apply the principles of EVM to each of these to determine whether he is on budget or under budget based on the amount of work done.
Understanding Agile EVM
Earned Value Management is an old concept that has been around for over 50 years. Only in the last 10 years or so that it's made its way into Scrum. Its resurrection isn’t an accident. The great thing about Agile EVM is that it starts from using the latest Story Points estimate, rather than initial estimates before the project took off. The result is a much more accurate prediction that reflects the state of things.
Agile EVM comes with a number of key concepts.
• Expected Percent Complete (EPC) - Amount of value planned to be delivered over a certain period
• Actual Percent Complete (APC) - Amount of value actually delivered over the period in question
• Planned Value (PV) - Budgeted cost for the work scheduled to be completed up to a given point
• Earned Value (EV) - Budgeted cost for the work actually completed during a given time period
• Actual Cost (AC) - Budgeted costs in PV for release
• Budget at Complete (BAC) - Initial budget for the release
• Schedule Variance (SV) - Monetary difference between the planned and actual time to complete a certain workload
• Cost Variance (CV) - Monetary difference of value incurred and cost to produce a certain piece of work over a certain amount of time
• Scheduled performance and cost performance indexes (SPI) and (CPI)
• Estimate to complete (EAC) / Estimate at complete (ETC)
• Variance at complete (VAC)
• To complete performance index (TCPI) Don’t worry -- you don’t have to memorize these to make the most of Agile EVM.
How to Implement Agile EVM
EVM includes a wealth of indicators, making it seem daunting at first. In the beginning, though, it's better to focus on its key features to keep things simple. To implement EVM you need, in addition to a project plan, a valuation / budgeted cost of work scheduled (PV or BCWS), and metrics that quantify the work being done, that is, earned value (EV) or budgeted cost of work performed (BCWP).
Initial Preparations for Setting up Agile EVM
1. Gather project work as work items (Story Points)
2. Manage all Story Points in a ordered list (Product Backlog)
3. Determine the Planned Value (PV) of the project by estimating project size compared to other items
4. Establish a definition of "project completion," by listing the criteria a project should meet before it's being listed as complete
5. Give Story Points for each completed project based on its complexity The easiest way to implement Agile EVM is by using a spreadsheet. With a spreadsheet you can automate calculations. But at the same time, you have full control over all numbers, allowing for fast and easy adjustments on all numbers. You'll start from basic estimates for scope, time, and cost. Here are the input metrics you can use.
Release Baseline
• Estimate scope in planned release points (PRP)
• Time in planned sprints (PS)
• Cost in budget at complete (BAC)
Sprint Baseline
• Scope in story points (SP)
• Cost in planned value (PV)
• Time in starting date (SD) and length (L) After each sprint, collect relevant data using the metrics for number of sprints completed, number of story points, actual cost.
Once you have them, you can calculate the following:
• Scope = actual percent complete (APC) against expected percent complete (EPC) to determine how much of the scope has been done
• Cost = earned value (EV) against actual cost (AC) to determine the monetized value earned
• Time (number of sprints done) = cumulative per iteration So what can you actually do with these metrics?
Compare guesses for key considerations such as time, cost, and scope. Determine the efficiency of your planning and performing. Change the baseline on project estimates to reach accurate values.
Find How to Effectively You Are Spending Money and Time
Cost Performance Index (CPI) = Earned Value divided by Actual Cost
• You're on budget if CPI = 1
• You're under budget if CPI = >1
• You're over budget if CPI = <1
Schedule Performance Index (SPI) = Earned Value divided by Planned Value
• You're on schedule if SPI = 1
• You're ahead of schedule if SPI = <1
• You're behind schedule if SPI > 1
Scope Change and What to Do About It
Whether it's due to increase story points or team size changes, scope changes are ultimately unavoidable for Agile projects. But you can factor them into your calculations so that they won't take you unawares. Factoring these into your Agile management strategy and calculating them helps to improve your project management process.
It's important to make the distinction between changes and adjustments. Adjustments don't happen by chance and are not beyond your control. For example, a change is caused by faulty features or product defects that alter the pace at which the project is being developed. An adjustment, on the other hand, is something that you do manually when the developer leaves the team or if a new feature is added.
Agile EVM has a variable known as Scope Floor (SF) which reflects the impact of the scope change on time and cost. Determining the Scope Floor isn't that hard. In Agile EVM, scope is determined by Planned Release Points (PRP), which in turn is calculated based on Story Points added (SP+) and Story Points removed (SP-).
Using Agile EVM to Make Cost and Schedule Forecasts
The power of Agile EVM lies in its ability to accurately predict future and past performance for near-terms. This comes in handy in a number of situations. You can use it to predict the total costs of a project after a scope is changed or the cost that the project will require from the present date until the planned end of the project, as well as discover cost discrepancies between predicted costs for a project and actual costs based on the performance of the project so far. You can also determine the efficiency of a given project. Here’s how you can do all that.
• Not sure how much more money is needed to complete the project from the current day until the deadline, after a scope change?
Estimate at Completion (EAC) = ACcum + BAC – EVcum
• Worried that there is a major difference between the planned costs for a project and the actual costs the project will require?
Variance at Complete (VAC) = BAC – EAC
• Not sure whether to make changes to a project? You can use Agile EVM to predict its projected efficiency/
To-Complete Performance Index (TCPI) = (BAC-EVcum) / (BAC-ACcum)
With all these forecasts, you will be able to make more informed decisions about ongoing Agile projects. You can decide when to release the product, at what cost, and with what features.
Possible Limitations of EVM
As most management methodologies, EVM comes with a number of possible limitations. These may become apparent only in certain contexts. It's important to be aware of them in order to mitigate any risks they may give rise to.
• EVM was not designed for projects that require continuous work, or non-discrete effort (level of effort = LOE). Projects that contain both discrete and non-discrete effort should not be measured using EVM standards, or the results will be inaccurate. For Agile EVM to work, it's crucial to ensure you apply it only to projects that require discrete effort.
• EVM relies heavily on accurate cost data and accurate project accounting. Without this data, it may not be possible to get accurate predictions or even implement EVM at all. The problem is that many smaller companies either don't have this data available, or else they have to hire a professional to produce it. In such scenarios, companies can limit themselves to implementing EVM only for larger, more important projects.
• EVM may also be vulnerable to data timing errors. If the data is not up to date and in sync with the actual progress in development for the project -- whether as a result of slow reporting or misreporting -- EVM calculations will be off the mark. By the time the analysis is delivered, the results may be behind the actual results and thus unreliable.
The Bottom Line
While implementing Agile EVM is not without its challenges, it can be used even by small software companies as a means to better manage the development of their products, make better predictions about key aspects of their projects, and ultimately, create better products.
On the plus side, Agile EVM implementation is not costly and does not require any massive changes in the way a company manages projects. There's no need for costly software or hardware. That said, Agile EVM does rely on accurate data and good math. Mistakes can creep into Agile EVM, which in turn can lead to poor project management decisions that defeat the whole purpose of its implementation.
Ultimately, Agile EVM is a reliable methodology for businesses that want to make the most of Agile while filling in the gap that the former leaves in terms of cost control. EVM complements Agile, making it a more reliable and ultimately more accurate way to manage projects and release successful products.
How LightspeedHQ Can Help Your Business Grow
Lightspeed eCom is a powerful multilingual, multi-currency eCommerce platform with built-in analytics and inventory management. Lightspeed has over 45,000 customers worldwide transacting $15 billion every year. At Interactivated, we appreciate the convenience and flexibility Lightspeed provides. We believe in it as a platform that can help connect businesses with customers and make the management of businesses active online easier. We work together with Lightspeed partners in the Netherlands for all their custom Lightspeed projects.
Lightspeed: The Basics
After acquiring eCommerce software developer SEOShop in 2015, Lightspeed has launched a new eCommerce platform for online retailers and brick-and-mortar businesses -- Lightspeed eCom. In addition to integration with Lightspeed's POS platform, the new solution comes with a wealth of new features that makes it one of the most exciting new platforms for businesses that want to run a beautiful and intuitive online shop. At the time of the purchase, SEOShop was the fastest growing eCommerce platform in Europe, providing its services to over 8,000 companies including Philips Lighting, Heineken, or National Geographic Netherlands.
Lightspeed eCom includes shop design, marketing, and sales tools that make it a one-stop solution for a business. All of these are available on the same dashboard, through which you can customize every aspect of your site, run a blog, plan and run email marketing campaigns, track site stats, and more. One of Lightspeed eCom's selling points is its flexibility. With it, you can set up a store in just a couple of minutes. If you want to avoid all the coding and the technicalities of setting up a store and basically just choose a theme and add a logo, you can do that.
But at the same time, it also offers a depth of customization that rivals that provided by more established eCommerce marketing platforms. Every bit of code that goes into your store can be accessed through the Lightspeed eCom backend. Whether you want to play with the code yourself or have a web developer look at it, it's always there and easy to access.
Lightspeed eCom comes with powerful multi-channel marketing tools. With it, you can do pretty much anything you need to increase the visibility of your shop online. You can create, plan, and run segmented email marketing campaigns for maximum efficiency. You can integrate customer reviews on your site and manage reviews. You can also easily integrate Facebook comments into your store and company blog, to encourage people to leave more comments on your product pages.
The Rise of mPOS
POS systems have changed the way businesses handle transactions, making life easier for both customers and employees. But traditional POS systems are expensive to implement and maintain, requiring hardware updates and replacements, and dedicated maintenance teams. It's no wonder then that mobile point-of-sale systems (mPOS) are on the rise.
Handling POS transactions using tablets or smartphones is becoming more convenient for businesses big and small. mPOS is cheaper, easier to implement, and comes with simple subscription-based pricing plans that can be adapted to the volume of transactions each business needs to handle. More than that, the smartphones and tablets used in an mPOS system can be used by employees for other tasks as well.
One challenge that mPOS raises, however, is the synchronization of stock for stores that feature both a physical location and an online shopfront. If the same items are being sold both online and offline, the inventory has to be synced in the fastest and easiest way possible. That's where Lightspeed eCom comes in.
While most eCommerce solutions available offer either an online shopping platform or a POS system, Lightspeed eCom offers both in a unified, fully-responsive platform. It integrates a cloud-based POS solution with an eCommerce platform to synchronize store inventory, sales data, and sales figures. With Lightspeed eCom it's also possible to shift stock from one channel into another, allowing for an omnichannel approach to business with real-time visibility that saves store owners a lot of trouble.
In a world where 90 percent of consumers have a smartphone in hand while shopping online, many customers are relying on mobile devices to find and research products. In many cases, they do this in store. This often means they keep switching between the online and offline shopping experience on the go. For businesses, this calls for a readjustment of their approach to POS and their online shopping experience. Lightspeed eCom makes this readjustment easier.
Mobile Friendly
The solution Lightspeed eCom provides is fully mobile responsive. Going beyond providing a responsive web store, Lightspeed eCom has applied the principles of responsive design to its whole backend and customer touchpoints such as billing system and abandoned shopping cart email reminders. Lightspeed can be managed entirely from mobile, too. Lightspeed eCom also simplifies in-store checkouts by providing a mobile-friendly checkout solution that works with popular mobile payment solutions like Apple Pay.
Customer Profiles
Business managers who know the power of customer personas will be glad to hear that Lightspeed enables businesses to create customer profiles quickly so they can draw on purchase history or product preferences to target the right customers. And since in-store information is synced with e-store data, this can be used for personalized promotions and more next time customers shop online. A better understanding of their clients can help businesses not only send more effective personalized emails but also segment their customers more accurately and with less hassle.
Themes Marketplace
As you might expect, Lightspeed eCom features a theme marketplace where companies can choose from a wealth of options. While you shouldn't expect the same theme variety as you may find for a content management system like WordPress, Lightspeed themes have the advantage of being all optimized for providing a high-quality shopping experience. All the features Lightspeed is capable of with or without extensions can be easily integrated into any theme. This means that regardless of which theme you choose, you won't be facing any limitations in terms of functionality.
Lightspeed eCom's functionality is further expanded by an app store powered by partners and individual app developers. Apps can be used for a variety of purposes, including streamlining local transactions, improving transactions that involve currency conversions, providing shipping, customer support, accounting tools, marketing strategies, and more. New ads are being added all the time by a growing list of partners and developers.
Lightspeed allows any business owner to create an online shopping experience that customers will enjoy returning to. But for businesses that want a custom Lightspeed project, whether it’s an app, a unique website, or a complete custom project, personalized Lightspeed development services are a go-to solution. At Interactivated, Lightspeed is one of our specialties. We are proud to offer complete website, mobile, and app development for businesses of any size. Please don’t hesitate to contact us with your idea, even if it’s only in the early stages. We can use our experience with Lightspeed to help you develop it.
Benefits of Lightspeed eCom
• Fast setup – almost instant implementation. If you don't have an online store already, you can create one that reflects your brand in less than an hour, by customizing any one of the many templates available for different types of stores.
• Easy customization - every aspect of your online store experience can be customized from the backend without any need for coding. You don't need to be a web developer or graphic designer to create a professional website with Lightspeed eCom.
• Inventory management integration - built-in inventory control features enables you to manage stock and maintain optimal inventory levels. More advanced inventory features like product bundles are included, so you won't be needing a separate inventory app to manage your store.
• International payments and tax support - you can use Lightspeed to sell products and receive payments in all the major currencies. You don't have to worry about international taxes, either, as they are calculated automatically. This is a great feature for specialty retail shops shipping products globally.
• Marketing implementation - bundled into Lightspeed eCom is a marketing suite that includes social media integration (sharing, commenting), blogging, and SEO optimization. The ability to manage all of these in one place isn't only convenient, but it can help you save time, as there's less switching back and forth between apps.
• Easy data export and import - with Lightspeed eCom you can easily import and export data for accounting, analysis, and other purposes whenever you need to. Easy .cvs importing means you can move your existing online shop to the Lightspeed ecosystem without losing any of your previous data.
• Forecasts and Analysis - Lightspeed comes out of the box with essential sales and inventory performance forecasting and reporting capabilities, which can be further expanded with extensions. This saves you money on investing in a separate sales and forecasting solution and having to export data to it from your store management system.
Who Is Lightspeed For?
Almost any business that runs an online shop and a third-party POS system can benefit from Lightspeed. This platform is ideal for:
• Businesses who are running a brick and mortar store and want to open an online shop, or vice versa
• Restaurants, tea shops, and other businesses in the local services industry that sells products online
• Any business that wants to integrate physical and online operations to improve customer experience
• Shops which use an expensive or slow POS system and are looking for an upgrade
• Startups that want to open an online shop with as little hassle as possible
• Any business that wants to bring mobile optimization to their customer experience and make it as easy as possible for mobile users to order products Lightspeed eCom is a powerful multilingual, multi-currency eCommerce platform with built-in analytics and inventory management.
The Disadvantages of Managing Separate Sales Channels
Not integrating multiple sales channels means you waste time managing separate channels. Your shopping experience is also limited to those who come to your store. Lightspeed makes possible omnichannel retail, a way to integrate online and in-store sales channels under a centralized management system -- the Lightspeed dashboard. This helps you provide customers with a faster, more consistent shopping experience that spans channels and devices.
By centralizing operations, you not only improve efficiency but also are able to view all your sales data and reporting in one place. You will also be able to provide a consistent brand experience across all channels. For customers, the benefits include faster and easier searches, since they can go to their mobile devices whenever they can't find an item in store, more flexibility in terms of when and where they shop, and a deeper awareness of your brand and products.
By eliminating distances between companies and customers, omnichannel retail can also make it easier for customers to order items when they don't have the time to pick them up in your store.
Why Choose Us for Lightspeed Integration?
People's reliance on mobile devices means your business can't afford not to be visible online, or to offer a sub-par mobile shopping experience. But using a responsive theme is not necessarily enough, as it doesn't solve the problem of sales channels integration. By using Lightspeed, your business can increase its online visibility and streamline transactions across locations. Add to that the powerful marketing, analysis, and inventory management features that Lightspeed offers, and you can have on your hands a more than reliable marketing platform that can help you improve customer satisfaction and reach more people without any massive investments.
We've been working with Lightspeed for many years and know the ins and outs of this powerful POS and eCommerce platform. We can help you create a great online shopping experience for your customers or link your brick and mortar and online shopping experiences together. We can handle all aspects of Lightspeed development for you, whether it’s a custom store, app, or something else.
Whether you sell a large catalog of products or a small one, Lightspeed is ultimately an easy to use and reliable shopping solution that can take your business to the next level. Call us now and we will make Lightspeed integration as easy as possible for you.
May 17, 2017Lightspeed: The Basics
After acquiring eCommerce software developer SEOShop in 2015, Lightspeed has launched a new eCommerce platform for online retailers and brick-and-mortar businesses -- Lightspeed eCom. In addition to integration with Lightspeed's POS platform, the new solution comes with a wealth of new features that makes it one of the most exciting new platforms for businesses that want to run a beautiful and intuitive online shop. At the time of the purchase, SEOShop was the fastest growing eCommerce platform in Europe, providing its services to over 8,000 companies including Philips Lighting, Heineken, or National Geographic Netherlands.
Lightspeed eCom includes shop design, marketing, and sales tools that make it a one-stop solution for a business. All of these are available on the same dashboard, through which you can customize every aspect of your site, run a blog, plan and run email marketing campaigns, track site stats, and more. One of Lightspeed eCom's selling points is its flexibility. With it, you can set up a store in just a couple of minutes. If you want to avoid all the coding and the technicalities of setting up a store and basically just choose a theme and add a logo, you can do that.
But at the same time, it also offers a depth of customization that rivals that provided by more established eCommerce marketing platforms. Every bit of code that goes into your store can be accessed through the Lightspeed eCom backend. Whether you want to play with the code yourself or have a web developer look at it, it's always there and easy to access.
Lightspeed eCom comes with powerful multi-channel marketing tools. With it, you can do pretty much anything you need to increase the visibility of your shop online. You can create, plan, and run segmented email marketing campaigns for maximum efficiency. You can integrate customer reviews on your site and manage reviews. You can also easily integrate Facebook comments into your store and company blog, to encourage people to leave more comments on your product pages.
The Rise of mPOS
POS systems have changed the way businesses handle transactions, making life easier for both customers and employees. But traditional POS systems are expensive to implement and maintain, requiring hardware updates and replacements, and dedicated maintenance teams. It's no wonder then that mobile point-of-sale systems (mPOS) are on the rise.
Handling POS transactions using tablets or smartphones is becoming more convenient for businesses big and small. mPOS is cheaper, easier to implement, and comes with simple subscription-based pricing plans that can be adapted to the volume of transactions each business needs to handle. More than that, the smartphones and tablets used in an mPOS system can be used by employees for other tasks as well.
One challenge that mPOS raises, however, is the synchronization of stock for stores that feature both a physical location and an online shopfront. If the same items are being sold both online and offline, the inventory has to be synced in the fastest and easiest way possible. That's where Lightspeed eCom comes in.
While most eCommerce solutions available offer either an online shopping platform or a POS system, Lightspeed eCom offers both in a unified, fully-responsive platform. It integrates a cloud-based POS solution with an eCommerce platform to synchronize store inventory, sales data, and sales figures. With Lightspeed eCom it's also possible to shift stock from one channel into another, allowing for an omnichannel approach to business with real-time visibility that saves store owners a lot of trouble.
In a world where 90 percent of consumers have a smartphone in hand while shopping online, many customers are relying on mobile devices to find and research products. In many cases, they do this in store. This often means they keep switching between the online and offline shopping experience on the go. For businesses, this calls for a readjustment of their approach to POS and their online shopping experience. Lightspeed eCom makes this readjustment easier.
Mobile Friendly
The solution Lightspeed eCom provides is fully mobile responsive. Going beyond providing a responsive web store, Lightspeed eCom has applied the principles of responsive design to its whole backend and customer touchpoints such as billing system and abandoned shopping cart email reminders. Lightspeed can be managed entirely from mobile, too. Lightspeed eCom also simplifies in-store checkouts by providing a mobile-friendly checkout solution that works with popular mobile payment solutions like Apple Pay.
Customer Profiles
Business managers who know the power of customer personas will be glad to hear that Lightspeed enables businesses to create customer profiles quickly so they can draw on purchase history or product preferences to target the right customers. And since in-store information is synced with e-store data, this can be used for personalized promotions and more next time customers shop online. A better understanding of their clients can help businesses not only send more effective personalized emails but also segment their customers more accurately and with less hassle.
Themes Marketplace
As you might expect, Lightspeed eCom features a theme marketplace where companies can choose from a wealth of options. While you shouldn't expect the same theme variety as you may find for a content management system like WordPress, Lightspeed themes have the advantage of being all optimized for providing a high-quality shopping experience. All the features Lightspeed is capable of with or without extensions can be easily integrated into any theme. This means that regardless of which theme you choose, you won't be facing any limitations in terms of functionality.
Lightspeed eCom's functionality is further expanded by an app store powered by partners and individual app developers. Apps can be used for a variety of purposes, including streamlining local transactions, improving transactions that involve currency conversions, providing shipping, customer support, accounting tools, marketing strategies, and more. New ads are being added all the time by a growing list of partners and developers.
Lightspeed allows any business owner to create an online shopping experience that customers will enjoy returning to. But for businesses that want a custom Lightspeed project, whether it’s an app, a unique website, or a complete custom project, personalized Lightspeed development services are a go-to solution. At Interactivated, Lightspeed is one of our specialties. We are proud to offer complete website, mobile, and app development for businesses of any size. Please don’t hesitate to contact us with your idea, even if it’s only in the early stages. We can use our experience with Lightspeed to help you develop it.
Benefits of Lightspeed eCom
• Fast setup – almost instant implementation. If you don't have an online store already, you can create one that reflects your brand in less than an hour, by customizing any one of the many templates available for different types of stores.
• Easy customization - every aspect of your online store experience can be customized from the backend without any need for coding. You don't need to be a web developer or graphic designer to create a professional website with Lightspeed eCom.
• Inventory management integration - built-in inventory control features enables you to manage stock and maintain optimal inventory levels. More advanced inventory features like product bundles are included, so you won't be needing a separate inventory app to manage your store.
• International payments and tax support - you can use Lightspeed to sell products and receive payments in all the major currencies. You don't have to worry about international taxes, either, as they are calculated automatically. This is a great feature for specialty retail shops shipping products globally.
• Marketing implementation - bundled into Lightspeed eCom is a marketing suite that includes social media integration (sharing, commenting), blogging, and SEO optimization. The ability to manage all of these in one place isn't only convenient, but it can help you save time, as there's less switching back and forth between apps.
• Easy data export and import - with Lightspeed eCom you can easily import and export data for accounting, analysis, and other purposes whenever you need to. Easy .cvs importing means you can move your existing online shop to the Lightspeed ecosystem without losing any of your previous data.
• Forecasts and Analysis - Lightspeed comes out of the box with essential sales and inventory performance forecasting and reporting capabilities, which can be further expanded with extensions. This saves you money on investing in a separate sales and forecasting solution and having to export data to it from your store management system.
Who Is Lightspeed For?
Almost any business that runs an online shop and a third-party POS system can benefit from Lightspeed. This platform is ideal for:
• Businesses who are running a brick and mortar store and want to open an online shop, or vice versa
• Restaurants, tea shops, and other businesses in the local services industry that sells products online
• Any business that wants to integrate physical and online operations to improve customer experience
• Shops which use an expensive or slow POS system and are looking for an upgrade
• Startups that want to open an online shop with as little hassle as possible
• Any business that wants to bring mobile optimization to their customer experience and make it as easy as possible for mobile users to order products Lightspeed eCom is a powerful multilingual, multi-currency eCommerce platform with built-in analytics and inventory management.
The Disadvantages of Managing Separate Sales Channels
Not integrating multiple sales channels means you waste time managing separate channels. Your shopping experience is also limited to those who come to your store. Lightspeed makes possible omnichannel retail, a way to integrate online and in-store sales channels under a centralized management system -- the Lightspeed dashboard. This helps you provide customers with a faster, more consistent shopping experience that spans channels and devices.
By centralizing operations, you not only improve efficiency but also are able to view all your sales data and reporting in one place. You will also be able to provide a consistent brand experience across all channels. For customers, the benefits include faster and easier searches, since they can go to their mobile devices whenever they can't find an item in store, more flexibility in terms of when and where they shop, and a deeper awareness of your brand and products.
By eliminating distances between companies and customers, omnichannel retail can also make it easier for customers to order items when they don't have the time to pick them up in your store.
Why Choose Us for Lightspeed Integration?
People's reliance on mobile devices means your business can't afford not to be visible online, or to offer a sub-par mobile shopping experience. But using a responsive theme is not necessarily enough, as it doesn't solve the problem of sales channels integration. By using Lightspeed, your business can increase its online visibility and streamline transactions across locations. Add to that the powerful marketing, analysis, and inventory management features that Lightspeed offers, and you can have on your hands a more than reliable marketing platform that can help you improve customer satisfaction and reach more people without any massive investments.
We've been working with Lightspeed for many years and know the ins and outs of this powerful POS and eCommerce platform. We can help you create a great online shopping experience for your customers or link your brick and mortar and online shopping experiences together. We can handle all aspects of Lightspeed development for you, whether it’s a custom store, app, or something else.
Whether you sell a large catalog of products or a small one, Lightspeed is ultimately an easy to use and reliable shopping solution that can take your business to the next level. Call us now and we will make Lightspeed integration as easy as possible for you.
Less Confusion, More Business: Improving Search Functionality for Ecommerce Website
Being able to efficiently search is one of the most important things on an ecommerce website. Even a smaller ecommerce website can have thousands of products, and you need to make sure the website visitors can find exactly what they’re interested in (at an affordable price, too).
When talking about the search functionality on an ecommerce website, we have to start with the simple things. For starters, there should always be a simple search box that’s clearly visible on the website. Use familiar rectangle shape and the magnifying glass symbol. In this way, a user won’t be confused, and they will immediately know what the function of that box is, because they’re used to it.
The search box should not be hidden, even when it’s not in use. You might be tempted to hide it when it’s not being used, in order to have a cleaner, neater interface, but remember – it’s all about improving the functionality, and it should be given priority over aesthetics.
Advanced Search
So far, we’ve focused on simple search – for example, just typing the name of the product in the search box. This is certainly useful, but a successful ecommerce website also needs to have a more advanced search, one that will allow the user to search by different criteria. They can narrow their search by selecting different parameters and filters, such as the price, the manufacturer, the average review score and many others. It’s recommended to add up to 8 parameters, but try not to overburden your website’s visitors. Having a choice is great, but make it too complicated to navigate, and they will soon be overwhelmed with the amount of information.
Once the user has searched for the product they want, it’s time to order the results. One of the most obvious parameters should be the price. But it wouldn’t be a bad idea to also suggest other products they may be interested in. Or why not put the bestselling item in that category?
There are many ways to enhance the search functionality, including using a synonyms database and a spell-check tool. These will ensure that the users will find what they want, even if they’re not sure how a specific product is called, or if they misspell the name. Another useful feature is auto-complete, which will enhance the shopping experience, and perhaps suggest something new to users that they haven’t thought about before.
May 12, 2017When talking about the search functionality on an ecommerce website, we have to start with the simple things. For starters, there should always be a simple search box that’s clearly visible on the website. Use familiar rectangle shape and the magnifying glass symbol. In this way, a user won’t be confused, and they will immediately know what the function of that box is, because they’re used to it.
The search box should not be hidden, even when it’s not in use. You might be tempted to hide it when it’s not being used, in order to have a cleaner, neater interface, but remember – it’s all about improving the functionality, and it should be given priority over aesthetics.
Advanced Search
So far, we’ve focused on simple search – for example, just typing the name of the product in the search box. This is certainly useful, but a successful ecommerce website also needs to have a more advanced search, one that will allow the user to search by different criteria. They can narrow their search by selecting different parameters and filters, such as the price, the manufacturer, the average review score and many others. It’s recommended to add up to 8 parameters, but try not to overburden your website’s visitors. Having a choice is great, but make it too complicated to navigate, and they will soon be overwhelmed with the amount of information.
Once the user has searched for the product they want, it’s time to order the results. One of the most obvious parameters should be the price. But it wouldn’t be a bad idea to also suggest other products they may be interested in. Or why not put the bestselling item in that category?
There are many ways to enhance the search functionality, including using a synonyms database and a spell-check tool. These will ensure that the users will find what they want, even if they’re not sure how a specific product is called, or if they misspell the name. Another useful feature is auto-complete, which will enhance the shopping experience, and perhaps suggest something new to users that they haven’t thought about before.
Market Yourself – How to Make a Great “About Us” Page
When creating a website, there isn’t just one correct way to make a great website. Different ideas work for different purposes, and there’s always room for a little bit of tweaking and tinkering with the content and the formatting of the website. However, if you compare most websites today, you’ll notice that they have a significant number of things in common. For starters, they will all have some kind of navigation, to let the visitors easily go from one page to another and find everything they need to know. There will also be some kind of contact page if a visitor wants to get in touch with the company or the individual behind the website.
A lot (if not most) websites will also feature a page called “About us”. As its name implies, this page tells the visitor what exactly the website offers and who the people behind it are. It gives the visitor a chance to better get to know the website and its purpose. Again, there isn’t just one correct way to make a great “About Us” page, but there are some guidelines and recommendations that can help you with this part of your website.
The Very Beginning
Well, this is a no-brainer. You have to start from somewhere, so the most logical place to focus on first when making the “About Us” page is the very beginning. How are you going to start this section? Perhaps you were thinking about something like “It all began in the year…” or “Our company is…”, but the truth is, that will probably sound boring to your visitors. And you don’t want them to leave the website and go to your competitors! That’s why you need to write something more exciting, something more memorable, and something that will really capture their attention.
For example, you can start the “About Us” page with a question, to immediately make the visitors think, and get them engaged in the content. If your website is not too formal, you can even start with a joke, or a funny anecdote related (or not related) to your business. And if you’re feeling particularly creative, you can write something provocative and shock the visitors. Of course, in a very careful and playful way.
Where to Put It?
Even before starting to make the “About Us” section, you might want to consider just where you’re going to put it. After all, a great page won’t be of much use if the visitors can’t find it, or forget that it exists at all while browsing your website. That’s why you need to put it in some prominent place – such as the home page. This seems like a pretty obvious answer, and it definitely makes the most sense. In this way, it’s in the most noticeable place, but what happens when a visitor clicks on some other page, and they forget about the “About Us”? Well, you can remind them, by using a sticky header. The important information will always be available to the visitors, and they can click on it no matter which specific page they’re on at that moment.
Think about the Mission Statement
In addition to telling your visitors who you are, you need to tell them what your mission statement is. A mission statement is a short statement of an organization’s purpose, and what it basically contains is the information about the product or service that’s being offered, as well as information about customers and the market the organization operates in. This may include some additional things, such as the philosophy, the values, as well as the future of the company.
Don’t worry if this sounds a bit complicated or intimidating because it doesn’t need to be. And don’t worry too much about using elegant language and complicated phrases, because you don’t want to confuse your visitors with needlessly complex words which don’t really tell much in the end. Less is more, and keep that in mind. Just ask yourself: Why do my customers need my product or service? How will it benefit them? And what’s the motivation behind all this?
Less is More
Keep it simple – this advice isn’t good just for the mission statement, but rather the entire “About Us” page. Your goal is to create content that’s easy to read and entertaining. And you won’t achieve that with one huge block of text written in overly complicated sentences. So, what options do you have?
When creating a website, there isn’t just one correct way to make a great website.
• Don’t be afraid of different formatting. Use lists, bullet points, whatever different style you might think of. Nobody likes to read long blocks of text, as it will most likely make your visitors want to leave your website. Keep them interested in what you have to say and be creative.
• Get to the point. You should explain who you are and what it is that you’re offering. Additional information is fine, but your visitors shouldn’t forget why they’re reading the “About Us” page in the first place.
• Include contact information. This one may seem superfluous, as you most likely already have a page with this information, but it’s good to remind people of how they can get in touch with you.
• Links to your other content. This will make the page more interesting and more interactive.
What Kind of Content?
When thinking about what to put in the “About Us” page, the first thing you’re going to think is certainly text. As we mentioned, you have the catchy intro, the mission statement, the contact information, and those are all, of course, going to be in text form. But just one type of content is not very interesting – if you just have text on the page, it doesn’t seem very inviting. Especially if you have a long, overly detailed text, the visitors might get bored very quickly. That’s why you need to expand your options, and try to lure potential clients with rich media content.
What does rich media content actually mean? Well, it means using different kinds of media content in one place. For example, In addition to the necessary text, you can put video, or links to videos that might be useful and/or interesting to your site’s visitors. Of course, pictures are great, as well. And to spice it all up, why not put some infographic that showcases your business and its potential. If you don’t know how to make one, there are some helpful (and free!) online infographic makers that you can use.
Keep It Professional – but Not Too Much Professional
You want to come across as a serious person whose product or service is just what the world needs. Great! However, you don’t have to be rigid in your communication with your website’s visitors. In fact, if you just stick to talking about business, it may even alienate the visitors and make them not want to visit your website ever again. And you sure don’t want that! So why not include something a little bit personal about yourself? For example, you can include links to your profiles on social media networks – not necessarily your own personal profile, but rather profiles created specifically for your business.
Adding a bit of something personal about yourself is a great way to “humanize” yourself and your business, and not be just same faceless entity. You can even put pictures of your employees and introduce the team to your website’s visitors. Or you can put just some of them if you want to present the core part of your company.
About Us – and Them, Too
Remember, you’re talking to an audience, and that means the “About Us” page is not supposed to be a monologue, but rather a dialogue. Sure, you want to talk about yourself, your company and how your product or service is the best there is. And that’s understandable. But don’t forget about your potential clients and their needs. When talking about your company, make sure to pay attention to several aspects:
1. Talk about how you’re going to solve their problems.
2. Explain to your potential clients why choosing your product or service is better for them.
3. List the benefits they get by choosing your company.
4. Make them feel welcome, and thank them for visiting your page (just as a nice, polite gesture).
These are just some of the tips you can keep in mind while thinking of the content for the “About Us” page, but the most important thing is to not forget about your potential clients and their needs.
Quotes & References
You talking about yourself is nice, but why not let somebody else do it for you? You could include information that’s backed by experts in the field, so it doesn’t look like you’ve thrown a bunch of words on the page without any true meaning. This will ensure that your potential clients feel confident in your business, and they will probably be more likely to choose you for their professional needs.
Another helpful thing that you could put on the “About Us” page are quotes. You can use the experience of your former clients (of course, if they were satisfied with you) and ask them for an opinion, which you can then later present in the form of a quote. In this way, the visitors will see that you’ve proven yourself by having successful business interactions, and it will definitely shed a positive light on you and your company.
Call to Action Buttons
A really nice way to make the visitors interact with your website, Call to Action buttons can also be placed on the “About Us” page. In fact, it’s recommended that you do so. Because, once the visitors have read the fantastic page that you prepared for them, you have to make sure that they do something, like contact you. For example, you can offer them an option to subscribe to your website’s newsletter.
But even more, direct approach would be for you to suggest that they contact you, or even buy the product or service that you’re offering. Don’t be too aggressive in this approach, and be careful about the language that you’re using. Another option is to ask them for an opinion, or just general feedback aimed towards improving the overall user experience, which they will certainly appreciate.
It’s not easy to write a good “About Us” page, but on the other hand, it should not be a frustrating task. Just keep it as simple and short as possible, while maintaining rich content. Make sure to cover all the relevant information that your potential clients might be interested in. Engage them in a dialogue, and make them think. In this way, your business is bound to succeed, and the benefits of a good “About Us” page will quickly show themselves.
May 10, 2017A lot (if not most) websites will also feature a page called “About us”. As its name implies, this page tells the visitor what exactly the website offers and who the people behind it are. It gives the visitor a chance to better get to know the website and its purpose. Again, there isn’t just one correct way to make a great “About Us” page, but there are some guidelines and recommendations that can help you with this part of your website.
The Very Beginning
Well, this is a no-brainer. You have to start from somewhere, so the most logical place to focus on first when making the “About Us” page is the very beginning. How are you going to start this section? Perhaps you were thinking about something like “It all began in the year…” or “Our company is…”, but the truth is, that will probably sound boring to your visitors. And you don’t want them to leave the website and go to your competitors! That’s why you need to write something more exciting, something more memorable, and something that will really capture their attention.
For example, you can start the “About Us” page with a question, to immediately make the visitors think, and get them engaged in the content. If your website is not too formal, you can even start with a joke, or a funny anecdote related (or not related) to your business. And if you’re feeling particularly creative, you can write something provocative and shock the visitors. Of course, in a very careful and playful way.
Where to Put It?
Even before starting to make the “About Us” section, you might want to consider just where you’re going to put it. After all, a great page won’t be of much use if the visitors can’t find it, or forget that it exists at all while browsing your website. That’s why you need to put it in some prominent place – such as the home page. This seems like a pretty obvious answer, and it definitely makes the most sense. In this way, it’s in the most noticeable place, but what happens when a visitor clicks on some other page, and they forget about the “About Us”? Well, you can remind them, by using a sticky header. The important information will always be available to the visitors, and they can click on it no matter which specific page they’re on at that moment.
Think about the Mission Statement
In addition to telling your visitors who you are, you need to tell them what your mission statement is. A mission statement is a short statement of an organization’s purpose, and what it basically contains is the information about the product or service that’s being offered, as well as information about customers and the market the organization operates in. This may include some additional things, such as the philosophy, the values, as well as the future of the company.
Don’t worry if this sounds a bit complicated or intimidating because it doesn’t need to be. And don’t worry too much about using elegant language and complicated phrases, because you don’t want to confuse your visitors with needlessly complex words which don’t really tell much in the end. Less is more, and keep that in mind. Just ask yourself: Why do my customers need my product or service? How will it benefit them? And what’s the motivation behind all this?
Less is More
Keep it simple – this advice isn’t good just for the mission statement, but rather the entire “About Us” page. Your goal is to create content that’s easy to read and entertaining. And you won’t achieve that with one huge block of text written in overly complicated sentences. So, what options do you have?
When creating a website, there isn’t just one correct way to make a great website.
• Don’t be afraid of different formatting. Use lists, bullet points, whatever different style you might think of. Nobody likes to read long blocks of text, as it will most likely make your visitors want to leave your website. Keep them interested in what you have to say and be creative.
• Get to the point. You should explain who you are and what it is that you’re offering. Additional information is fine, but your visitors shouldn’t forget why they’re reading the “About Us” page in the first place.
• Include contact information. This one may seem superfluous, as you most likely already have a page with this information, but it’s good to remind people of how they can get in touch with you.
• Links to your other content. This will make the page more interesting and more interactive.
What Kind of Content?
When thinking about what to put in the “About Us” page, the first thing you’re going to think is certainly text. As we mentioned, you have the catchy intro, the mission statement, the contact information, and those are all, of course, going to be in text form. But just one type of content is not very interesting – if you just have text on the page, it doesn’t seem very inviting. Especially if you have a long, overly detailed text, the visitors might get bored very quickly. That’s why you need to expand your options, and try to lure potential clients with rich media content.
What does rich media content actually mean? Well, it means using different kinds of media content in one place. For example, In addition to the necessary text, you can put video, or links to videos that might be useful and/or interesting to your site’s visitors. Of course, pictures are great, as well. And to spice it all up, why not put some infographic that showcases your business and its potential. If you don’t know how to make one, there are some helpful (and free!) online infographic makers that you can use.
Keep It Professional – but Not Too Much Professional
You want to come across as a serious person whose product or service is just what the world needs. Great! However, you don’t have to be rigid in your communication with your website’s visitors. In fact, if you just stick to talking about business, it may even alienate the visitors and make them not want to visit your website ever again. And you sure don’t want that! So why not include something a little bit personal about yourself? For example, you can include links to your profiles on social media networks – not necessarily your own personal profile, but rather profiles created specifically for your business.
Adding a bit of something personal about yourself is a great way to “humanize” yourself and your business, and not be just same faceless entity. You can even put pictures of your employees and introduce the team to your website’s visitors. Or you can put just some of them if you want to present the core part of your company.
About Us – and Them, Too
Remember, you’re talking to an audience, and that means the “About Us” page is not supposed to be a monologue, but rather a dialogue. Sure, you want to talk about yourself, your company and how your product or service is the best there is. And that’s understandable. But don’t forget about your potential clients and their needs. When talking about your company, make sure to pay attention to several aspects:
1. Talk about how you’re going to solve their problems.
2. Explain to your potential clients why choosing your product or service is better for them.
3. List the benefits they get by choosing your company.
4. Make them feel welcome, and thank them for visiting your page (just as a nice, polite gesture).
These are just some of the tips you can keep in mind while thinking of the content for the “About Us” page, but the most important thing is to not forget about your potential clients and their needs.
Quotes & References
You talking about yourself is nice, but why not let somebody else do it for you? You could include information that’s backed by experts in the field, so it doesn’t look like you’ve thrown a bunch of words on the page without any true meaning. This will ensure that your potential clients feel confident in your business, and they will probably be more likely to choose you for their professional needs.
Another helpful thing that you could put on the “About Us” page are quotes. You can use the experience of your former clients (of course, if they were satisfied with you) and ask them for an opinion, which you can then later present in the form of a quote. In this way, the visitors will see that you’ve proven yourself by having successful business interactions, and it will definitely shed a positive light on you and your company.
Call to Action Buttons
A really nice way to make the visitors interact with your website, Call to Action buttons can also be placed on the “About Us” page. In fact, it’s recommended that you do so. Because, once the visitors have read the fantastic page that you prepared for them, you have to make sure that they do something, like contact you. For example, you can offer them an option to subscribe to your website’s newsletter.
But even more, direct approach would be for you to suggest that they contact you, or even buy the product or service that you’re offering. Don’t be too aggressive in this approach, and be careful about the language that you’re using. Another option is to ask them for an opinion, or just general feedback aimed towards improving the overall user experience, which they will certainly appreciate.
It’s not easy to write a good “About Us” page, but on the other hand, it should not be a frustrating task. Just keep it as simple and short as possible, while maintaining rich content. Make sure to cover all the relevant information that your potential clients might be interested in. Engage them in a dialogue, and make them think. In this way, your business is bound to succeed, and the benefits of a good “About Us” page will quickly show themselves.
Current Trends in Ecommerce Website Design
Having a successful ecommerce website requires a lot of hard work. Obviously, one of the most important things is having a great product or an idea that people will be interested in. But if your website’s design is not interesting, chances are, not much people are going to bother finding out what it is that you’re offering. That’s when following current trends in website design can come in handy. It will help your business grow and attract more clients. But what exactly are those trends? Well, here are several great ways of optimizing an ecommerce website design that will surely help you in expanding your business.
Responsive Web Design
It’s no secret that the number of users of smartphones is constantly rising. In fact, a lot of people access the Internet solely through their smartphones. Because of this, a website needs to be optimized for both the desktop and mobile environments. What works in desktop mode might not work in mobile mode, and vice versa. For the latter, you need bigger buttons and a different arrangement of information so that the visitors can easily navigate the site. Furthermore, images should be optimized, both in terms of resolution and size, so that the visitors don’t lose their precious time waiting for a page to load (or even their megabytes if they’re not using Wi-Fi or don’t have an unlimited data plan).
Infinite Scrolling
Infinite scrolling is one of the things mobile users will particularly appreciate. It allows them to go through the content of your website without having to constantly click on “Next Page”. The scrolling movement on smartphones just feels more natural, and it makes for a more comfortable user experience. Examples of infinite scrolling can be found on websites such as Google Images or Pinterest, which offer a large amount of content. Furthermore, you have the long scroll websites, which also offer an immersive user experience.
“Sticky” Headers
The use of “sticky” headers, or fixed position mastheads, is the latest web design trend. As its name implies, a sticky header will stay at the same position while the user is scrolling on a web page. In this way, they will always have the necessary information at a glance. In addition to a fixed header, websites may adjust the position of some other elements as well, such as the secondary navigation and the buttons for sharing the content on social media. This reduces the time a user navigates your website, making the whole experience more efficient. And it’s very useful for the marketers, as well.
Typography
Good typography can greatly improve your website and make it more attractive to your visitors. When designing a website, you shouldn’t necessarily choose what you personally like, but rather try to anticipate what your visitor might like. After all, the site is for them. You have many styles to choose from, but here are some of the trendy and popular typography styles that your visitors might like.
• Watercolor. A style which feels handmade, watercolor can be found in backgrounds, typography, and illustrations. Depending on the vision you have, incorporating watercolor typography might be a bit difficult if you’re not sure what you want. But once executed correctly, watercolor can really give a website that artistic feeling with its incorporation of different colors.
• All caps typography. You’ve probably been told that you shouldn’t use all caps on the Internet, as it would make you seem like you’re YELLING AT SOMEONE. And that’s true to a large extent. However, using all caps in typography for your website can actually be a good thing. Carefully arranged text in all caps can work well for thin typefaces, condensed typefaces, as well as the wider typefaces. It should be used for simple words and phrases, so the visitors don’t feel overwhelmed with too much all caps.
• Retro grunge typography. Everyone feels nostalgic from time to time, so why not include some retro and vintage typography? You can have custom-made typography which will make your website stand out. Choose a theme – it can be the 1950s or 1980s, country style, futuristic, or whatever works for you and your website.
Fonts
Obviously, a lot of the content on an average website is going to be text. So it makes perfect sense to pay attention to fonts and what impact they might have on the visitors’ willingness to spend more time on a website. Having a good, neatly formatted text can make all the difference, and fonts are here to help. Usually, it’s recommended to use two font types, and you should use fonts from the same family, for example, PT Sans or PT Serif. Next, you should not use the same fonts for both the headings and the body text, so that visitors could focus more easily on the different parts of the website. Last but not least, using different sizes for fonts can be a great way of emphasizing the important information, or it can just be a way to ‘spice up’ long paragraphs where you want to keep the reader’s attention and not have them wander off to some other website.
Flat Design 2.0
It’s been a while since the flat design has become the norm in website design. Gone are the days of bloated icons and ‘heavy’ websites. It’s all about being efficient, and flat design works great with that. Flat design is modern and minimalistic, perfect for this decade. It can help you make the interface more intuitive for the visitors. It doesn’t even have to be completely flat; you can balance between flat and artistic and find the perfect ratio that suits your needs and the purpose of your website. Over the past couple of years, flat design has evolved, incorporating long shadows and dynamic colors, and it’s now known as ‘Flat design 2.0’.
Long shadows are great for when you want to add depth and complexity, but still, want to keep that nice minimalist feel that’s very trendy. Dynamic colors are also crucial – use bright colors and shades to emphasize certain parts of the website that the visitors are most likely to notice first. Finally, use simple fonts. They should be light and easy to read and not be too distracting to visitors. And speaking of distractions, one type of font should be used across all pages of your website. The exception, of course, could be the main page with the logo of the brand identity. This should be more unique so that you’ll stand out more compared to similar websites.
Full-Screen Typography
Using a flat design will allow you to use high-quality static images that are large in size. These can be used as the main image block, setting the mood on your website and creating a nice, welcoming atmosphere. Just make sure they blend in nicely with the overall design of the website, in terms of content and the color and transparency of the image itself.
Ghost Buttons
“What are ghost buttons?” you might be wondering. Good question. It’s not something scary, don’t worry, it’s simply a name for all those little square or rectangle-shaped buttons that you see on websites very often, and that are almost or entirely transparent. This transparency makes them very versatile in terms of positioning on the website, as they don’t obstruct the main content. What’s more, since they’re transparent, they don’t compromise the main design of the website and they blend in quite nicely. You’ll often see these types of buttons on websites that utilize full-screen photography. In this way, the interaction with the image is reduced, especially compared to more standard button use.
Interactive Storytelling
Depending on the exact type of website that you have, interactive storytelling can greatly improve the overall user experience. Tell your visitors what exactly is that you’re offering, and how they can get it. Don’t be boring, and include some fun, interesting details that someone might find surprising. A carefully edited story can have a great impact on the visitors, and this can help your business grow. Use interactive tools to make the storytelling feel more immersive. Don’t make it too long, though. Keep in mind that a lot of people have limited attention spans, so it might not be a good idea to create a story that goes on for a half an hour, or maybe even an hour, if you’re feeling particularly creative.
So, there you have it – some helpful information about the current trends in ecommerce website design. These trends can help you in improving your website, and we hope that you got some interesting ideas from them. You can start applying some of those ideas on your own, or if you’re not feeling comfortable with changing your website, there’s always the possibility of hiring a professional. They will make sure your website is following all the latest trends, perfectly fitting in the 2010s. And ultimately – that means more business for you, and having happier customers and website visitors. It’s always good to be trendy, that’s for sure! Source:
https://codetiburon.com/modern-trends-in-ecommerce/
May 8, 2017Responsive Web Design
It’s no secret that the number of users of smartphones is constantly rising. In fact, a lot of people access the Internet solely through their smartphones. Because of this, a website needs to be optimized for both the desktop and mobile environments. What works in desktop mode might not work in mobile mode, and vice versa. For the latter, you need bigger buttons and a different arrangement of information so that the visitors can easily navigate the site. Furthermore, images should be optimized, both in terms of resolution and size, so that the visitors don’t lose their precious time waiting for a page to load (or even their megabytes if they’re not using Wi-Fi or don’t have an unlimited data plan).
Infinite Scrolling
Infinite scrolling is one of the things mobile users will particularly appreciate. It allows them to go through the content of your website without having to constantly click on “Next Page”. The scrolling movement on smartphones just feels more natural, and it makes for a more comfortable user experience. Examples of infinite scrolling can be found on websites such as Google Images or Pinterest, which offer a large amount of content. Furthermore, you have the long scroll websites, which also offer an immersive user experience.
“Sticky” Headers
The use of “sticky” headers, or fixed position mastheads, is the latest web design trend. As its name implies, a sticky header will stay at the same position while the user is scrolling on a web page. In this way, they will always have the necessary information at a glance. In addition to a fixed header, websites may adjust the position of some other elements as well, such as the secondary navigation and the buttons for sharing the content on social media. This reduces the time a user navigates your website, making the whole experience more efficient. And it’s very useful for the marketers, as well.
Typography
Good typography can greatly improve your website and make it more attractive to your visitors. When designing a website, you shouldn’t necessarily choose what you personally like, but rather try to anticipate what your visitor might like. After all, the site is for them. You have many styles to choose from, but here are some of the trendy and popular typography styles that your visitors might like.
• Watercolor. A style which feels handmade, watercolor can be found in backgrounds, typography, and illustrations. Depending on the vision you have, incorporating watercolor typography might be a bit difficult if you’re not sure what you want. But once executed correctly, watercolor can really give a website that artistic feeling with its incorporation of different colors.
• All caps typography. You’ve probably been told that you shouldn’t use all caps on the Internet, as it would make you seem like you’re YELLING AT SOMEONE. And that’s true to a large extent. However, using all caps in typography for your website can actually be a good thing. Carefully arranged text in all caps can work well for thin typefaces, condensed typefaces, as well as the wider typefaces. It should be used for simple words and phrases, so the visitors don’t feel overwhelmed with too much all caps.
• Retro grunge typography. Everyone feels nostalgic from time to time, so why not include some retro and vintage typography? You can have custom-made typography which will make your website stand out. Choose a theme – it can be the 1950s or 1980s, country style, futuristic, or whatever works for you and your website.
Fonts
Obviously, a lot of the content on an average website is going to be text. So it makes perfect sense to pay attention to fonts and what impact they might have on the visitors’ willingness to spend more time on a website. Having a good, neatly formatted text can make all the difference, and fonts are here to help. Usually, it’s recommended to use two font types, and you should use fonts from the same family, for example, PT Sans or PT Serif. Next, you should not use the same fonts for both the headings and the body text, so that visitors could focus more easily on the different parts of the website. Last but not least, using different sizes for fonts can be a great way of emphasizing the important information, or it can just be a way to ‘spice up’ long paragraphs where you want to keep the reader’s attention and not have them wander off to some other website.
Flat Design 2.0
It’s been a while since the flat design has become the norm in website design. Gone are the days of bloated icons and ‘heavy’ websites. It’s all about being efficient, and flat design works great with that. Flat design is modern and minimalistic, perfect for this decade. It can help you make the interface more intuitive for the visitors. It doesn’t even have to be completely flat; you can balance between flat and artistic and find the perfect ratio that suits your needs and the purpose of your website. Over the past couple of years, flat design has evolved, incorporating long shadows and dynamic colors, and it’s now known as ‘Flat design 2.0’.
Long shadows are great for when you want to add depth and complexity, but still, want to keep that nice minimalist feel that’s very trendy. Dynamic colors are also crucial – use bright colors and shades to emphasize certain parts of the website that the visitors are most likely to notice first. Finally, use simple fonts. They should be light and easy to read and not be too distracting to visitors. And speaking of distractions, one type of font should be used across all pages of your website. The exception, of course, could be the main page with the logo of the brand identity. This should be more unique so that you’ll stand out more compared to similar websites.
Full-Screen Typography
Using a flat design will allow you to use high-quality static images that are large in size. These can be used as the main image block, setting the mood on your website and creating a nice, welcoming atmosphere. Just make sure they blend in nicely with the overall design of the website, in terms of content and the color and transparency of the image itself.
Ghost Buttons
“What are ghost buttons?” you might be wondering. Good question. It’s not something scary, don’t worry, it’s simply a name for all those little square or rectangle-shaped buttons that you see on websites very often, and that are almost or entirely transparent. This transparency makes them very versatile in terms of positioning on the website, as they don’t obstruct the main content. What’s more, since they’re transparent, they don’t compromise the main design of the website and they blend in quite nicely. You’ll often see these types of buttons on websites that utilize full-screen photography. In this way, the interaction with the image is reduced, especially compared to more standard button use.
Interactive Storytelling
Depending on the exact type of website that you have, interactive storytelling can greatly improve the overall user experience. Tell your visitors what exactly is that you’re offering, and how they can get it. Don’t be boring, and include some fun, interesting details that someone might find surprising. A carefully edited story can have a great impact on the visitors, and this can help your business grow. Use interactive tools to make the storytelling feel more immersive. Don’t make it too long, though. Keep in mind that a lot of people have limited attention spans, so it might not be a good idea to create a story that goes on for a half an hour, or maybe even an hour, if you’re feeling particularly creative.
So, there you have it – some helpful information about the current trends in ecommerce website design. These trends can help you in improving your website, and we hope that you got some interesting ideas from them. You can start applying some of those ideas on your own, or if you’re not feeling comfortable with changing your website, there’s always the possibility of hiring a professional. They will make sure your website is following all the latest trends, perfectly fitting in the 2010s. And ultimately – that means more business for you, and having happier customers and website visitors. It’s always good to be trendy, that’s for sure! Source:
https://codetiburon.com/modern-trends-in-ecommerce/
Agile Project Cost and Time Management
Agile software development is about delivering customer value. Since all work is geared toward customer value and a working product from the get-go, it is by nature more efficient and less wasteful. A well-run agile development is agile because it is adaptive and responsive to changes. If funds are depleted or requirements undergo major changes, the customer will still end up with a working product. Agile development makes so much sense that it has been widely adopted beyond software development.
Agile software development is about delivering customer value.
Great, but does it mean the cost isn’t going to exceed the estimate like software projects are known to? How do you manage and estimate cost?
One common snarky answer is: Agile software projects need a budget, not an estimate. Substituting budget for estimate would make things so much cleaner and life so much easier. Unfortunately, things have a way of getting more complicated than they look, and we’re about to get into it.
Do Agile Projects Need An Estimate?
The answer to this question is another question: Why does the client think an estimate is in order?
If the answer is merely to hold the developer to a firm commitment or to turn the proverbial screw on the developer if they didn’t live up to expectations, then we’d be inclined to say no. On the other hand, if major decisions or plans are riding on the estimate, we’ll have to dive into it.
You’ll find that sometimes a project is so urgent that, as long as the client and provider can come to terms, it has to be worked on right away without an estimate. A project in the exploratory phase requires just a rough estimate for the client to allocate the appropriate funds or decide if they could afford it or wait for it to complete.
The whole point of agile development is not to be married to the original expectations, which may not even be feasible, so most estimates are by nature on the rough side. In any event, there are always times when we will have to develop a more detailed estimate.
The 5 Steps of Estimation and Planning
Estimation and planning are deeply intertwined in agile development. Tools are available for tracking the efficiency of the process. Another characteristic of agile development is that the estimate can be updated as often as needed, so it is not a problem even if the details of a project are unknown in the beginning.
We will be using the Scrum framework of agile software development. There are 3 roles in a Scrum project: Product Owner, ScrumMaster, and Team. A backlog is a list of features and a backlog item is a feature. A backlog item is recorded in story format called user story, which can be further broken down into story points, the sum of which represents the amount of effort needed complete the user story of feature. A sprint is an iteration. The rest will be introduced as we go along. (The Scrum nomenclature is useful beyond its elegance. Why not a sprint instead of iteration that puts people to sleep? Would you rather be assigned story or work?)
1. Create Backlog
A product backlog is a list of all features in the product. First, we break up the initial idea into smaller features or backlog items. The initial idea may be abstract but backlog items must be definable. These backlog items are recorded and told in user stories. An agile user story describes the feature in any level of detail that can be continuously modified. The product backlog is planned in advance though naturally it will evolve as each user story is modified, added, or dropped. A backlog can contain dozens or even hundreds of user stories.
2. Prioritize Backlog Items
Arrange user stories in the backlog in order of decreasing priority (to be performed by the Product Owner). In keeping with the principle of delivering value early, Agile software development always starts with the high priority items.
For example, to build a Magento eCommerce site, inventory management and shopping cart would be higher priority than reviews and blogs. The site would still be functional even if the project did not proceed to reviews and blogs.
3. Estimate the Project Scope
Estimate the scope of the project by adding up the total number of story points. A Scrum Team of developers assigns the number of story points to every user story and the grand total of story points is a rating of the scope and complexity of the project (higher is more complex).
Each user story is assigned a Fibonacci number, say from 1 to 21. The number in ascending sequence reflects the complexity of a user story, and thus the relative amount of effort required to complete. This number would become the story points of said user story. Note that a story point of 8 doesn’t mean the story would require 8 hours or anything like that in a sprint – it’s just a preliminary number of story points, and a popular practice for determining this preliminary estimate is Scrum poker.
Scrum poker is believed to reduce cognitive biases of anchoring (over-reliance on the first piece of information) and the Dunning-Kruger Effect (an illusion of grandeur).
4. Estimate the Project Time Requirement
This estimate is not a precise date of completion. Start with a product roadmap and release plan. The product roadmap of an agile development shows the product’s evolution through a number of major releases. The release plan is an advance schedule of major releases based on the product backlog.
The project time requirement is estimated for each sprint. The metric is velocity, which in Scrum is the number of user stories completed in each sprint. A good guideline for predicting initial velocity can be found in Mike Cohn’s blog post. The estimation of time requirement is an iterative process as the velocity fluctuates before stabilizing after a few sprints.
The incremental nature of agile development means the product can be delivered piecemeal, each of them a working and shippable product if not complete. How much and what functionalities to release can be managed and controlled in ways other than deadlines.
5. Estimate the Project Cost
Calculating the project cost estimate is rather straightforward once the project scope and velocity are known. There are two standard approaches toward that: via blended rate or specific labor categories. Check out the write-up by Jesse Fewell as the details are beyond the scope here. Both methods assume constant Team members and sprints as figured in the release plan.
A quicker estimate can be obtained by calculating the team burn rate per sprint and assuming that it’s fixed. The total number of sprints required can be calculated by dividing the total user stories by the velocity.
Most service companies have a rate sheet of hourly rates for each labor category. Each team member’s (including Product Owner and ScrumMaster) burn rate per sprint is: Hourly Rate x Working Hours/Day x # of Days in a Sprint And the team’s burn rate per sprint is the sum of each member’s burn rate per sprint as calculated above.
Though assumed fixed, the estimated team burn rate per sprint can also be continuously refined as the actual velocity is known after the completion of each sprint.
Tracking of Workflow Efficiency
Agile software development is inherently more efficient. In addition, there are workflow efficiency solutions ready-built in Scrum and other agile frameworks. At the end of the day, however, it takes insights and able management to be absolutely sure that resources are not going to waste at any point during the development.
The presence of positive synergy and the concurrent absence of adverse conditions are key to efficient workflow. To achieve positive synergy is to create an environment in which individual efforts are directed for maximum impact. Adverse conditions in software development include but are not limited to encountering bottlenecks and piling up code debt.
Many activities in agile development can be automated with the ultimate goal of workflow efficiency. One well-known and proven tool is JIRA Software, a customizable agile project management tool with support of all agile frameworks including Scrum and Kanban and their popular variations.
Burndown Chart
A burndown chart tracks the remaining tasks to be completed in a sprint. It’s a chart with planned amount of work (user stories, story points, or their equivalent in days) on the y-axis and sprint timeline on the x-axis. The plot would start from the planned total number of user stories in a sprint and “burndown” to zero, hopefully at or before the last day of the sprint cycle.
Two lines or curves are plotted on the chart. One is the projected or ideal burndown rate and the other the actual burndown rate plotted at the end of each day.
The burndown chart of a sprint keeps track of progress and indicates whether or not the team is on schedule to complete all planned work at the end of the sprint. Team members would know when to compensate as needed by keeping an eye on the sprint burndown chart.
The burndown chart can be extended to the whole project by extending the x-axis to the projected release date and y-axis to the planned total number of user stories or story points for the project. This is known as the release burndown chart, as opposed to the sprint burndown chart.
Earned Value Management (EVM)
Earned Value Management (EVM) has grown to become a wildly popular method for measuring agile project performance since it was introduced to agile frameworks in 2006. EVM is most commonly applied at the release level rather than individual sprints.
The various metrics of EVM are calculated from the planned number of user stories and the number actually completed. More specifically, we are going to look at just 3 of them: actual cost (AC), earned value (EV) and planned value (PV). AC is the actual cost of work performed, EV is the budgeted cost of work performed, and PV is the budgeted cost of work scheduled.
AC, EV and PV can be incorporated into the release burndown chart to illustrate the efficiency of an agile project at any given stage. The project’s total cost and duration as forecasted by a release burndown chart with EVM afford the client and provider valuable time for making informed decisions about changes needed or desired.
EV is an important measure of cost efficiency but more often than not it does not equal to AC and PV. This is either caused by efficiency-related issues such as workflow inefficiency and misalignment of priorities and estimates, or other variables such as initial ramp-up and changes in requirements and priorities.
EVM data is historic, current and predictive in nature. It allows the use of historic data for iterative estimates, diagnosis of current data in tracking, and prediction of future data for timely decisions to optimize customer value.
The EVM data indicates the presence or absence of inefficiency and not much more. It is up to the Team to find the cause of the inefficiency. Would a StrumMaster stake his or her reputation on identifying the real cause?
True Values of Agile Development
Agile software development delivers customer value early and often. After just a few sprints, an agile software product would be ready for premature release with all core features in place and its end users might not know any better.
Agile development thrives on changes so detailed planning can be left in the rearview mirror. It is best to dive into development with just a preliminary order of priorities. Track the progress every step of the way in order to be able to devise changes and make informed decisions.
April 10, 2017Agile software development is about delivering customer value.
Great, but does it mean the cost isn’t going to exceed the estimate like software projects are known to? How do you manage and estimate cost?
One common snarky answer is: Agile software projects need a budget, not an estimate. Substituting budget for estimate would make things so much cleaner and life so much easier. Unfortunately, things have a way of getting more complicated than they look, and we’re about to get into it.
Do Agile Projects Need An Estimate?
The answer to this question is another question: Why does the client think an estimate is in order?
If the answer is merely to hold the developer to a firm commitment or to turn the proverbial screw on the developer if they didn’t live up to expectations, then we’d be inclined to say no. On the other hand, if major decisions or plans are riding on the estimate, we’ll have to dive into it.
You’ll find that sometimes a project is so urgent that, as long as the client and provider can come to terms, it has to be worked on right away without an estimate. A project in the exploratory phase requires just a rough estimate for the client to allocate the appropriate funds or decide if they could afford it or wait for it to complete.
The whole point of agile development is not to be married to the original expectations, which may not even be feasible, so most estimates are by nature on the rough side. In any event, there are always times when we will have to develop a more detailed estimate.
The 5 Steps of Estimation and Planning
Estimation and planning are deeply intertwined in agile development. Tools are available for tracking the efficiency of the process. Another characteristic of agile development is that the estimate can be updated as often as needed, so it is not a problem even if the details of a project are unknown in the beginning.
We will be using the Scrum framework of agile software development. There are 3 roles in a Scrum project: Product Owner, ScrumMaster, and Team. A backlog is a list of features and a backlog item is a feature. A backlog item is recorded in story format called user story, which can be further broken down into story points, the sum of which represents the amount of effort needed complete the user story of feature. A sprint is an iteration. The rest will be introduced as we go along. (The Scrum nomenclature is useful beyond its elegance. Why not a sprint instead of iteration that puts people to sleep? Would you rather be assigned story or work?)
1. Create Backlog
A product backlog is a list of all features in the product. First, we break up the initial idea into smaller features or backlog items. The initial idea may be abstract but backlog items must be definable. These backlog items are recorded and told in user stories. An agile user story describes the feature in any level of detail that can be continuously modified. The product backlog is planned in advance though naturally it will evolve as each user story is modified, added, or dropped. A backlog can contain dozens or even hundreds of user stories.
2. Prioritize Backlog Items
Arrange user stories in the backlog in order of decreasing priority (to be performed by the Product Owner). In keeping with the principle of delivering value early, Agile software development always starts with the high priority items.
For example, to build a Magento eCommerce site, inventory management and shopping cart would be higher priority than reviews and blogs. The site would still be functional even if the project did not proceed to reviews and blogs.
3. Estimate the Project Scope
Estimate the scope of the project by adding up the total number of story points. A Scrum Team of developers assigns the number of story points to every user story and the grand total of story points is a rating of the scope and complexity of the project (higher is more complex).
Each user story is assigned a Fibonacci number, say from 1 to 21. The number in ascending sequence reflects the complexity of a user story, and thus the relative amount of effort required to complete. This number would become the story points of said user story. Note that a story point of 8 doesn’t mean the story would require 8 hours or anything like that in a sprint – it’s just a preliminary number of story points, and a popular practice for determining this preliminary estimate is Scrum poker.
Scrum poker is believed to reduce cognitive biases of anchoring (over-reliance on the first piece of information) and the Dunning-Kruger Effect (an illusion of grandeur).
4. Estimate the Project Time Requirement
This estimate is not a precise date of completion. Start with a product roadmap and release plan. The product roadmap of an agile development shows the product’s evolution through a number of major releases. The release plan is an advance schedule of major releases based on the product backlog.
The project time requirement is estimated for each sprint. The metric is velocity, which in Scrum is the number of user stories completed in each sprint. A good guideline for predicting initial velocity can be found in Mike Cohn’s blog post. The estimation of time requirement is an iterative process as the velocity fluctuates before stabilizing after a few sprints.
The incremental nature of agile development means the product can be delivered piecemeal, each of them a working and shippable product if not complete. How much and what functionalities to release can be managed and controlled in ways other than deadlines.
5. Estimate the Project Cost
Calculating the project cost estimate is rather straightforward once the project scope and velocity are known. There are two standard approaches toward that: via blended rate or specific labor categories. Check out the write-up by Jesse Fewell as the details are beyond the scope here. Both methods assume constant Team members and sprints as figured in the release plan.
A quicker estimate can be obtained by calculating the team burn rate per sprint and assuming that it’s fixed. The total number of sprints required can be calculated by dividing the total user stories by the velocity.
Most service companies have a rate sheet of hourly rates for each labor category. Each team member’s (including Product Owner and ScrumMaster) burn rate per sprint is: Hourly Rate x Working Hours/Day x # of Days in a Sprint And the team’s burn rate per sprint is the sum of each member’s burn rate per sprint as calculated above.
Though assumed fixed, the estimated team burn rate per sprint can also be continuously refined as the actual velocity is known after the completion of each sprint.
Tracking of Workflow Efficiency
Agile software development is inherently more efficient. In addition, there are workflow efficiency solutions ready-built in Scrum and other agile frameworks. At the end of the day, however, it takes insights and able management to be absolutely sure that resources are not going to waste at any point during the development.
The presence of positive synergy and the concurrent absence of adverse conditions are key to efficient workflow. To achieve positive synergy is to create an environment in which individual efforts are directed for maximum impact. Adverse conditions in software development include but are not limited to encountering bottlenecks and piling up code debt.
Many activities in agile development can be automated with the ultimate goal of workflow efficiency. One well-known and proven tool is JIRA Software, a customizable agile project management tool with support of all agile frameworks including Scrum and Kanban and their popular variations.
Burndown Chart
A burndown chart tracks the remaining tasks to be completed in a sprint. It’s a chart with planned amount of work (user stories, story points, or their equivalent in days) on the y-axis and sprint timeline on the x-axis. The plot would start from the planned total number of user stories in a sprint and “burndown” to zero, hopefully at or before the last day of the sprint cycle.
Two lines or curves are plotted on the chart. One is the projected or ideal burndown rate and the other the actual burndown rate plotted at the end of each day.
The burndown chart of a sprint keeps track of progress and indicates whether or not the team is on schedule to complete all planned work at the end of the sprint. Team members would know when to compensate as needed by keeping an eye on the sprint burndown chart.
The burndown chart can be extended to the whole project by extending the x-axis to the projected release date and y-axis to the planned total number of user stories or story points for the project. This is known as the release burndown chart, as opposed to the sprint burndown chart.
Earned Value Management (EVM)
Earned Value Management (EVM) has grown to become a wildly popular method for measuring agile project performance since it was introduced to agile frameworks in 2006. EVM is most commonly applied at the release level rather than individual sprints.
The various metrics of EVM are calculated from the planned number of user stories and the number actually completed. More specifically, we are going to look at just 3 of them: actual cost (AC), earned value (EV) and planned value (PV). AC is the actual cost of work performed, EV is the budgeted cost of work performed, and PV is the budgeted cost of work scheduled.
AC, EV and PV can be incorporated into the release burndown chart to illustrate the efficiency of an agile project at any given stage. The project’s total cost and duration as forecasted by a release burndown chart with EVM afford the client and provider valuable time for making informed decisions about changes needed or desired.
EV is an important measure of cost efficiency but more often than not it does not equal to AC and PV. This is either caused by efficiency-related issues such as workflow inefficiency and misalignment of priorities and estimates, or other variables such as initial ramp-up and changes in requirements and priorities.
EVM data is historic, current and predictive in nature. It allows the use of historic data for iterative estimates, diagnosis of current data in tracking, and prediction of future data for timely decisions to optimize customer value.
The EVM data indicates the presence or absence of inefficiency and not much more. It is up to the Team to find the cause of the inefficiency. Would a StrumMaster stake his or her reputation on identifying the real cause?
True Values of Agile Development
Agile software development delivers customer value early and often. After just a few sprints, an agile software product would be ready for premature release with all core features in place and its end users might not know any better.
Agile development thrives on changes so detailed planning can be left in the rearview mirror. It is best to dive into development with just a preliminary order of priorities. Track the progress every step of the way in order to be able to devise changes and make informed decisions.
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