Top things to consider for your business developing multi-platform ecommerce apps and plugins

Whether you are a listed corporation or a growing SME with 20 staff, developing for your own business services and products a Shopify App, a WooCommerce plugin, or add on software for any one of the other dozens of ecommerce platforms can be a challenging and costly process if done in the wrong way and using the wrong people.

So you have a service which is valuable to your clients, maybe you have an established API, but now you need to gain better market access by delivering to new and existing customers software on their preferred commerce platform.

Having over a decade of broad and extensive experience specifically in the ecommerce plugin & app development space ourselves, for both clients and our own digital ecommerce products, and across a number of platforms such as Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento and BigCommerce, in this post we delve into some of the key considerations to have when embarking on a project like this.

This may be related to your business or a new venture. For our clients they are typically looking to extend accessibility to their product by offering it across multiple ecommerce platforms.

If you’re looking to offer your product across multiple ecommerce platforms, whether proprietary or open source, such as Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento, BigCommerce or something else, the idea itself can usually be applied into a multi-platform environment.

There may be some restrictions here, which we cover in platform strategy below.

A step which may not be relevant for your business but important to consider is viability and potential market demand.

If you are not clear on the market, research is important to ensure you don’t waste time and money on your idea which does not get the right return.

Here I am talking about why you are launching this in the first place?

Is it that you’ll be launching a first to market product? Or are you doing it to keep up with competitors so you have a similar offering? Being clear on why you are developing the market solution does determine the approach you should be taking.

While budget operators are regularly offering cheap “apps” in the marketplace, these are usually relating to apps for your phone that reproduce existing features of your website, such as being able to view your website, services, login via your website and send enquiries via email – not what this article is about.

The sorts

Next you should be considering your MVP or Minimum Viable Product.

This is what the product will be and the features it will have when it is first launched.

Having too little in the MVP may negatively impact your reputation. Although, if you are first to market, customers have nothing to compare to, so may help you launch that initial product faster.

If you have too much in your MVP, you may bury the project as it is mired in extended timeframes and reduces your competitiveness.

Platform strategy

When developing a solution for your customers, it is standard practice to consider a multi platform approach, especially to the most popular platforms.

For example, catering to just Shopify, despite its market dominance, will exclude a large number of prospective customers. You can poll customers on their preferred or current platform to help lead your strategy and priorities.

Each platform has differing technology. At OPMC we involve our specialists in your business, API’s and so on, across all platform builds. This allows us to have consistency and knowledge transfer for all builds. We then have platform specific developers who can best build the solution for that platform, with guidance from our team members with expert knowledge in the business APIs and technology.

Another consideration is the marketplace capabilities, rules, and limitations. For example at the current time:

Next up you need to consider who will do the development.

Here I suggest focusing on overall lifecycle cost to the business.

The cheapest quote has a lower upfront expectation on price. But if the service provider doesn’t bring enough experience then the project costs will blow out and sometimes more importantly the timeframes.

In the development of our own Plugins and Apps, whether Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento or otherwise, we find typically that the biggest cost to us is not the spend on development, but the timeframe. So if we spend 150 hours on a project, but due to issues and internal priorities, it took 3 months to deploy, then it can be more expensive to our business than a 500 hour project that took 2 months.

I’d also consider demonstrable experience by the service provider. Many firms tend to be “experienced” in everything, can do anything, but not very good at much.

In the case of OPMC, our client plugin & app projects are borne from our own thriving business experience, producing our own commercial plugins. We are already producing commercially viable digital products and investing our own money in these.

An alternative approach is to develop in house. This works well in a number of cases, however I would give the following advice:

If going down the route of engaging with an external partner, it’s important you set clear expectations and develop a good relationship with the business you partner with.

This needs to be done at the beginning to avoid major delays and ensure issues can be mended when there is a problem.

This will help you better understand upfront who the best provider is.

Have you considered how you’ll distribute this to existing and prospective customers?

With Shopify you can create a private integration, or you can list on the Shopify App store. This requires an approval process.

With products like WooCommerce, you can apply to be a partner on the WooCommerce Marketplace at WooCommerce.com, manage this through your development Partner, or sell on your own website or even distribute for free there or via the WordPress.org marketplace.

Each of these methods have their own approaches and challenges that need to be considered.

Supporting a customer base requires a dedicated team of people who specialise in this space. Support for ecommerce apps and plugins can be incredibly broad and time consuming to resolve without the right resources, processes and team.

At OPMC we deal with thousands of customers a year, who have a broad range of feedback and skillset – those who don’t know how to install the software, right through to those with detailed product and even code feedback.

Some customers expect responses within an hour as it impacts substantially their online store right now, whereas others are happy to wait a week. If you have a WordPress website or otherwise, with say a WooCommerce store, best practices in customer support mean the first things customers expect is their ecommerce business doesn’t fall apart and lose money because their new plugin or app from your business is broken.

Maintaining and improving your ecommerce plugin or app is just as important as developing it in the first place.

You can expect to have customer feedback in the initial phases which can positively shape the customer experience and grow product adoption – I’d highly recommend attention to this.

There is also new features to add, support for new software requirements and compatibility – such as changes to the Shopify App store or new software releases of WooCommerce for example.

Healthy apps and plugins need ongoing regular attention and input just like a business does.

Planning to launch a “forever” product which doesn’t have an ongoing budget is the best way to sink it.

To summarise, the success of your digital ecommerce apps & plugins will depend on a number of factors which need a good Partner with relevant experience, or internal team.

For more advice, or to enquire about your customer plugin development project, I encourage you to reach out to our team at opmc.com.au