From the course: Choosing an Ecommerce Platform for Developers

Get buy-in from the whole team

From the course: Choosing an Ecommerce Platform for Developers

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Get buy-in from the whole team

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- [Instructor] When you work on any project, it's a good idea to get buy-in from the stakeholders. Usually, the stakeholders are the owner of a company or the project manager. And if your client knows what they're doing, the stakeholder will get feedback from all the right people in their organization. Unfortunately, not every client is good at this. As an example, a few years ago, if you wanted to open a women's clothing store on WooCommerce, I would've advised against it, and that's because a few years ago, WooCommerce didn't have automated refunds. So, a customer support person who wanted to refund in WooCommerce would first have to go to the payment gateway and refund the payment there and then refund the order itself in WooCommerce. That's two times the amount of work. And in women's clothing specifically, they have some of the highest return rates for e-commerce stores. Many of them are above 50%. So imagine, as the customer support person, how much extra time you'd waste having to refund the order in two places and how much opportunity there is for human error. Instead, I'd recommend a system that has automated refunds where you can refund the order in the e-commerce platform and it automatically refunds in the payment gateway. As the solution provider, I like to reach out or at least ask about these different roles. So, for customer service, what is your exchange rate? For marketing, how often do you plan on writing content and how do you measure the results? For logistics, how often do you update your inventory and how do you ship your products? And for legal, do you comply with GDPR? You'd be surprised how important some of these roles can be. In women's clothing, with a return/exchange rate of over 50%, customer service's input should matter a great deal. But if you're selling digital products, then the return/exchange process is much easier to handle and their input should matter a little less. Another good example. We're recording this course approximately nine months after EU's GDPR laws went into effect and one of the top five e-commerce platforms in the world still isn't compliant. So, if your business cares about being compliant, then you can't choose that platform. For new companies or companies without much e-commerce experience, they won't know to request certain features from you. So, you want to walk them through the features and limitations of your solution so they're prepared for any shortcomings.

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