One of the most encouraging things about the current coronavirus crisis is the number of businesses who are pivoting to an online business model, allowing them to reach their customers through social distancing measures.
Whether these businesses are grocers, retailers, schools, or servicing many other industries, the move to online practices is very encouraging.
Obviously, a large number of these businesses already have solutions in place for eCommerce platforms, but many don’t, and it can be challenging to understand where to start; especially for those with little-to-no understanding of the digital space.
At Faith, we’ve been playing in the digital space for close to 20 years, at the leading edge of what is being used by businesses as a part of a larger integrated communications strategy. If you need help to find, design and develop the right eCommerce platform for your business, we can help. Below are just a few options that we’ve come across and can highly recommend.
Shopify – eCommerce Platform #1
Shopify is perhaps the gold standard when it comes to eCommerce platforms in Australia. With full functionality available for websites and mobile apps, Shopify allows you to create your online store with speed and efficiency. With a minimal cost and simple interface, once it is set up effectively through your digital agency (hello!), you are online and ready to go. With all the elements required to run your business digitally, the Shopify eCommerce platform is a great option to choose. Faith has experience working with a number of Shopify websites; talk to us to find out more.
Square – eCommerce Platform #2
An alternate option is Square. If you’ve ever been to a café and tapped your payment card on a small little white square, you’ve used Square. The benefit of this platform, especially if you may still be operating in a reduced physical presence, is that Square combines online transactions and physical ones into a single dashboard. This, of course, allows businesses to more easily track their income, especially during the challenges of COVID-19 impacting usual trading. Square itself doesn’t provide an eCommerce platform, they partner with Weebly, which can house your new eCommerce solution with Square integration already in place.
OpenCart – eCommerce Platform #3
Finally, the eCommerce platform that we are most excited about is OpenCart. Giving you (and by extension, us) total control over how your online store looks, OpenCart allows you to fully customise your platform. While coding is required (again, hello!) to full get the most out of OpenCart, it also features a range of over 13,000 extensions (some free and some paid), making it similar to other CMS platforms. We can work with your business to determine what is most critical and develop the eCommerce platform accordingly.
Why Work with Faith?
Faith’s dynamic and agile digital team are based in South Melbourne but utilise an array of developers from across the globe to fully implement our client’s desires. Typically, with our digital lead and account manager, we’ll work with you to determine your needs and your requirements before providing our own input and suggestions, to get the most out of the relationship.
And the best thing is that your account manager for the eCommerce platform project can also be your social media coordinator moving forward, or your digital lead can help with other facets of your digital experience. Our team is multi-faceted, with a full creative and audio-visual department, media buying and analytical reporting capacity and higher-level branding capability as well.
In times like this, you gotta have Faith, so talk with us today to find out more.