Wednesday 18 September 2013

Pros and Cons of Outsourcing Your eCommerce Project

When it comes to building an eCommerce website you have typically two options to choose from: either built it on your own or hire someone expert from outside (usually called Insourcing and Outsourcing). Well, these both options make sense in certain situations. If you have adequate technical and programming knowledge then you can better start building your eCommerce site your own, since there are tons of ready to use free themes and software’s available on the web (such as WordPress, Magento and Joomla) which extremely reduces the development work, efforts and time. The obvious advantage of building site on your own is that you can shape your eCommerce store just the way you imagine about it. At the same time, if you want your store to shine over your competitors, have elegant user-friendly functionality with smooth performance and covering all basic technical aspects, its absolutely worth investing in hiring professional web development firm to take care of your project.

Outsourcing has risks but it has benefits too. We are going to highlight its pros and cons in this article.

What is Outsourcing?

When you hire an outside expert, service provider or any professional organization to meet particular business needs or to manage a portion of project such as eCommerce development is called as outsourcing.

Following are the reasons to outsource your eCommerce project:

Outsourcing is an eminent concept which has been appreciated by organization across the globe and often recognized as cost-effective tactic. It allows businesses to focus on its core competencies and off-load its non-core functions to outsourcing providers in low-cost countries such as India and many others.

  • Expert skills: By outsourcing your project to a genuine company, you will get support of expert and highly qualified professions experienced in delivering satisfied results in stipulated time frames. Developing project under skilled developers ensures that your project meets all your specific business requirements.
  • Advanced tools: Due to high competition outsourcing ecommerce development companies are under immense pressure to survive and to stay in the market they must produce best results utilizing latest technical tools and resources. Hence customers can benefit from competitive costs and efficient services.Furthermore there is an ever increasing community of ecommerce developers who contribute by sharing their experience and builds nurturing the web with outstanding technical functionalities and designs.
  • Reduce in overall cost: Outsource project will tremendously reduce your overall budget as many renowned companies offers best services at reasonable cost.
  • Peace of mind: Most of the time project scope is well agreed between client and ecommerce Development Company in advance and they give fix time and cost to do development. This tremendously reduces the burden for client to continuously monitor development as they know what they are going to pay, what is going to be built and when to expect completed project. help organizations to give estimation to their clients.
  • Smooth communication: Since outsourcing companies have to deal with foreign companies, most of them are trained in speaking good English. Developers team of outsourcing companies are well experienced on how to communicate with clients. Modern technologies such as instant messengers, conference calls, video chat gives virtually close environment to interact with development team.
Cost savings is the main benefit of outsourcing ecommerce development. There are thousands of options to choose from. Some are good and some are bad. Just use your common sense to avoid falling in the trap of wrong companies. But when you strike the right chord and you have a good company you are working with – you just need to focus on expanding your business by having a strong back up of reliable ecommerce developers.” – KGN Technologies

Disadvantages of Outsourcing

The main is the reliability factor and falling in the trap of wrong company. It may hit you extremely hard in face when you realize poor quality work, no seriousness in development team about timely delivery, poor communication and inefficient project management. It will become extremely frustrating and very hard to get out of the deep crap you will fall into. So be prepared and take all necessary steps before you award your project and rely on a team to do work for you. Ask for examples, speak with them on phone, talk to their references, visit them if it is worth and find out how they work, check out infrastructure and interact with team.

Quality is another major complain. There will be lapses and you will need to raise the bar to achieve the standard you expect.  The best approach is to agree and confirm what type of TESTING companies will perform. If you need any specific configuration testing let them know. In short a complete guideline on quality standards has to be put in front of development team.

Poor communication and delay in delivery are also common issues. Ensure that the company you work with have staff fluent in English communication and they understand your project requirement perfectly. Set a target deadline to deliver the project with you with testing.

About Author: Sem Jacobs is working at KGN Technologies as web developer. KGN technologies offers pixel perfect and validated PSD to HTML conversion services.

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