Kenner_Soft
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Member since 2024-06-19
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E-commerce consultants

E-commerce consultants do not have an easy job. There are many reasons for this. In my opinion, however, the biggest challenge is that many companies, managing directors, decision-makers and e-commerce managers have simply stood still.

However, the development that e-commerce has undergone in recent years is astonishing. Astonishingly fast and astonishingly extensive. I'm not so much interested in the rising costs or the new players on the market. Above all, the technical development of recent years has been and continues to be ground-breaking. E-commerce works differently today than it did 5 or 10 years ago, and you have to realise that.

Many e-commerce experts are aware of this - but not the decision-makers. This is all the more critical, because ultimately it is the managing directors, IT managers, sales managers or even marketing managers who make the decisions at the end of the day as to whether and how an e-commerce project is realised.

How e-commerce worked in the past

Let me take a step back. How was it possible to operate successfully in e-commerce, let's say before 2009/10? What requirements did companies have to fulfil and what did the projects look like?

Due to the low level of competition and the still manageable expectations of consumers, e-commerce projects were quite simple 10 years ago. As soon as the decision was made to sell products and services online, you simply looked for and commissioned an e-commerce agency.

In most cases, the requirements were of a purely technical nature, and if business requirements were also involved, these were relatively straightforward. Accordingly, an agency briefing 10 years ago might have roughly included the following points:

High-level requirements "online shop"

My products must be able to be displayed online
Some products may require a configuration option
It must be possible to pay with any payment method in the checkout
The system should be stable and reasonably performant
As long as the shop looks good on the desktop, everything is fine
Connections to other IT systems are not absolutely necessary
Of course, this is a highly abbreviated and condensed overview. Even 10 years ago, reasonable briefings consisted of 40-60 pages. At this point, however, I would simply like to give you a feeling for the topics that companies attached importance to back then when introducing online shop software.

At that time, the systems used were usually as little complex as the requirements. This can be explained relatively easily using the example of osCommerce: back then, osCommerce consisted of a handful of files that mapped a very simple logic. The installation was completed in minutes, there were no major hosting requirements and changes could be made quickly in the live system and in a few files.