Since forming in 2010, Onstate has worked on a number of platforms, including the likes of Venda, Woocommerce, Magento, Salesforce Commerce Cloud and Shopify.
After a decade of valuable insight and experience, in 2019, we decided to focus solely on Shopify and Shopify Plus. The reason behind this was a recognition that - for the vast majority of our clients - it had become the platform of choice, be they start-up brands or complex multichannel retailers.
Below are seven areas we’ve identified as to why Shopify is the best platform for our clients:
1. Shopify’s Scalability
The infrastructure behind Shopify powers millions of stores worldwide, so there’s no load testing or optimisations required ahead of peak. As a SaaS platform, Shopify provides peace of mind that your store is stable and the main focus of your efforts can be focused on growth.
2. Simplicity
Shopify projects are generally less technically complex than other platforms (and alternative approaches such as Headless). In our experience, complexity almost always leads to additional cost and risk. Each new line of code is something else that will need maintenance and is a potential point of failure. As a 'low-code' solution, Shopify helps us deliver more, with less.
3. Flexibility
Simplicity does not come at the expense of flexibility, and for those merchants that require more features we’ve found it to be an exceptionally capable platform. See how we helped Mamas & Papas migrate from Hybris with zero loss of functionality.
4. Creativity
With less time and effort spent on solving technical problems, our team is freed up to focus on the creative and marketing challenges that help drive our clients’ online growth. It unlocks more budget to elevate the brand digitally, giving licence for ‘surprise and delight’ moments such as animations and micro-interactions that bring the store to life.
5. Innovation
The platform is being constantly updated with new features (see the changelog here). Merchants can be confident that they’re moving to a platform that will maintain pace with the latest innovations in ecommerce technology.
6. Cost of Ownership
When compared to ’traditional’ enterprise platforms, Shopify Plus delivers savings on technology and upkeep - freeing up budget for investment in product, marketing and customer services.
"Shopify changed our digital business overnight. Our checkout experience is fast and the platform has empowered the team in merchandising, search and analytics. It has allowed us to grow quickly and more importantly saved a significant amount of investment with easy development in house. Our cost to operate is much lower increasing profitability for the business." Jo Molineux - Digital Director, Mamas & Papas.
7. It's Collaborative
Ecommerce platforms can be a black box - arcane systems whose workings are known only to a select band of technical folk. As a result, businesses become totally reliant on their tech partners. With Shopify, we've found that we can involve our clients far more closely in the process: upskilling inhouse developers and collaborating on other technical aspects. This gives merchants a greater degree of autonomy, ownership and freedom.
If your business is looking to migrate to Shopify Plus, enhance its current ecommerce offering or launch a digital platform for the very first time, we’d love to talk to you. To get a flavour of what we've been up to of late, take a look at some of our recent work.
