Important milestones in eCommerce CRM development

The solution we’re talking about is an eCommerce CRM system. It enables e-businesses to create a buyer’s journey that results in repeat sales and true customer lifetime value. 

CRM software for eCommerce industry is nothing new. Healthcare and real estate CRMs have proven successful and gained a lot of traction in the past few years. We’ve already talked about them, but today we’ll focus on custom CRMs for eCommerce.

How eCommerce businesses benefit from CRMs

Before we get to the meat of the matter, let’s look at the critical advantages of eCommerce CRM solutions. 

eCommerce CRM development

Building an eCommerce CRM from the ground up is a challenging process, requiring sound management and an understanding of the eCommerce context. To help you with the latter, we share our insights into eCommerce customer relationship management and outline important milestones of custom CRM development. 

#1 Strategize, plan, and prioritize

Every product starts with an idea. Surely, good design and solid code are important to your project’s success. But having a well-designed platform won’t bring you the desired results if it doesn’t address your pains and business needs. Would you go shopping for your week’s groceries blindfolded, randomly choosing items without even looking at the price tags and products? Not a good idea. The same goes for software development. If you don’t plan correctly when starting out, you can jeopardize your chances of project success.

Therefore, we suggest getting your team together to brainstorm. Analyze your business processes, outline pain points and challenges of customer relationship management, and be clear about what you want to accomplish with your solution. 

#2 Craft a user experience that resonates with your CRM processes

A seamless experience matters a lot, especially in complex systems like CRMs. The problem is that there isn’t a one-size-fits-all design formula for eCommerce CRM success. Much depends on your business specifics and process flows. However, there are a few things every business looking into developing a CRM should consider.

• Make sure your design is user-centered. Understand your users. This isn’t about imagining what you’d do if you were the user. It’s about spending some time with your future users and interviewing them to learn about their needs and what they want to achieve with your software.
• Design for multiple user types. CRM development is a collaborative effort between different departments including marketing, sales, and customer support. Therefore, find out the different needs, wants, and goals of different users. Make a list of associated user roles and their permissions to access specific content and functionality. Also, make sure you understand how different departments are going to work together and be connected within your system.
• Put your findings together and start mapping the user journey, ensuring users are always at the heart of the design process. 

Another thing that’s important when designing your CRM system is your buyer’s journey, or the customer lifecycle. Understanding what stages your customers go through when they build a relationship with your business is fundamental to a good CRM user experience design. You should be aware of how customers move through your sales funnel and which department is responsible for which buying stage.

A typical customer lifecycle looks like this:

Ideally, your customer lifecycle should define your CRM processes. Say your buyer’s journey is like the one we described above. In this case, your CRM processes should look like this:

We’d be wrong to say that must-have CRM features end here. You can develop unique features from scratch to meet your specific needs and concerns. That’s what custom development is all about. 

#3 Good-looking, branded, and usable user interface

One of the reasons why companies go for custom software development is that they want to maintain brand consistency across their product lines. A CRM is no exception in this respect. Custom development allows you to decide on every single element of your CRM system, from design elements to functionality, while reflecting your brand identity. 

As for the qualities of a successful CRM user interface design, the most important are usability, simplicity, clarity, consistency, and responsiveness.

• Usability. Ensure users can accomplish tasks easily and quickly without any (or at least much) training.
• Simplicity. eCommerce CRMs are complex systems. Just don’t overdo the complexity. A great user interface comprises only necessary and logical elements.
• Clarity. Users should understand how your CRM works and be able to easily find what they’re looking for.
• Consistency. Keep your CRM clear and simple, but also keep it consistent. Your CRM system should always behave the same way so users don’t have to find new ways of doing what they need to each time they take a similar action.
• Responsiveness. Your employees are more likely to use your CRM on their mobile devices. Make sure your CRM app adjusts smoothly to different screen sizes, providing consistency across devices.

#4 Tech stack & integrations

Another key decision is your technology stack. There are dozens of programming languages, frameworks, and libraries to use in your CRM project. How can you choose the right ones? There isn’t a one-size-fits-all language. You should choose a language whose libraries, tools, and support align with your project.

#5 Code, test, review, and launch

Continuous testing and feedback loops are critical. You should get user feedback during the development process. By doing so regularly, you’ll be able to validate your user journey, user interface, and features and prove they’re a success before your CRM is available to everyone. You may even need to ask for real feedback before you commit your ideas to code — for example, to build a CRM roadmap. 

Salesforce vs custom development: What’s right for your eCommerce business?

Why develop a CRM from scratch with so many ready-to-use platforms? Of course, if you own a small eCommerce company, custom CRM software development can be to your disadvantage. But if you serve hundreds of customers daily, have a lot of employees and departments that use a CRM, require more features than a ready-made solution can offer, and have unique workflows, investing in a custom CRM is likely the best choice. Let’s discuss these cases in more detail.

#1 Are you okay with functionality that already exists in Salesforce?

What CRM features do I need? This should be the main question you ask when making the build vs buy decision. 

Check out Salesforce CRM features to find out if they cover your needs. If you’re okay with the functionality in Salesforce and don’t have any specific requirements, go with it. But if you require sophisticated features (that don’t exist in a ready-made solution) and have unique workflows, custom development is the best choice for you.

#2 How many employees/departments are going to use the CRM?

Salesforce charges by the user. So the more employees are using the CRM, the more you’ll pay. Say you’ve decided to go with the Salesforce Enterprise plan. If you have five employees using it, Salesforce will cost you $750 every month, which is $9,000 a year. That’s bearable. But if you have 20 employees using it, it’ll cost you $3,000 per month.

#3 What’s your budget and timeframe for the project?

If you require a quick solution and have a tight budget, then custom CRM development is out of the question. Again, building an eCommerce solution from scratch is a sophisticated process, requiring lots of effort and time. Don’t go custom unless you have the necessary resources. 

#4 Are you reflecting your brand identity across product lines?

Custom eCommerce CRM development is the best way to go if you’re a big-name company that wants to maintain its brand identity across product lines. Or if you want to decide on every design element in your CRM, from navigation to the UI concept to content and fonts.

When should you build an eCommerce system from scratch vs use a ready-made solution?

At Globaldev, we offer custom CRM development services. Read about how we developed a custom CRM for a consulting firm, allowing them to efficiently manage clients and track financial performance. 

Message us with your CRM idea and we’ll get back to you with our advice and a rough estimate.