DEV Community: Alexey Kalachik

How To Start Your Ecommerce Business From Scratch

Alexey Kalachik — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 23:02:08 +0000

Ecommerce is now one of the fastest growing industries, as lots of startups all over the world struggle to create their own online store and become as popular as Walmart and Amazon. But how to start an ecommerce business if all you have is just an idea, and how to make it profitable? Let’s figure it out.

1. Decide on a Product

Your product should solve a definite customers’ problem. For example, bottles from stainless steel became popular because they can be reused without polluting the environment. If you want to find such opportunities, do the following:

Use social media to read comments on different brands you admire;
Ask friends about products they purchased recently and didn’t like;
Pay attention to popular trends like conscious consumerism or healthy lifestyle;
Think about items in your home that disturb you or look outdated and can be improved.

Then choose your niche and research for items that can solve the defined issue. Pay close attention to demographic and psychographic characteristics of your future consumers, because if you understand what they want, you will have success.

2. Research the Competitors and Find Your Advantages

When you set up an ecommerce business, it’s good to look at popular brands like Nike, Pandora or Ebay, and highlight everything you find good and innovative. It can be the design, the branding, the way they communicate the idea, the shipping options, etc. Write down your top 10 favourite features and think how they can be realised in your product to make it better, at least in something. Starting an ecommerce business from scratch try not to use seasonal products, but if you really want, think about additional items to sell all year round. It’s good if your product could be purchased again, or at least need some related accessories, and cost from $20 to $60 each — neither cheap nor expensive.

3. Get Clear on the Brand Mission

Now, you are ready to describe the mission of your business: what is its main goal? Making people happy, aligning their individuality, freeing their workload or probably automating the routine? This seems not so important at first, but your brand mission will define your whole business strategy. Also think about the tagline, the brand voice and values. Look for inspiration at competitors’ websites, using their mission only as a starting point.

4. Create Your Logo and Design

This is needed to distinguish your brand among others and get the feeling of integrity of all your communication with the customers. You can open Google Fonts and try different styles to see what fits your brand mission best. To find your colour palette, you can go to Design Seeds, which posts a new colour scheme every day and has thousands of themes.

5. Choose the Sailing Method

Here you don’t need to invent something, but just to choose among the product-sourcing strategies. If you want to sell online without creating your own products from scratch, you can drop-ship (purchase the inventory from a supplier after a customer purchases it, like Aesthentials), wholesale (purchase the products from a supplier before customers, like ASOS), or private label (hide the fact that you purchased products from another supplier, like IKEA). If you want to build a well-known brand with great potential, you need to create your own supplier platform with original products (like Alibaba). Be ready to have around 200 units of each product at the start, and then gradually increase this number.

6. Create the Landing Page and State the Shipping Policy

Building an online store is an essential part of a successful ecommerce business. It’s ideal to have a separate page for every product you sell, but if you are just starting, you can go with a one-pager. Sometimes even e-commerce giants like Mercedes use one-page websites. Don’t forget to state your shipping and return policies on the website clearly, explain how quickly orders will be shipped in case of ordinal and expedited shipping. Pick 2-3 days a week for shipping orders, but don’t do it every day, as you’ll waste a lot of energy and time in vain.

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7. Follow a Marketing Plan

To grow your custom ecommerce solution, you should choose one of the following marketing strategies:

Social media marketing: to use social media and networks to market your products and services;
Social media ads: to serve paid ads to your target audience using social media platforms;
Email marketing: to notify the customers on your email list of new products and discounts;
Influencer marketing: to use endorsements and product mentions from “experts” who have a dedicated social following;
Search and display ads: to use paid ads that appear on the screen based on various targeting parameters;
Search engine optimization (SEO): to orient your website to rank higher on a search engine results page.

You can start with one or two strategies, evaluate their effectiveness, and then try others if needed.

Things to Avoid

Now you are finally ready to build your own ecommerce startup! The last advice we want to give you is to avoid the following common mistakes:

Giving up if competition is high: if you see a competitor doing exactly the same, don’t give up, but see it as a sign of market validation: there are definitely customers who want this product, so you can capture some market share too, and even a bigger one;
Buying too much inventory at the start: instead of spending all your money on day one, launch your store with only 2-3 products with 200 units of each. Then, if you really don’t succeed or if you see how to optimise the process (as it often happens), you can sell the products at cost and try again with a new concept;
Investing too much in marketing: you shouldn’t be afraid of spending money on marketing, but don’t invest too much until you have at least a dozen of organic sales via social media.

Starting an ecommerce business is an exciting adventure. Choose a product that will solve a definite problem, doesn’t cost too much, and isn’t seasonal. State an inspiring mission of the brand and create its individual design that people will remember. And if you need a personal consultation on custom ecommerce development, feel free to contact us, and we’ll be happy to help you in realising your idea.

Check Whether Your Business is E-commerce Ready

Alexey Kalachik — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 22:58:57 +0000

Among all the dire straits of 2020, e-commerce has become a ray of hope for business since consumers switch to online transactions. According to eMarketer, while total worldwide retail sales declined by 3.0%, retail sales online grew 27.6% for the year. That is prompting us to rethink the opportunities of e-commerce for business in 2021.

source: eMarketer

Now let’s talk about your business. You must have started using a website or even an app. Have you ever wondered whether it’s enough and what else can be done? This article is intended to help you to determine whether it’s time to start looking for an e-commerce development company or it will be perfectly fine if you just maintain the status quo.

Take a Look Around

Before rushing into the technology, look at your competitors and industry as a whole system. Despite the total digitalization trend, some businesses are still strongly tied to offline - so-called labor-intensive industries like caregiving or agriculture. At the same time, some industries are in immediate transition to total e-commerce and if you belong to one of them, you should respond quickly. Therefore, explore what your competitors do and what’s the demand for your products or services online.

Before we start discussing the technical aspects of the e-commerce software, let’s keep in mind that the main business objective is to sell. It sounds clear as a bell but sometimes online customers get distracted by technical stuff and completely forget their intention. Therefore, before introducing any upgrades, make sure it will make the customer journey easier.

Managing Customer Relations

If you use a customer relations management system, you save time and provide high-level customer support. CRM is a powerful tool since it brings together client databases, sales modules, marketing tools, technical support, and organizational management tools for a team. One of the key factors of CRM relevance is access to customer data in real-time. Moreover, the data is always systematized and up-to-date.

CRM is the fastest growing marketing software. You can find server and cloud solutions, web and mobile versions, ready-to-use or custom CRM. If you make it a part of your e-commerce kit, you’ll do half the job.

Customer Support Department Taking a Pass

You may invest tons of money in e-commerce design and development, boost marketing campaigns, and end up with nothing if there are troubles with processing the requests and dealing with complaints. A large staff is often unnecessary when you deploy and adopt an AI chatbot that could handle standard situations and answer immediately.

89% of consumers have switched to a competitor following a poor customer experience. It means that you should have someone focused on that part of the business processes. The larger the turnover becomes, the more responsibility falls on customer service.

Omnichannel Presence

73% of customers use multiple channels while shopping online. Customer journeys are getting more complicated - a client might find an Instagram account, proceed to a website, and place an order within an app. To stay in sight, use all the suitable media platforms and formats. Moreover, all your channels should work cohesively - no one wants to deliver a fragmented experience.

If you already have a physical store, include it in the omnichannel strategy. It perfectly corresponds to the online-to-offline (O2O) commerce principle that underlies home delivery and curbside pickup services - two strategies that can be effective during pandemics.

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UX as a Secret Ingredient

User experience is a cornerstone of e-commerce. It takes a customer 50 milliseconds to decide whether to stay on your website/in your app or not. The way you present yourself, position the products, and provide a customer journey means a lot. You can succeed in e-commerce with the help of online store design.

You may think of UX design as a subjective thing or a judgement call. In fact, design and UX lead to greater conversion rates in e-commerce. It may turn out to be your best investment. So, while planning to create a mobile or web solution, allocate a sufficient budget for UX too.

Building E-commerce Solutions That Work

E-commerce expansion is the logical step for a business to take in 2021. It doesn’t mean though that you should jump in at the deep end. Before making any decisions, analyze your business domains, your capability to respond, and your omnipresence for customers. Hire an e-commerce developer to provide technical assistance and connect all the elements into one system.

If you’re not sure what software company to choose, keep in mind that the Fively team would be glad to analyze your project and offer a competitive solution right for your needs. Feel free to contact us!

What is Technical Debt and How to Reduce Yours?

Alexey Kalachik — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 22:55:52 +0000

All of us strive for business optimization. We look for new practices to improve the general performance, reduce costs, and boost our effectiveness. However, sometimes it happens that troubles grow snowballs.

You start a software development project at length, work thoroughly on every feature, and suddenly discover an issue to deal with when you run out of time. What happens next? You most likely start fixing it, cutting corners in other tasks, which causes more problems. You have too many destructions but the clock is ticking. This is how your technical debt accumulates.

Let’s discover what you can do with that before a snowball turns into an avalanche.

Technical Debt: Meaning

The main idea of technical debt is that during software development you postpone some tasks to meet a deadline but inevitably face the consequences of the work undone, which consumes even more of your resources and time.

When you intend to add a new function to a software solution, you can either work fast, leaving a messy code, or spend more time but deliver a quality code. The choice is not that obvious, especially when you’re limited in time.

Software development is often a compromise between a good-enough product and a perfect one. However, perfection stays unattainable, and sometimes all we can do is to accept carrying some debt. The limits are crucial, though.

According to a McKinsey survey, 60% of Chief Information Officers admit that technical debt in their companies has risen significantly over the past three years. If you feel that the issues of technical debt can not be ignored, let’s continue to figure out ways of dealing with it.

Types of Technical Debt

Technical specialists distinguish certain types of technical debt that reveal the reasons for its emergence. To begin with, technical debt can be deliberate when you leave something undone as described above and accidental if you miscalculated something. Unavoidable technical debt is a separate category from which no development team can consider itself immune. For example, a coding language can become outdated that will make it harder to bring the necessary changes to the product.

Other types of technical debt are the following:

*Duplication*. You leave code lines that mean more or less the same thing. When a bug arises in one place, it can also emerge in another place so that it would be difficult to trace and fix it.
*Lack of Tests*. Any code is supposed to be protected with tests, otherwise, you can not trust in its quality and make further changes.
*Lack of Technical Documentation*. Technical documentation is crucial to make a code understandable and subject to further changes.
*Lack of Automation*. Leaving multiple manual steps can entail human errors.
*Poor Structure*. If a code is poorly structured, it is hard to grasp what module is responsible for what.

How to Manage Technical Debt: Best Practices

Identify the Cause

If you have an ongoing project and understand that something is holding you back, analyze the reasons. When you detect the cause of the problem, discuss it with the team members responsible for that area. For example, if you set short terms and hard deadlines, software developers may be ruled by time pressure and leave a messy code. So, if it is not a case of necessary evil, you can alter your planning or operational process for the sake of technical debt reduction.

Create a Clear Assessment Criteria of Done

The definition of “done” means a lot. When you complete the coding part, it can be tempting to declare the work done. However, it’s not over without proper testing. The rule is fair for various activities: review a job done. The time costs should be included in your project plan. Set the right standards.

Talk to Your Team

A motivated and conscious team is one of the powerful resources to reduce technical debt. Motivate people to maintain quality standards and remunerate them, if needed. For example, start measuring the number of bugs fixed or updates to draw attention to the issue. Such activities will encourage mutual help, attention to detail, and promote a favorable corporate culture.

Adhere to Agile Development

When you apply the principles of Agile, technical debt becomes a manageable thing in an ongoing manner. Repeated iterations and rapid change when needed allow fixing bugs quickly without accumulating problems. Also, Make sure that all the deferred tasks are part of your product backlog to keep transparency.

Don’t Leave Technical Debt to Fate

The practices we shared here can prevent your business from technical debt distress. However, if you feel that you can not handle it in your current project, Fively team can come to the rescue. We can assume software development or provide consulting services for your company.

Save your nerves and budget, and let snowballs be a funny winter activity but not a part of your project plan.

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What is the Right User Interface for Financial Services

Alexey Kalachik — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 22:53:32 +0000

The fintech deal activity increased by 11% in the 4th quarter of 2020 compared to the 1st quarter of the same year. The technology is gaining more trust and popularity among customers and the companies should think about responding to the trust. Providing a smooth customer journey supported by the right UI is the best way to do that. Even if you offer demanded financial products at affordable prices, it may all be wiped out by poor visual presentation. In this blog post, we’ll discuss what a good interface is and its key principles regarding fintech solutions.

Improving the digital experience for consumers has become a top priority for financial organizations worldwide in 2020. Fintech software development embraces complicated solutions that can raise questions for the clients. That’s why such designs should be simple for users though provide a sufficient level of security since we are talking about money. Best fintech solutions are designed with care for users and attention to detail. The work of fintech developers can be considered successful when older adults use the solution without difficulty.

The Fively team has experience in working with fintech. The technology requires respect for several principles when you want to accomplish the high-class design. If you’re reading this, you must be ready to provide sufficient customer care and we share the following fintech UI principles at the right time.

Colors

The first thing customers see is colors that can either promote a solution or destroy it. Colors alone influence up to 90% of the first impression. The right palette will help you to put financial products in the proper perspective so that your clients could foresee a positive outcome of their interaction with the solution.

You should keep in mind two things when considering the colors for your future financial solution - your brand positioning and the cultural background of your target audience.

First of all, according to classical color psychology, banks and financial institutions should avoid red as a color of danger, grey as a color of conservatism, and black as a color of evil. Instead, marketers offer green as a color of money, blue as a color of loyalty, and yellow as a color of support. At the same time, the ‘dangerous’ colors are successfully implemented as the accent ones. This approach traditionally works well for financial services and if the ‘safe’ colors fit into your brand vision, do not hesitate to use them.‌

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MoneyLion app is presented in a green color palette so that we think about money with calm

However, there are certain rebels who prefer breaking the rules and betting on young and creative customers or the same rebels in business as they are. Then we may see *red color as a provocation, purple color as mystery, orange color as creativity*. If that feels like yours, choose appropriate color schemes.‌

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Nubank app relies heavily on purple color and adds stars to make us think about magic

Another important point in choosing color is cultural sensitivity. In China, for instance, red means happiness and prosperity. What is more, red signifies a rise In East Asian stock markets, while North American markets use it to signify a fall. So, if you’re planning to launch your product in a specific region, explore the cultural background.

Progressive Flow

An average mobile app loses 77% of its daily active users within the first 3 days after installation. When it comes to financial services, users are even more scared by the potential complexity of such a solution. Therefore, it’s important to keep the flow simple and smooth when creating UIs for fintech. Do not overload the pages with excessive elements, stick to simplicity. Provide tooltips to explain the terms that can not be omitted and a glossary of all the terms used. The ultimate goal is to make your product understandable for users with different levels of education.‌

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FintechOS demonstrates the usage of tooltips so that customers understand what action to perform

Onboarding experience is one of the most important parts when it comes to user flows. Customers are scared by huge forms and a lot of typing though financial security implies more effort during the registration than it would be with some app for entertainment. You can neither streamline everything nor scare off the users. To resolve this dilemma, divide your onboarding procedure into several parts. In the first part, ask your user for standard personal data like first and last names, date of birth. After that show them a preliminary version of their account and explain how you’re going to use their personal data. In the following part, ask the users for more private financial information.‌

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N26 carefully explains how registration takes place

Assistance

The fintech UI is all about giving a helping hand among puzzling operations and figures. Graphics and tooltips help to achieve that, as you already know, but the list of such instruments can be much longer. You should include in it at least one more fundamental concept - animation. Do not forget about the principle of simplicity though. Animation should help users to navigate and inform about the results of action within an app. When it’s smooth and slightly noticeable, the users will perform desired actions and won’t get tired of the animated effects.

You can go further and prepare a voice user interface that is a growing trend in digital banking development. The voice assistance will speed up financial transactions within a solution and make it possible for visually impaired clients to use fintech products.‌

A typical conversation with a voice assistant. Source: Media Logic

Inspiration Into Action

Now you know how many fabulous ideas you can try when creating a user interface for a financial product. Just don’t forget to stay customer-centric because otherwise, all the effort is in vain. The next step will be to find a development team who cares about customers as much as you do about yours and it looks like we know someone great.

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AI Development in Healthcare: Revolutionizing Treatment and Patient Care

Alexey Kalachik — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 22:49:29 +0000

Better diagnostics and treatment, effective day-to-day communication with patients, reduced workloads of doctors and other professionals – these and many other effects one can get when using AI in Healthcare.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) helps simulate the process of human thinking and teach computer systems to analyze medical data. Later on, people will use the result of this analysis to make better and faster decisions.

AI market size (Source: Fively)

Let’s talk about the many ways to apply AI in the medical field. These days, many companies are developing medical software for different purposes, growing the total value of health-related digital products: the world’s healthcare market is predicted to reach $31 billion in two years from now.

First of all, we would like to briefly describe the advantages and disadvantages of Artificial Intelligence in healthcare settings.

10 Benefits of AI in Healthcare

How is AI revolutionizing the healthcare industry? One of the groundbreaking changes is related to how this technology analyzes large sets of data faster and usually more accurately than a human specialist.

Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare provides numerous opportunities for specialists:

Diagnosing serious diseases early, with first-sign detection;
Making better-informed decisions about treatment, with thorough analytics that includes a patient’s medical history, latest medical discoveries, etc;
Decreasing the number of human errors;
Helping make faster decisions and save lives in emergency situations.

Another positive role of Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare is helping healthcare providers manage everyday tasks. AI-based solutions have potential to free a lot of time, which can be best illustrated by these examples:

Automation of a scheduling process for more convenient doctor's appointments;
Faster and less error-prone management of patient records;
Freeing more time for healthcare professionals to provide quality patient care;
Reducing manual work can minimize burnout and increase job satisfaction.

Fast data analysis and opportunities for automatization are also the biggest benefits of Artificial Intelligence in business, regardless of the industry.

What are some other benefits of developing AI in Healthcare? Personalization is a great advantage that changes patients’ experience dramatically. For example, AI used in Healthcare can analyze various information and provide individualized recommendations, helping people take care of their health more effectively, which in the long run means fewer hospitalizations and less spending.

We listed 10 positive things about this technology. There are also some negative effects of Artificial Intelligence. Let’s discover them.

5 Challenges of Using AI Technology in Healthcare

The first challenge is how to produce accurate and reliable results, avoiding algorithmic bias. It is vital to provide equal diagnosis and treatment for all demographics of patients. However, if engineers use incomplete or outdated data to teach algorithms, they will receive biased results, creating various ethical issues with AI in Healthcare.

It's also worth remembering that the accuracy of results directly depends on the quality of data for AI healthcare development. If algorithms are not well designed and trained, there will be poor diagnosis and wrong treatment recommendation ruining the whole idea of this technology.

There are some other risks, challenges, and ethical considerations of Artificial Intelligence used in Healthcare. Since the medical data is equally valuable and sensitive, it becomes difficult to send it from one healthcare provider to another. *Interoperable systems* are vital for chronic illness treatment, difficult or emergency cases, etc. On the other hand, easy information exchange can potentially create data breaches. The exposure of patients’ personal details is one of the negative impacts of AI in Healthcare.

There is a challenge connected to the *cost of using AI in Healthcare.* Even though the technology cuts many costs in the long run, the initial investment can be huge for smaller organizations. These days, only big and middle-sized healthcare providers can benefit from implementing such solutions.

In addition to all the described risks and considerations, it’s important for medical organizations to keep in mind that AI in Healthcare should serve as *a tool, not a replacement*. Some aspects simply can’t be automated because they require human expertise and individual judgment. Businesses should consider this fact when choosing from new ideas for AI-based products to develop.

Now that we have talked about the controversial role of AI in Healthcare, let’s dive into the most promising ways to apply this new technology to the work of medical professionals.

7 Innovative Ways To Use Artificial Intelligence in the Medical Field

There are various subsets of Artificial Intelligence that you can use in this particular industry. For example, Natural language processing helps computers understand spoken and written speech. One more example is Machine learning that allows computer systems to make predictions after analyzing massive datasets.

We will describe some interesting cases of Al and ML development for hospitals, clinics, medical laboratories, pharmaceutical companies, etc.

#1 Disease Detection

Medical image analytics is a great example of AI in Healthcare that helps improve diagnosis and plan better treatment. Such solutions can recognise faces, find and identify objects and detect abnormalities, provide medical image classification, analyze X-ray and MRI images, CT scans etc.

It has been proven by a JAMA study that doctors can diagnose lymph node cancer more accurately with Deep learning technology. The best outcomes of a ML-based healthcare software project would be prediction and early detection of dangerous diseases like cancer or diabetic retinopathy, making personalized and more effective treatment plans for patients, and more.

#2 Personal Recommendations

Healthcare AI development can revolutionize patient care in unprecedented ways, analyzing patient profiles, family medical history, lifestyle factors, and other important information that helps to make effective treatment recommendations for each person. These solutions are somewhat similar to personal financial management apps that also analyze a lot of internal information to create personalized offers and useful tips.

Another way to implement personalization is a chatbot. The best thing about chatbots and AI in the medical field is that they take the workload off healthcare professionals and let them focus on difficult cases. AI-powered solutions can talk to patients, ask them about current symptoms or medical history, give accurate pieces of advice, connect with a doctor via a video chat, and so on.

#3 Patient Engagement

Healthcare providers can use new technologies for improving patient adherence to recommended care. For example, this study by Deloitte shows that healthcare AI development involves creating a patient self-service portal to access from smartphones and tablets. This way, providers will reduce costs and allow consumers to get sufficient care and stay in touch with their doctors in the most convenient way.

Medical institutions also use custom healthcare software development services to develop IoT projects such as activity trackers, personalized health app, and other wearable devices that help patients stick to treatment recommendations. Since AI technologies can personalize treatment, it becomes easier for patients to stay engaged and interested in regular actions like pills taking or checkups.

#4 Document Management

A variety of AI applications in healthcare can streamline operational workflow for hospitals, insurance companies and other providers. According to recent studies, doctors waste up to 55% on reviewing electronic health records daily. If they used AI-powered tools such as NLP (Natural language processing), this routine could be easily automated.

One problem with building software for medical document management is having to deal with lots of data from different channels. Our team faced a similar challenge when creating a profit recovery platform for eCommerce store managers. Another problem is sensitivity of patient data. Healthcare organizations should spread cyber security best practices among employees and hire IT specialists to enable protection of managing, sharing and storing EHR.

AI uses in Healthcare are not limited to hospitals. Insurance companies can implement automation tools to evaluate claims and quickly send customers notifications when documents need to be corrected. ML-powered tools can also detect fraudulent activity and notify security specialists.

#5 Remote Monitoring

Software for remote patient monitoring became very popular during the Covid pandemic, making it one of the most interesting ideas of SaaS for a small business. Providing better patient care, detecting dangerous symptoms early and acting quick in case of emergencies – these are the primary examples of how Artificial Intelligence is used in Healthcare to provide better patient care remotely.

Remote monitoring is best performed using the combination of wearable devices in Healthcare to gather health-related information and Machine learning algorithms to analyze these and some other pieces of information. ML can also use predictive analysis to study each patient’s characteristics and assess the risk of heart disease, diabetes, and other serious conditions.

#6 Treatment Methods

How AI technology can help in the treatment of patients in hospitals? First of all, ML algorithms can help to advance the current by analyzing lots of data from researchers and offering predictive analytics to determine innovative and more effective options.

In addition to this, AI development in Healthcare includes ML-based tools that can analyze historical data on symptoms and treatments. This enables specialists to make evidence-based medical decisions.

There are many other ways of revolutionizing treatment techniques with Artificial Intelligence. One of the great examples is BCI or Brain-Computer Interfaces: they are designed to help patients who lost their ability to move or speak due to strokes, injuries, and other circumstances. One of the recent updates in BCI technology is a successful implantation of a thought-driven robotic arm.

#7 Pharmacology Research

What is the impact of Artificial Intelligence on pharmaceutical companies and drug discovery? First of all, these tools can go through vast data sets to find patterns and interactions that help drug researchers discover new chemical structures. Additionally, you can use AI algorithms to find new potential of existing medicine.

There can be many ideas for healthcare AI drug development projects, because the application of this technology allows to speed up the research time significantly. This means that pharmaceutical companies can develop new medical products faster and with better outcomes.

Summing up: Future of AI in Healthcare

These days, over 35% of companies worldwide are already using Machine learning, Computer vision, Brain-Computer Interface and other AI innovations in healthcare to improve treatment methods and make data⁠-⁠driven decisions. What is the role of AI in the future of healthcare? This cutting-edge technology is likely to grow and evolve in the near future, bringing innovative and valuable HealthTech solutions.

Differences between AI, ML and DL (Source: Fively)

All things considered, Artificial Intelligence can become an ideal assistant if companies will be able to ensure its ethical and transparent use.

How We Develop Solutions Based on AI for Healthcare

Here at Fively, we provide Artificial Intelligence development services for various industries. HealthTech is one of our main specializations.

Software engineers at our company have hand-on experience with:

Machine learning and Deep learning;
Natural language processing;
Computer vision;
Expert systems that provide diagnosis tools;
Predictive analytics, and other ways to implement Artificial Intelligence in the medical field.

Need a consultation about an existing project or a brand new idea? Talk to us.

Top 13 Cybersecurity Trends to Follow in 2026

Alexey Kalachik — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 22:41:50 +0000

The number one cybersecurity threat today will be software vulnerabilities combined with the lack of understanding of how online attacks usually work. We collected the top cybersecurity trends emerging in 2026 in industries ranging from healthcare and higher education to retail and banking.

According to a cybersecurity trends report by McKinsey, dangers doubled between 2021 and 2022, which means that the year 2026 is likely to reveal more security issues.

Source: Unsplash

In the article, we will look into the future of cybersecurity discovering some of the most interesting future cybersecurity trends connected to different business areas and technology fields.

Remote Working Cybersecurity

Cybersecurity risks are often associated with the actions of tech-savvy hackers and other cybercriminals. However, unsecured networks and indiscreet users are also very likely to open the doors to data breaches and unauthorized access. This is why optimization of digital security is one of the most important network security solutions and trends in software development now.

The sophistication and the number of digital attacks have increased dramatically since the Covid-19 pandemic when millions of people worked remotely, often leaving their devices not properly protected.

These are the main online threats your employees may encounter in home offices:

Not having access management systems, secure firewalls, password managers, and other software that your company’s office is equipped with.
Not scan their laptops and smartphones to ensure they have the latest versions of antivirus software.
Not checking their devices for spyware and malware.
Not being cautious with emails – according to recent statistics, 97% of Internet users find it hard to identify phishing links.
Leaving their devices unattended or losing them, leads to exposure of sensitive information.

The work-from-home digital security has become one of the most important trends of cybersecurity, especially in larger companies. The sophistication and the number of digital attacks have increased dramatically since the Covid-19 pandemic when millions of people worked remotely, often leaving their devices not properly protected.

Nowadays, the widely spreading work-from-home culture and actively developing IoT technology create more security issues and new sophisticated solutions for security teams.

These strategies enable companies to mitigate security risks associated with remote and hybrid working:

Providing sufficient monitoring and documentation;
Identifying vulnerabilities;
Implementing strong IT protocols;
Enabling multi-factor authentication;
Teaching employees how to share confidential data and how to avoid common threats like phishing attacks.

Raising user awareness is an effective means of data protection and a highly important example of cybersecurity trends for 2026 and the upcoming years.

Cybersecurity Trends in Healthcare: More Attacks on This Sector

Many healthcare providers have become a target of cyber attacks in recent years. Therefore, creating new ways to assess security risks in real time will become one of the main trends of cybersecurity in the healthcare industry in 2026.

Patients’ records and other sensitive data being stolen or exposed is a huge problem that requires secure technology solutions combined with employee training on digital security. The nearest future of cybersecurity in this sector is growing budgets – estimated at 9.78 billion in 2019, it is projected to reach $33.65 billion by 2027.

What are the prominent cybersecurity healthcare trends for 2026? Many hospitals and other healthcare providers will invest more in cybersecurity, including solutions like:

Access management;
Secure password management;
Ransomware protection;
Secure system integration;
Data encryption, and more.

Data breaches became the biggest threat to cyber security in the medical sector, and the development of data protection software became one of the prominent cybersecurity healthcare trends in 2026.

Ransomware attacks are among the three major threats to cybersecurity today. Despite being very common, ransomware is extremely dangerous. In 2020, a patient died due to the circumstances created by such an online attack. This tragic incident happened in Germany where ransomware caused locking out of all hospital systems.

As a result, the doctors were unable to accept a new patient to provide urgent care. The patient was taken to a neighboring hospital but it appeared to be too late and she died. This incident shows that ransomware attacks can steal not just data but human lives and we should take cyber threats with all seriousness.

Cybersecurity Trends in Financial Services: Zero Trust, AI, and more

Financial organizations face a lot of threats, such as unauthorized access, customer-sensitive data theft, cryptocurrency-related crimes, and much more. A new trend in cybersecurity for 2026 will be creating new ways to protect financial data and enable safer transactions.

There are some measures you can take to protect your systems and networks in the *financial industry*:

Multi-factor authentication;
“Zero trust” strategy;
Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithms;
Anti-fraud systems based on machine learning;
Access management, and more.

What is a “zero trust” strategy? It means that your systems must identify and authenticate all users without exceptions. Constant validation includes various methods, including multi-factor authentication that can effectively prevent unauthorized access.

AI algorithms play an increasing role in digital safety, which makes them an integral part of the modern cybersecurity industry and its latest trends. Larger companies can use AI to process huge amounts of client data while mid-sized businesses may work efficiently even if they don’t have enough online security professionals.

This is how Artificial intelligence (AI) allows us to prevent cyberattack attempts:

Automated security system development;
Promptly analyzing large amounts of data;
Automated scanning and threat detection in real-time;
Scanning for data breaches to notify you instantly;
New attack prediction;
Natural language processing;
Face detection, and more.

On the other hand, cybercriminals are also learning to take advantage of Artificial intelligence, using clever techniques to steal or change data and make their attacks automated. This is why cybersecurity professionals and hackers are constantly racing to invent the newest ways of using AI to maximize efficiency and defeat the other side.

According to the IBM report on cybersecurity spending trends, companies that use Artificial Intelligence to prevent data breaches can save 55.3% of their average online security budget. We expect both AI and Machine Learning to grow in capability and popularity in 2026 to be among the most promising cybersecurity industry trends.

Machine Learning

Machine Learning (ML) is not a new trend in cybersecurity technology – it has been effectively used for years, creating significant opportunities for threat detection. Cyberattacks happen regularly, and a quick response can save a large amount of critical information, business reputation, and lots of money.

Even though cyber threats are continuously evolving, ML allows security specialists to use their efforts more effectively. It provides the *following capabilities*:

Creating algorithms to process large data sets;
Effectively and quickly assess security risks;
Develop patterns to analyze the habits and techniques of cyber criminals;
Help prevent similar attacks;
Make processes simpler for security teams and less expensive for businesses.

Threat detection and fraud detection tools based on programming languages like Python and technologies like AI and Machine Learning.

We develop ML elements for various kinds of applications to enable various safety and *privacy functions*, such as:

Transaction analysis;
Fraud detection;
Access control;
Virtual assistants;
Safe password management;
Digital protection recommendations;
Risk assessment;
Threat prediction, and more.

Our specialists also build data analysis software that will be among the prominent trends in cybersecurity shortly. We use programming languages like Python that are ideal for the analysis of huge data sets to identify any suspicious activity. It allows businesses to prevent unauthorized access and protect valuable information by answering questions about errors, vulnerabilities, and risks.

Cybersecurity Insurance Trends: Increase in Automotive Hacking

The clients of any insurance company want to know that their claim will be swiftly and correctly processed while sensitive data like personal and payment information will not fall into the wrong hands. This is why insurance industry businesses closely watch all cybersecurity updates and use threat monitoring systems to prevent data breaches.

There are different types of insurance covering health and life, as well as homes, cars, and other types of property. The rise of automated cars means that the protection of modern systems will be among the most important cybersecurity trends in 2025.

Many vehicles today are equipped with automaton software and IoT solutions that smoothly connect drivers with all the systems, such as control, assistance, locks, airbags, etc. Advanced functions depend on technologies like Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, which means there can be vulnerabilities and threats.

Self-driving cars rely on more complex systems that can also be attacked by digital criminals who want to eavesdrop or take complete control of the vehicle.

Future cybersecurity trends in the insurance industry will include analysis and prevention of cybersecurity risks associated with automotive hacking, IoT solutions, and network protection.

Evolution of IoT

The Internet of Things (IoT) is an evolving and growing technology that includes wearables like smartwatches and fitness bracelets, medical equipment, industrial machinery, home monitoring systems, smart appliances, cars, and much more. This advanced technology is likely to stay with us for decades to come: many researchers estimated that the number of IoT-connected devices will reach 43 billion by 2025 and 64 billion by 2026.

However, there are lots of potential cyber threats related to the use of IoT devices: the more they connect and exchange information, the more opportunities cyber attackers have to catch or change this information or hijack the device.

When it comes to IoT technology, the most common cybersecurity risks include DoS attacks and gaining control of a device. Although IoT units don’t store sensitive data inside themselves, hackers still use them as gateways to other systems and networks.

This is why protecting IoT connections from unauthorized access is extremely important. The challenge is, that such devices usually don’t have capabilities to store and process larger amounts of data, which makes it hard to install antivirus software and threat monitoring applications. Software solutions that enable data protection for IoT-connected devices will be among the new things and developments in cybersecurity in 2026.

Cybersecurity Trends in Higher Education: Ransomware and Other Threats

Colleges and universities face *targeted attacks* that may include:

Ransomware attacks;
SQL injections;
Phishing attacks;
Data breaches;
User carelessness;
Legacy technology, and more.

Ransomware and phishing are the threats that have existed for decades, but they are constantly changing and evolving as hackers adapt to all cybersecurity technology changes.

Another important factor is remote work and study which became widespread in the pandemic times, creating new targets for online criminals. The growing cybersecurity industry trends in higher education will include developing better protective solutions such as IAM automation and others.

Increase in Cloud Apps: Potential Vulnerabilities

Cloud computing is highly popular as more and more businesses move to the cloud searching for ways to improve their processes. Companies need to establish, monitor, and update their security protocols to prevent all kinds of cybersecurity risks, especially the ones related to remote working with cloud software.

Since data breaches cost around $3.86 million on average, it is important to provide cloud security and network security as well as be prepared for other challenges.

These are typical *cloud threats* that organizations usually face:

Network vulnerability that can be a potential entry point for hackers;
Migration problems;
Compliance with different security regulations;
Adequate expertise of IT specialists to manage cloud development and migration, meeting current demands and challenges.

Cloud app development plays a great role in building automation systems for various business industries, making cloud security one of the promising trends of cybersecurity in 2026.

Solutions from Google or Microsoft provide full cybersecurity, but cloud applications are still a primary target for attacks. Misconfiguration of complex settings may cause lots of threats like malware or phishing attacks and issues like data breaches, user profile hijacking, unauthorized access, etc.

An increase in the development and use of cloud applications will continue creating threats to cloud security because more users also mean more insider threats. Many of these issues happen accidentally while some others may be intentional.

Regardless of the cause of insider threats, it is important to protect cloud services from *common vulnerabilities*:

Device misuse (remote working is a usual reason why it happens)
A weak password;
An unprotected network;
Unsupervised access (often happens if a company doesn’t use an access management system and role-based access).

The protection of cloud-based infrastructure is an important challenge that will be still trending in cybersecurity in 2026.

Data Protection and Compliance

In 2026 and the years to come, there will be more governmental pressures regarding privacy, sensitive data, and cybersecurity. Gartner predicts that by 2026, 65% of people around the globe will have their personal information protected by laws and regulations.

There are lots of *laws and requirements* related to digital protection, both in the US and the EU:

New cybersecurity laws in the major US regions;
Reporting regulations for important organizations;
User awareness and reporting requirements from the SEC;
GDPR compliance.

Some profound laws on data privacy are coming into force in the USA, where many states have already discussed new cybersecurity bills.

According to new requirements in the States, organizations with critically important infrastructure must report ransomware attacks and other online safety incidents from March 2022.

There are also new requirements from the SEC regarding measures and practices of digital protection that all board members should be aware of and report periodically.

GDPR, or General Data Protection Regulation, covers all data protection issues that a consumer from any country of the European Union may ever face. All companies that sell to EU citizens must use the latest cybersecurity developments to protect personal information and other sensitive data, regardless of a customer’s current location.

We are sure that enabling data privacy with the help of cutting-edge technologies will be among the top 13 cybersecurity trends in the healthcare sector, banking, insurance, education, and other industries in 2026.

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Mobile Cybersecurity

Mobile-first approach is a promising trend in current web development, because many people spend more than 60% of their daily online time using mobile devices. This also makes smartphones and tablets a new target for cybercriminals.

Remote working makes it habitual for employees to switch between various devices, use collaboration tools, or connect to public Wi-Fi networks. All these actions may possess cybersecurity risks. This is why mobile device protection will become one of the growing trends in cybersecurity in 2026.

According to mobile cybersecurity statistics, Trojans and ransomware attacks are the most common threats that users face when they open banking apps and other software that deals with personal and financial data that must never be disclosed to third parties.

These are *typical threats* to mobile data protection:

Spyware attacking encrypted messages;
Attacks focused on Android devices to find weak spots in security;
Malware attacks to steal data or spam via SMS;
DDoS attacks, etc.

5G technology is currently rolling out, which also means creating potential security risks and vulnerabilities. IT security specialists will monitor, measure, predict, and prevent those threats with the help of modern technology.

Mobile cybersecurity is about adding more and more protective layers to cover all possible spots that cybercriminals can use. The elements of mobile safeguarding may include:

Back-end security;
Cloud security;
Network security;
IoT devices security.

IT security professionals combine software and hardware solutions to protect sensitive data on mobile devices.

Improvements of Multi-Factor Authentication

MFA has been an effective safety solution for years. However, cyber attackers adopted ‘man-in-the-middle’ attacks and other ways of bypassing two-factor authentication procedures enabled with phone calls or SMS. The current security standard is using special keys or app-based authentication methods.

Vulnerabilities of multi-factor authentication create a threat to businesses like online banking, insurance, eCommerce, and more. In 2026, we will see more companies turning towards app-based MFA instead of SMS.

Social Engineering and Targeted Attacks

Financial organizations, healthcare and insurance providers, and large corporations often face targeted attacks aimed at stealing user data or getting access to corporate tools.

Social engineering includes phishing attacks that became widespread during the pandemic with the work-from-home trend. Individual employees become an easier target for hackers who gain information that allows them to infiltrate the company’s network.

Here are some examples of targeted *phishing attacks*:

Messaging apps – attackers contact employees on WhatsApp, Slack, WeChat, and other apps and trick people into downloading malicious software;
Voice phishing – criminals call business representatives and pose as someone else to get valuable data or passwords;
SIM jacking – a type of targeted attack of mobile operators convincing them to transfer a certain phone number and all connected information to another SIM card.

Social engineering becoming smarter and more technologically advanced is one of the great dangers of cyber crimes. Therefore, developing new ways to safeguard businesses from targeted attacks will be among the cybersecurity trends for 2026.

Wide Range of Cybersecurity Solutions

We have talked about the future of cybersecurity and the latest trends that may shape the industry of digital protection. One more trend for 2026 is a wide range of solutions – web, mobile, cloud, desktop, etc. Companies of different sizes implement various tools to protect sensitive data, analyze risks, optimize outdated software, and more.

These are some examples of cybersecurity solutions that we offer to companies around the world:

*Password Management Extensions.* Secure password managers are built into your favorite browser to ensure safe and convenient access to websites and applications from any computer, laptop, tablet, or smartphone.

*Fraud Detection Software.* Applications for fraud detection use data analysis techniques, Machine Learning, and an AI-based approach to validate safe operations and detect suspicious ones.

*Identity Verification Services*. Software for identity verification allows businesses to quickly check if the personal information of their customers is true. Apart from fraud prevention, this helps companies to stay compliant with KYC, AML, and other regulations.

*Legacy Software Optimization.* Renovation of outdated software is crucial in terms of safety because it allows cybersecurity specialists to strengthen potential weaknesses that may otherwise cause data breaches and open the doors for criminals.

*Cloud Development and* *Cloud Migration*. Transfering your databases and software to a safe cloud environment is a new step toward business efficiency and one of the promising cybersecurity industry trends for the near future.

*Workflow Automation*. Optimizing the flow of information and everyday activities allows a business to monitor the progress in real-time and notice suspicious actions as soon as they occur.

*Secure Transactions (API Integration).* Payment gateways allow a business to process transactions without risk. We can integrate all kinds of payment solutions according to your requirements.

Do you have any questions about the solutions we provide or some of the cybersecurity technology updates? Don’t hesitate to contact us and discuss your project with experienced cybersecurity professionals.

Top 10 Web Development Companies in Pasadena

Alexey Kalachik — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 22:26:12 +0000

In the vibrant city of Pasadena, where innovation thrives amidst its historic avenues, businesses are increasingly realizing the critical role a strong online presence plays in their success. Whether it's a startup or a seasoned enterprise, the need for a reliable and creative web development partner in Pasadena is more pressing than ever.

To guide you on this pivotal journey, we've scoured the city's tech landscape to bring you the cream of the crop. So, without further ado, let's explore the top website development companies for Pasadena, each uniquely equipped to elevate your company’s digital footprint and drive your business forward.

Fively

Employee number: 50-249
Average hourly rate: $50 - $99
Min. project size: $25,000+
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Fively stands out as a beacon of ingenuity and technical excellence. Since its inception in 2018, Fively has rapidly ascended various software ranks to become a powerhouse in bespoke web development, revered for its ingenious solutions and cutting-edge technology.

At the heart of Fively's success is a profound mastery of an array of web development technologies, including Python, React, Ruby on Rails, and a deep dive into the transformative potential of AI & ML. This broad technical arsenal enables Fively to craft custom-tailored software solutions that seamlessly align with the unique needs of small and medium enterprises.

The company's prowess extends to crafting intricate supply chain and rental management services, as well as delivering specialized solutions for the Fintech, Real Estate, Insurance, Healthcare, and eLearning sectors. Every Fively project is approached with a blend of technical creativity, strategy, and domain expertise, ensuring outcomes that are not just functional, but also aesthetically appealing and intuitively navigable, exceeding client expectations.

My Company Site

Employee number: 2-9
Average hourly rate: $50 - $99
Min. project size: $5,000+
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Launched in 2008, My Company Site has emerged as a beacon for local businesses in Los Angeles seeking affordable yet impactful web solutions. They specialize in crafting websites that not only rank on Google, Yahoo, and Bing but also dazzle on mobile searches. With a clientele ranging from contractors and artists to restaurants and small enterprises, My Company Site is dedicated to delivering clean, informative, and effective websites designed to yield tangible results.

Whether it's a first-time web presence or revamping an outdated one, they provide user-centric designs filled with relevant content, intuitive links, and engaging visuals. They also extend their expertise to local directory submissions, press releases, industry-specific content creation, graphic design, and site localization.

The Web Corner

Employee number: 2-9
Average hourly rate: $100 - $149
Min. project size: $5,000+
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Established in 2004, The Web Corner stands at the forefront of web design, BI, and Big Data Consulting. They are the artisans of the internet world, crafting bespoke online experiences that not only resonate with customer's ethos but also give a competitive edge in the digital arena.

With a client portfolio diversified across business services, consumer products, and advertising and marketing, The Web Corner dedicates a significant portion of its expertise to these sectors, understanding the unique digital challenges and opportunities they present. They are committed to creating captivating website designs, insightful business intelligence, or strategic big data solutions.

PX Media

Employee number: 10-49
Average hourly rate: $50 - $99
Min. project size: $1,000+
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Since its inception in 2001, PX Media has emerged as a beacon of excellence in digital solutions, web design, and SEO. Their philosophy is simple yet impactful: Deliver exponential results, value, and success.

Boasting two decades of industry expertise, PX Media has cultivated a diverse team of web designers, programmers, technical mavens, graphic artists, and photographers. Altogether they maintain open lines of communication with customers, ensuring they're always available for their clients’ needs.

Art+Logic

Employee number: 50-249
Average hourly rate: $150 - $199
Min. project size: $1,0000+
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Founded in 1991, Art+Logic has established itself as the go-to firm for tackling the most complex and unconventional software development challenges. With a deep understanding of the software development lifecycle, from nascent concept to mature product, Art+Logic stands as a pillar of reliability, particularly when projects encounter unexpected technical snags.

Their process is centered around the transformation of client ideas into realities that surpass original expectations. With a technology focus on Linux, Amazon, Azure, and industries like business services, arts, entertainment, and music, Art+Logic thrives in fields where others see impracticality. By merging their clients' industry insights with their software expertise, they consistently deliver outstanding software solutions that not only meet business needs but also adhere to stringent regulations and standards.

Montana Banana

Employee number: 50-249
Average hourly rate: $150 - $199
Min. project size: $1,0000+
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Montana Banana has evolved into a prominent full-service web and mobile development company since its inception in 1996. With a keen eye for design and an expert hand in backend development, Montana Banana specializes in crafting software solutions with exceptional UI/UX, digital transformation, and enhancing online business performance.

At the heart of Montana Banana's technical repertoire are PHP and LAMP-based tech stacks, with a particular affinity for Magento, WordPress, and Laravel (OctoberCMS). This technical versatility enables them to cater to a diverse array of client needs from industries that span retail, eCommerce, arts, entertainment, education, and gaming.

Olive+Spark

Employee number: 2-9
Average hourly rate: $10 - $149
Min. project size: Undisclosed
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Olive+Spark is a web design powerhouse founded in 2012, committed to delivering comprehensive solutions that transcend traditional boundaries. Their suite of services ranges from branding and marketing strategies to print and web design, development, and social media management, and beyond.

Their approach is hands-on and collaborative, recognizing that the best outcomes arise from a synergy of ideas. From sculpting compelling brand narratives to engineering dynamic web presences, the Olive+Spark team is devoted to realizing clients’ vision in its most compelling form, focusing on corporate identity and brand messaging to spark customer brands’ potential.

Ice House

Employee number: 50-249
Average hourly rate: $50 - $99
Min. project size: $1,000+
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Distinguished as one of the 25 Android Certified Agencies worldwide, Ice House stands at the forefront of software innovation, providing comprehensive technical consulting, product design, project management, and engineering implementation services on a global scale.

Their clientele includes industry titans like Paramount Pictures and rising stars such as Player.me. Starting in 2012, they thrive in the diverse verticals of eCommerce, finance, transportation, entertainment, and social, bringing an unparalleled level of expertise and passion to every challenge. Ice House's core services include custom software development, eCommerce solutions, enterprise app modernization, and mobile app development, all designed to elevate clients’ businesses to new heights of digital excellence.

Starke Marketing

Employee number: 10-49
Average hourly rate: $150 - $199
Min. project size: $5,000+
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In 2015, Starke Marketing emerged as a visionary force, redefining the essence of strategic marketing campaigns. Being a full-service marketing department, they are wholly dedicated to customer brands’ growth.

Starke Marketing thrives across diverse industries, from creating seamless experiences in eCommerce to navigating the nuanced realms of legal and financial services. Their forte lies in crafting visually compelling web designs that convert leads, their branding and digital strategies are meticulously crafted to fortify clients’ unique market positions.

Tomorrow Web Design

Employee number: 2-9
Average hourly rate: $50 - $99
Min. project size: $5,000+
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Tomorrow Web Design, founded in 2019, is a web design company where passion meets precision in the digital realm. Here, good design transcends aesthetics; it's about creating experiences that are not just visually appealing but also supremely functional.

Rooted in the heart of Los Angeles, they share the pulse of the city with their clients, understanding the unique challenges and opportunities that local businesses encounter in SEO optimization, digital marketing, web development, and design.

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Building a Custom Medical Billing Platform - Challenges and Costs

Alexey Kalachik — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 22:23:26 +0000

Healthcare billing was done on paper for years. However, this practice drove high overhead and the general rise of the healthcare services costs, which made it difficult for healthcare institutions to balance between high-quality services and affordability for more patients. The advent of software for medical billing has changed everything.

The technology has helped to automate most paperwork, which resulted in reduced administrative and human errors, time savings, and reduction of the overhead costs. The COVID-19 pandemic and the growth of telemedicine have boosted the digitalization in healthcare even more. That’s why hospitals, physician offices, and private insurers are interested in having high-quality solutions that would meet their needs.

According to a Data Breach market research, the medical billing software market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 5.1% from 2020 to 2027. In this connection, we will consider the key aspects of medical billing software systems so that you know what to look out for.

Concept and Key Features

The main idea of medical billing software is to help medical providers to submit claims to insurance companies and get compensation for the services provided to patients. A standard billing process consists of patient registration, coding of diagnoses and procedures, claim generation and submission, and payment collection.

Such solutions usually include the following features:

Patient profiles;
Claim submission and management;
Medical coding and report management;
Payment tracking;
Patient verification;
Data encryption and security;
Templates of bills;
Auto-backups

On-premise solutions run in your facility, while cloud or web-based medical billing software runs on a remote server. Custom software development allows you to create a solution that meets your requirements and business goals.

Medical Billing Challenges

If healthcare providers are unable to cope with the flow of claims and bills, they jeopardize the revenue stability. Focusing on the main challenges and obstacles can help to streamline the billing process and mitigate the risk of dealing with billing errors and clients’ complaints.

Accuracy. A tiny inaccuracy in patient profile and history can result in a significant error and a further claim denial. Such cases are not uncommon with manual performance and can be reduced to zero with the help of software.

Patient Eligibility Verification. Healthcare workers verify patients’ eligibility and benefits to make sure they will receive payment for the provided services. An automated solution makes the process much easier and helps to avoid the situations when a provided service isn’t in the insurance plan and can not be billed.

Payment Accessibility. Medical providers may lack the options to receive payments, which results in a decrease in on-time payments. By offering multiple ways to pay for the services you increase their accessibility.

Quality Support. Developing medical billing software is only a part of the journey. Operational problems happen and you should have a trusted ally to deal with them. The right support team will help you to optimize your solution and to scale it up.

Platform for Insurance Companies and Dental Clinics - Fively Experience

Our company has been working on a platform that could automate insurance billing for dental clinics. The main goal of our engineers was to create a technical foundation for the project and provide assistance at the initial development stage.

3 frontend and 2 backend Fively developers took part in the project and used the technologies including React, Python, and Node.js. The Fively team implemented both external and internal tools and the backend for those.

The collaboration is still ongoing but we can already see the first results and our customer’s satisfaction with the provided services. You can find more details and the customer’s feedback on our Clutch profile.

How Much Does It Cost?

Medical billing software costs depend on a technical partner that you choose to work with. Freelancers will offer you lower prices than software development agencies. However, such kind of work implies a deep understanding of the niche, a considerable amount of work, and a capability to provide further technical support of a platform.

Depending on your demands, project terms, and a desired level of control, hourly rates for building a web-based solution may vary from $20 to $250. You may choose from outsourcing development teams in Europe, the USA, or Asia, and an overall project budget can be $10,000-50,000.

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Summary

Developing an accounting software for medical practice implies a clear understanding of a project’s needs, solid technical background, and further support of insurance claim processing.

Fively has all the essential resources for such complex work and can become your big strategic help. Let’s talk and make something great on the health insurance market.

How Much Does an eCommerce Website Cost in 2026?

Alexey Kalachik — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 14:53:58 +0000

Every other startuper keeps bragging that they built a website for their eCommerce stores and their sales skyrocketed. For this reason or any other, you’ve decided to build your own, but, money matters first, and we hear your question: «How much does eCommerce website cost?». We’re not the pompous business owners, whose bombast never leads to a revelation of the real cost of an eCommerce website they've developed. Let them keep their secrets.

Instead, we want you to join this team of successful guys, become a legitimate website owner, and *succeed in eCommerce*. The first step towards it is to calculate your budget. Remember the proverb: "It takes all sorts to make a world"? Well, essentially, it’s the same for websites. He that can dare to say: «Man, eCommerce website costs $5000; been there, done that,» knows nothing.

The Ecommerce Cost Structure, or What Does the Cost of Ecommerce Website Consist Of?

The cost of an eCommerce website depends on various factors. In order to calculate website cost that will suit your business needs, think through things carefully before you knuckle down to this venture.

First, you need to understand your eCommerce cost structure or advise an experienced software agency that can help you calculate it. Basically, it’s the various costs and expenses that a business should be ready to foot. Breaking down all the expenses and eCommerce fees is a crucial step that helps to make sound financial decisions, define the areas that need more investment and hence decrease the overall cost of eCommerce website.

Generally, a cost structure consists of many components, such as operating costs, shipping, payment gateways, and marketing, and it can shape the understanding of the average cost for eCommerce website.

The range of the expenses varies tremendously, so an eCommerce website design costs, let’s say, $300 for a small start-up and $3,000 for a mature medical company. And such a wide range is not only about eCommerce website design price, but all the other ecommerce website prices on the stages of building and operation.

So, how much does eCommerce website cost? To take a step closer to answering this question, you should ask yourself a lot of other questions, and the major ones you will find below.

Who Do You Want to Work With?

This one appears to be one of the simplest. Basically, you have two options: hiring a software agency that will help you with building and maintaining a website, or doing it all by yourself.

Some business owners, striving to reduce the cost of ecommerce website development, rely on their coding knowledge and ready templates of eCommerce platforms, while other critical areas are overlooked. Promise us not to forget about marketing strategies, SEO optimization, UX/UI design, and content writing, as you probably expect that your customers will easily find your website online and will enjoy using it. If it’s not your goal, then well... ignore the advice.

In the end, building is only the tip of an iceberg, and even if you can do it on your own, it takes two to tango, so you’ll certainly need one or two teammates to help you with the rest of the work.

A software agency will probably already have their own engineers of all kinds, SEO-specialists, and marketers on board, but don’t hesitate to ask if the SEO-package is included in the cost, because it’s better to be. Some agencies work with only one type of eCommerce platform or prefer working with certain types of *eCommerce frameworks*. You’d better check beforehand what kind of products they specialize in and if they can add all the customized features you need.

What Kind of Ecommerce Website Do You Want?

There are four main types of eCommerce websites: single-brand, online retailers, marketplaces, and affiliate websites. Each of them demands different features, and the more features you want to implement on your website, the more complex it will be, and the more complex it will be, the more you will need to pay.

*Single-brand website*s, as is clear from the name, sell the products or services of one single brand. Just like Nike or Samsung, ecommerce stores sell only their own products.

Nike online shop is a single-brand website (Source: Nike website)

Another type is online *retailers* who resell products they have previously purchased from other brands. This means that if you’re planning to buy large quantities of products from different brands and then resell them at a higher price, an online retailer is what you will need.

Academy Sports and Outdoors has a retailer's ecommerce website (Source: Academy website)

A *marketplace* is something different, as it’s a platform for multiple vendors to sell their products. Marketplaces can be used not only by those who are only tipping their toes into the waters of online sales, but also by business owners who already have their own online or brick-and-mortar stores. That’s why you can go for custom marketplace development, as it can also become a lucrative business if approached correctly.

Amazon is a great marketplace example (Source: Amazon)

What Platform Do You Want to Use?

Recall your favorite websites. Which one did you like the most? There are many platforms that help software engineers and business owners to build a website with zero coding knowledge and a modicum of effort. It may turn out that the website you use the most was made on one and the same platform. All of them offer ready solutions as well as the opportunity to create out-of-the-box ones.

There are many eCommerce platforms, but the most popular ones are *BigCommerce, *Magento, and **Shopify****. All of them have trial periods, so try them before opting for one.

Remember Ford and Pepe Jeans websites? They’re built with Magento. It’s suitable for basically every type of eCommerce businesses, but largely used for medium and large-sized ones. Magento incessantly releases updates, fixes bugs, and has a lot of features that are aimed at streamlining the process of website building. To use Magento, you definitely need to hire a software agency or a whole team of software engineers as the learning curve of the platform is quite steep.

(Source: Pepe Jeans website)

This platform was recently rebranded to Adobe Commerce, and it offers two solutions: Adobe Commerce Cloud and Magento Open Source. The last one is actually free and open source, while to use Adobe Commerce Cloud you need to pay from $22,000 to $125,000, a percentage of your annual revenue.

There are many features that a paid version can provide for and the open source one can not, including 24/7 support from real specialists, advanced targeting, much better security, and a lot more. For example, a complete B2B suite that allows different companies to control prices and track orders on your website. Or change and add content to the page via a simple drag-and-drop function. Still, with good coding knowledge, you or your engineers can implement a lot of unique features with the free edition as well.

Another popular platform for eCommerce businesses is, of course, the praised Shopify, and let us say straight ahead that it’s cheaper. Shopify offers three pricing plans: Basic, Shopify, and Advanced Shopify. All of them allow you to add an unlimited number of digital and physical products; contact a support center at any time; recover abandoned carts; and use gift cards.

Shopify subscription plans (Source: Shopify website)

As for the difference, the Basic one costs $24 a month, which allows you to create two accounts for staff members, but the prices can not be adapted to a user’s country's currency. It also charges 2% for all online transactions that are not made by Shopify Payments - their own payment system. Clever move, Shopify, clever move...

Shopify and Advanced Shopify have monthly subscription fees of $69 and $299, respectively. The transaction fees here decrease by around $0.3. With the Shopify, you may use a much broader range of features, such as professional reports of users’ behavior in your online shop. This package allows you to adopt prices for a specific region, which makes international selling more effective.

Finally, the Advanced plan encompasses all the features above and also allows you to set different prices for different regions, while a website’s analytics is even more advanced here.

You may consider some of the cheapest eCommerce platforms, such as *WooCommerce* and Square Online. Using such website builders as Wix and Squarespace can also reduce the eCommerce website pricing. They may be less advanced and widespread, as they’re not geared solely for eCommerce like the three big bosses, but it’s a great solution for small business or startups.

For instance, Wix has the feature of reminding a user about an abandoned cart and can be integrated with Amazon and eBay. And, unlike Shopify, it doesn’t charge any additional fees for credit card transactions. They have attractive website templates and eCommerce features, so it can also be a good start on the path to a bigger online store.

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Do You Want to Enhance a Website and Reduce Ecommerce Fees in the Long Run?

Remember we mentioned content creation and SEO-optimization? Some software development companies can build a *customized CMS* software for your eCommerce website. The abbreviation stands for Custom Content Management System, and the customized means that it will be developed solely for your business.

It is one of the *bespoke software development solutions,* that is created from nothing and makes it possible to edit and add content to the pages, that is indirectly connected with sales. To put it simply, while eCommerce platforms are mainly about product catalogs, payment systems, and data consolidation, CMS is about blogs, texts, images, and videos.

Still, such platforms as Magento have a native CMS included in the package, but it won’t be as advanced as if you complemented the eCommerce platform with a customized CMS. So if you’re not a backend genius and know nothing about coding, CMS can help you modify page content intuitively, usually via a simple drag-and-drop page builder function. And the CMS built for your business personally will provide for *workflow automation*, consequently reducing the expenses.

Let’s say, you have a vegan shop with organic products. Include a blog with recipes on your website and a forum where people can exchange their own recipes and experiences of vegan life. With the attractive and unique UI/UX provided by the CMS, the forum dwellers will become your customers before you can say Jack Robinson.

This online store solution will cost you from $80,000 to $120,000. Ultimately, the eCommerce website price will be decreased with CMS, as it literally aims at reducing the amount of work, hence the expenses on additional workers.

Another way to make your online shop special is to build it as a web portal. For instance, check *Stacks*, but we warn you that it can become your core memory. Done? We bet you loved it. Well, it’s an enhanced version of a static website that provides dynamic and personalized content to the target audience, combining information from different sources and integrated with other software (CMSs and search engines).

(Source: Stacks website)

A web portal development company will typically charge $30,000 or more to build such a customized web portal. These solutions may ultimately reduce the total cost of building eCommerce website.

What Color Will Your Logo Be, or Should You Save Money on Ecommerce Website Design Costs?

In the era of people, pampered with excellent user experience and sublime designs, having a mediocre UX and UI is the highroad to failure. How should a menu button look and where should it be placed so that a user clicks it? What should the link styles be? How big and colorful a logo should be to attract and not frighten off the clients? It may seem like not a big deal, but UX/UI designers work incessantly to provide you with high retention and conversion rates.

Forrester claims that top-notch UI can increase conversion rates by 200%, while an excellent UX boosts them by 400%!

Hiring a team of real connoisseurs of design costs around $1,600 for forty hours of creating a landing page. A complex web app will cost around $12,000 for 300 hours of their work. A freelance web designer at Upwork takes from $20 to $40 per hour.

What About Hosting?

Hosting is another expenditure you need to think about. It may have a great impact on the overall cost of eCommerce website. While Shopify has its own servers all around the world, and the price for hosting is included in the package you buy, Magento is self-hosted, which means that you need to take care of it on your own. Sometimes, it can be even beneficial: you can optimize the space, depending on your needs, because you can’t always be certain about the stability of your traffic.

On average, eCommerce hosting costs from $80 to $730 per month, but it depends on the features of a website, the traffic it gets, and automation services.

Do You Choose to Save Money or Provide Security?

As you probably expect that users will entrust your online store with their credit card information, it’s necessary to provide them with security. According to the Baymard statistics, the reason for 18% of cart abandonment cases was the customer’s inability to trust a website with their credit card information.

Remember the padlock icon near the address bar? It indicates that a website has a valid Secure Sockets Layer, or SSL certificate. This technology provides a safe transaction between a customer and your website via creating encrypted links. Thus, no passwords or sensitive information of your customers' will be leaked.

It will be the least expensive item on your eCommerce website price list—around $69 per year—but it will help to build trust in your relationships with users. Cheapest is dearest, so make sure that your online store is safe.

And Yet, What Is the Average Cost for Ecommerce Website?

Well, by this time, you’ve probably started to ponder over the questions and can’t wait to search for lessons on making cost structures, right? So, asking how much does eCommerce website cost is the same as asking how many stars are in the sky.

Ecommerce startup costs may include the bare minimum and start at $50. But as you can see from this article - the final cost of setting up an eCommerce website will be known once you find answers to the questions above. Keep in mind that just as in any other type of business, throughout the whole process, many additional expenses can be incurred.

If you want to get advice from someone creative and experienced, contact our custom software development specialists. They will help you to get a more profound understanding of what your eCommerce business needs to thrive and how much it will cost.

So roll up your sleeves: maybe you will be the one who will rock the world of eCommerce, with a little assistance from Fively.

Web Sales Portal: Best Practices of Sales Enablement

Alexey Kalachik — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 14:50:09 +0000

Every eCommerce company nowadays has a web sales portal where its products, offers, and clients are displayed. But is it still effective in managing customers and analyzing their preferences? Or, probably, it’s just a mess of sales figures, leads, and opportunities? Modern sales portals are data-driven, dynamic, complex, and highly collaborative ecosystems, which can bring real value to your business and help you make the key decisions. How to distinguish where are you in this journey, and how to enhance your sales portal solution? Discover the answers to these questions right now.

What is a B2B Sales Portal?

A web sales portal is a centralized online repository where you can create, store and share your data on leads, opportunities, clients, contracts, projects, reports, etc.

Nowadays, the concept of a web sales portal has become more sophisticated. It should now also possess tools and content that can engage leads, bringing them to the bottom of your sales funnel: different pitch decks, engaging webinars, interviews, video testimonials, case studies, whitepapers, etc. Such a variety of materials and built-in tools and assets helps companies support customers at different levels of their buyer’s journey, as well as track, target, and re-target them later.

B2B Sales Portal Features

So, how to distinguish whether you have a good sales portal solution? When it comes to telling a modern web portal solution from an outdated one, start with the enumeration of the features it has or hasn’t. The more you get, the better. And if you have almost nothing from the list represented below, it’s a 100% sign that you need new sales portal software to boost your business. So, here we go:

1. Data-rich content

If customers spend hours trying to find the info on products they need, they will never come to you again. So if you want to help customers in their buying journey and increase sales, the information you store at your sales web portal should be fresh, clear, sharp, user-friendly, and highly engaging. To provide them with such high-level content on a regular basis, your sales web portal solution should have rich content management capabilities, such as:

Data storing and editing solutions: different templates for emails or case studies, pricing sheets;
Structured PDF kits: project descriptions, user guides, white papers;
Built-in tools to create sales presentations, cases, and video demos;
Valid through indication: monitoring of document creation date and alerting about their expiration

2. Robust collaboration tools

They are essential not only for effective communication and work of sales and marketing team members. What’s more important, they and vital for quick and easy creation and distribution of the stored materials with designers, PR, PM and BA specialists, finance and accounting departments, and the board of directors. Modern sales portal software should include the following collaboration tools:

Handy team workspaces: allow to co-work on documents, cases, and presentations, co-edit them and leave comments, arrange related chats and discussions, and compile follow-ups;
Data versions control: gives visibility into the recent changes, ability to restore the content to previous versions, as well as different sharing options with various rights for the content;
Video streaming option: can be very useful in arranging product training, demos, and webinars for your sales team and external partners;
Built-in interactive tools: products’ cost calculators and configurators on your sales portal software to streamline interaction with customers;
Chatbots and recorded voice messages: allow to automate the daily workflow and save your employees’ time

Source: SmallBiz.Tools

3. Smart Search

It often happens that sales and marketing teams have just a few hours to compile a competitive product proposal for a potential client who asked for their services. If they can’t easily find all the necessary materials and have no option to edit them, the mission will be failed. Smart search in modern sales portals allows you to quickly showcase your company strengths and persuade leads that you can do exactly what they want thanks to:

Structured document storage with numerous categories;
Handy filters to automatically find materials upon a certain service request, country, industry, etc.;
A user-friendly search box with personalized search feature based on previous activity;
A personal list of favorite and frequently used materials

4. Enhanced Security

To enable the due level of security and protect your customers’ data, your web sales platform should have the following tools and settings:

Restricted access to important company’s data and materials;
Different administrative roles upon materials sharing and editing;
Ability to set custom permissions to any material you need

Now when you have a list of features that your sales portal possesses, you can easily decide what’s lacking and what should be enhanced. If you discover that your web portal solution has very poor functionality and can’t effectively help your sales and marketing team in raising profits, then it’s time to build a new one.

B2B Sales Portal Development Types

When you’ve decided to build your own custom web portal solution, it’s time to decide which one to choose. There are two modern strategies for sales portals development: low-code and custom. Let’s look at their advantages in comparison:

To choose the type of web portal that fits your business line, it’s better to consult with a trusted custom software development company, which has dedicated sales portal developers, as well as vast experience in building web portal solutions in different domains.

How to Enhance a Sales Portal: Best Practices by Fively

If you don’t need to build a new solution, but want to enhance an existing one, we have collected a bunch of advice on how to do it the most productive way:

1) Decide on third-party integrations

Think of all the tools your salespeople use every day to manage leads, and include those that they’d like to try. These can be:

A custom CRM for business: provides quick access to sales materials, enhances customer experience, and boosts sales;
An email client: enables automated email notifications upon the release of important materials;
Online editing services: allows to co-work on sales materials creation via tools preferred by your team, for example, GoogleDocs;
File sharing system: a tool your team can use to share sales materials with the other departments, like Dropbox, Wetransfer, etc.

2) Make your sales portal user-friendly

Usability is one of the most important factors which makes you sales portal solution really valuable for your sales team members. If your portal navigation is cumbersome, and people spend even more time using it, if compared to manual operations, then your solution is just a waste of time and resources. High web portal usability, vice versa, boosts daily operations, improves customer experience, and increases your employees’ retention rate. Here are the two core UX practices Fively software specialists follow to make our custom sales portals highly usable:

Arrange a UX research with end users

Such research allows you to discover the main bottlenecks in the process of UX optimization and eliminate them. It’s better to conduct it in several focus groups, for example, with your salespeople, designers, and other departments. You can stumble upon such problems as misalignment between sales and marketing documentation and processes, a mess in filters, and unclear sales steps. You should discuss these issues with your various teams and choose the final variant of the layout.

Test the ready-made solution with end users

When your software vendor has already built the UX version of the solution you wanted, you should arrange a usability testing, where you either prove or not your UX hypothesis, observe the reactions of end users, and make a decision whether it’s a fitting variant. To conduct usability testing, you need to create test scenarios that emulate the most common activities of your team, for example, sorting out small business clients, finding industry-relative testimonials, or structuring them according to the geographical region. Checking these scripts one by one, you will make your solution highly usable for end users. Plus, you shouldn’t also forget about functional and regression testing of your web sales portal solution to prevent possible bugs on the user side. For this, you can use automated testing tools like DogQ, which allows for making such test scripts quickly and with no coding involved.

These are the core UX practices we follow in creating modern web sales portals like INZMO:

Source:Inzmo

3) Decide on the level of your investment and wanted ROI

When companies start their sales portal optimization, they often want to get everything done quickly and at a small price. But the reality is, that in most cases, your software vendor needs to do an even greater amount of work than in the case of new solution development. In other words, it can be time-consuming and costly, so be prepared for that. Decide on the maximum sum you can spend on your web sales portal optimization. And enlist the prior advantages you want to get, for example:

Less time and resources spent on data gathering and leads management;
Well-structured selling strategy with essential third-party integrations;
A smart search on sales materials, relevant case studies, company certifications, etc.;

Common Issues of Portal Sales Enablement

But still, whether you’ve decided to enhance your existing solution or build a brand-new one, Fively software specialists recommend you to pay special attention to the following development aspects to prevent common mistakes in sales portal enablement:

1. The number of seats for your sales team and their workflow visibility level

It’s the most common mistake sales team managers make while building their solution: they don’t take into account the maximum number of seats it can support. When a company is small, it’s okay to have 5-10 seats, but as it grows bigger, managers stumble upon the question of how to increase this number as soon as possible. And for an adorable price, of course. Thus, we strongly recommend you discuss it with your software vendor right at the initial stage of development.

The same concerns the overall visibility of your sales team members' workflow. When you’re the owner of a small company, it’s okay to check the processes manually. But when you grow into a big company, it becomes almost impossible to get visibility into the processes without dedicated automation solutions. It’s better to include such features as time tracking, automated reporting, visual statistics, and Kanban-like boards at the initial stage of the development process.

2. How many different sales channels do you have and how’re you going to track them?

What sales channels do you use in your daily sales operations? And what you can potentially use? It can be your website, social networks, third-party marketplace, email marketing, etc. What you should do is to think about them all and ask your vendor to integrate lead tracking from these sources in your future solution. With the proper CRM software development for your portal, you would be able to simply log in and get a full review of all the opportunities, orders, and inquiries across multiple channels. Plus, it will also help you to track purchasing more easily and reduce manual errors like duplicate or missing entries.

Source: Unsplash

3. Which departments may probably need your sales info?

Think about the cases when you needed to share your sales info with the other departments: what exact pieces they needed and why? How quickly and easily do they get the info? How it can be automated? When you build a new web sales portal or enhance the existing one, but your employees still need to use creativity to share the info with the other departments, it’s a huge mistake. You risk not only creating obstacles in the daily workflow of your employees, but you lose a greater amount of your opportunities due to the slow data-sharing process. It’s better to think of everything before the development is started: which departments may need info, how it should be represented, and what owner roles you want the portal to possess. Thus, your sales team won’t need to send the important info via social networks and text messages, but simply log in to the web sales portal and get a compilation of the needed data.

4. How are you going to manage your leads and what will be the steps?

If your lead management is something occasional and chaotic, then your risk of losing leads is extremely high. A sales portal can boost your productivity only if you have well-structured and discussed instructions upon leads management with clear steps. To compile one, discuss the whole sales process with the team, then consult with your software vendor, and choose the best fitting strategy with steps. With a proper leads management system, you will boost your sales department productivity and get much more chances to reach the bottom of your sales funnel.

If You Need Something Special

In this article we shared with you our experience and knowledge on what a modern sales portal is, what features it can give to your business, and how to tell a modern from an outdated one. We have also given advice on what development strategy to choose and how to avoid common mistakes in this process. Our web sales portal development specialists can analyze your business and quickly build a custom solution ideally fitting your business line:

A handy data-management sales portal with well-structured content;
All third-party tools you need are smoothly integrated into your solution;
An intuitive search box with personal recommendations based on the user prior activity;
Built-in data sharing, video streaming, and presentation tools;
100% availability of your web sales portal on different devices’ and browsers’ types;
Robust visual analytics to track leads and your sales department KPIs

How to Build Cross-Platform Mobile Apps

Alexey Kalachik — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 15:31:56 +0000

In the struggle for mobile customers, businesses aim to cover as many formats as possible. Segmentation is a good thing but sometimes you don’t have resources for making separate solutions. It doesn’t mean you have to reject one platform or another, though - make your app omnipresent. Here we’ll tell you more about that.

A cross-platform application is aimed at functioning on several platforms. You can attract more customers due to such compatibility that is a cost-effective strategy. Apart from that, cross-platform development is a reasonable choice when:

a native app would have any limitations;
business logic is constantly changing and entails app adaptations;
an app is needed in a short term

General Recommendations for App Building

There are certain standards steps for app making, regardless of the platform you’re going to use:

Define your goals and the app’s benefits to its users
Make a customer roadmap
Describe the features to add
Find a contractor
Choose a development way
Build an MVP
Launch, test, and learn
Make improvements until you get a full-fledged product
Create your app
Test, release, and learn
Upscale

Mobile cross-platform development, though, has its own peculiarities. Let’s learn more about them.

Exploring Tools

According to Statista, React Native, Flutter, Ionic, Cordova, and Xamarin are the most demanded tools among the cross-platform development companies in 2020. Looks like they cover a large scope of tasks and meet the needs for functional apps. Let’s check that.

*React Native* takes first place in the list of popular tools as the most widely-used. It’s an open-source framework that allows reusing pieces of code, maintaining a single codebase for iOS and Android, and creating a native-like UI. This makes the workflow smoother and lets users enjoy the ultimate variant of an app.

*Flutter* can also boast a single codebase but its real thing is unique widgets. Actually, everything in Flutter is a widget that allows making changes quickly and creating a solution cut out for customers’ needs.

*Ionic* is a toolkit with pre-designed UI components for web and mobile apps. It is famous for dynamic user interfaces and robust apps. If you want to cover Android and iOS and put an emphasis on a web browser, look at it.

*Cordova* involves web technologies like HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript. It has strong community support, opportunities for debugging and offline development. Giant enterprises use it to benefit from the rich experience of the products.

*Xamarin* is a part of the .NET ecosystem. It’s a highly trusted framework with native interface access. Xamarin has libraries for common patterns and streamlined Visual Studio support.

Why is it important to know about cross-platform development technologies for you as a business owner? First, we bet you want a solution built with the help of the most popular tools with a developed ecosystem and support. Second, you will acknowledge the technical part better and will be able to recognize what you pay for. Third, it will be easier for you to hire cross-platform developers.

Conquering App Stores

Since Apple and Google control more than 95 % of the app store market, you should concentrate efforts on App Store and Google Play. App marketplaces have their rules and you will have to play by them to get approval.

App Store guidelines deserve your special attention as they cover business, safety, design, performance, and legal issues. App Store is very strict when it comes to violent or pornographic content, and copyrights.

Google Play policies emphasize user trust so you must be especially careful with user data and user-generated content. Violence, drugs, pornography are also restricted.

You can also try using alternative app stores like Aptoide, GetJar, or Amazon App Store. Planning simultaneous releases on several platforms demands a carefully planned development schedule, so organize it in advance.

App store approval is one of the most stressful parts for any product owner. The process takes up to two weeks and reminds a black box system as it’s not that transparent as we would prefer it to be and the feedback is quite limited. As a result, you just face the verdict - approved or rejected. Rejection means missed business opportunities, so it’s important to learn the rules of app stores and prepare oneself mentally.

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Finding the Right Developer

Now you know more about the technical part of the process and will pay attention to the tools offered by coders. However, finding a specialist or a team can be far more challenging than you expect. We recommend you to use the following criteria:

experience and portfolio;
rates and price;
recommendations and ratings;
communication style;
your impression

We also recommend you to check our guides ‘Good Developer. How to Find and Identify’ and ‘How to Find the Right Freelancer on UpWork’ if you want to discover more about using talent marketplaces and job boards.

In case you’d like to skip this step and get down to mobile app development now, drop us a line.

Web Performance: Why You Should Care

Alexey Kalachik — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 15:27:39 +0000

Cloud infrastructure and platforms, modern programming languages and smart architecture designs - all these things are superb, but worth nothing if your website performance is slow. If you make users wait for 3 seconds to browse your page, they won't do it for the second time, but rather search for a better experience at your competitor. In our short review we sorted out the most important benchmarks of your website performance quality and collected 14 front-end optimisation techniques to make it better.

What Metrics to Benchmark

There are numerous tools to check web performance. The most simple and popular way is to run Chrome Development Tool by pressing F12 key, where you should choose the “Performance” tab and press the button “Record”. The tool will show you the overall website speed, elements that slow down performance and bulky pieces of code, while the “Networking” tab can even highlight problems with the server and hosting. If you get a speed test result that is higher than 3 seconds, then it indicates slow web performance.

But for a more sophisticated website performance test you should use special tools like Chrome User Experience Report, Lighthouse, Sematext Synthetics, Website Speed Test, etc., which indicate different web performance benchmarks. According to Google, there are three most important website performance benchmarks:

*Largest Contentful Paint*: measures the time a website takes to show the user the largest content on the screen;
*First Input Delay*: shows the time from when a user first interacts with your site;
*Cumulative Layout Shift*: quantifies the impact of layout shifts on your site.

There also some other important web performance metrics we recommend you to benchmark:

*TTFB*: time to first byte, tells you how fast your server responds with the first package;
*Page size*: the total size of all CSS, javascript, images, HTML;
*Number of requests*: total number of requests to load all the elements;
*First Contentful Paint*: the moment when your hero section is fully loaded;
*TTI*: time to interactive, that is the moment the site can respond to user input;
*Page speed and load time*: the moment when every resource is fully loaded and can respond to user input.

With the help of these benchmarks you can not only evaluate the quality and speed of your web performance, but also highlight the hidden pain points and see the page with the users’ eyes.

Reasons of Slow Performance

Before we list the ways to improve the web performance, let’s look at the factors that slow it down:

*Heavy CSS and JavaScript use* - when more pieces of code are loaded than are actually used on the page;
*Poor server/hosting plan* - sometimes the chosen hosting plan is too small for the needs of the website;
*Large image sizes and absence of browser cache* - not using pictures compression and browser caching;
*Too many widgets and plugins* - bulky designed websites cause difficulties to its proper work;
*Hotlinking resources from slow servers* - use of side resources with slow website performance.

Start web optimization with elimination or at least decreasing of the above mentioned mistakes and you will already get better performance test results.

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Frontend Tips to Fix Website Performance

Here we collected 14 web performance optimization strategies that will help to speed up your page in no time:

*Compress and minify your code files:* use Gzip and Brotli to compress heavy HTML, JS and CSS code files, plus Webpack to minify them;
*Remove unused CSS and JS:* reduce the pages size by only shipping the needed code using the coverage tool in Chrome Development Tool;
*Load JS asynchronously*: setting the async flag on the <script> tag will let the browser load the script asynchronously, parsing the page while the script is loaded;
*Reduce the number of HTTP requests:* each request need time to perform, so eliminate the unnecessary ones and optimize what’s left by compressing;
*Switch to HTTP/2:* switch your website from HTTP/1.1 to HTTP/2 protocol, which can send multiple files simultaneously, cutting the number of requests;
*Reduce the number of plugins*: leave only those that are actually needed;
*Optimize images and videos sizes:* use tools like Optimus, MozJPEG and Guetzli for pictures compressing, and HTML5 or AV1 format for video optimization;
*Use responsive image techniques and WebP:* with the help of srcset, sizes, and elements you can deliver differently scaled images based on the size and resolution of the accessing device, and simply converting the image into WebP format makes it up to 30% smaller than a JPEG one;
*Use website caching*: store a copy of the asset that a user has requested and later accesses the cached copy instead of the original one, reducing bandwidth consumption, latency, and the workload of the server;
*Use prefetch, preconnect, and prerender techniques*: tell the browser that a certain domain name will need to be resolved to an IP address before the browser actually sees resources from it. The same method is used in preconnect and prerender techniques;
*Choose a content delivery network ([CDN](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_delivery_network)):* it allows to reduce the physical distance between a user and the website’s hosting server using a version of the content in different geographical locations;
*Write mobile version of the page:* optimizing the desktop website for mobile can be a painful process which slows down performance on these devices, so try to write for mobile first or simply write a lighter mobile version of your page;
*Minimize time to first byte:* concentrate on reducing the server processing time by optimizing its hardware, logic and the way its queries databases;
*Set the right hosting plan:* shared hosting is the cheapest and slowest one, virtual private server uses multiple machines for one user, dedicated is the most expensive as you rent the entire customizable machine, and serverless is when you don’t need a server at all. Switch the hosting plan depending on your needs.

Using these FE techniques as well as eliminating the slowing down factors can greatly speed up your web performance and take user experience to the next level. We hope that you enjoyed this article, and if you want to find out more about web performance optimization strategies, feel free to contact us here.