Throughout the world, industries are adopting digitalization. Businesses are investing in various technologies that help them stay ahead of their competitors. Indeed, modern technologies act as an essential component for the development of all sizes of businesses. Especially, eCommerce enterprises are actively harnessing the power of technologies to remain flexible and agile. Technologies help them to modernize user experiences and deliver immersive shopping experiences to their consumers.
However, many eCommerce enterprises do not have adequate in-house experts and resources to properly utilize technology and develop tech-powered applications. This is where low-code app development platforms can help enterprises. LCAP platforms can ease the burden for many eCommerce start-ups and organizations. It helps enterprises build and maintain custom applications that respond to evolving market conditions and provide a quick path to digitization.
Factors That Hinder Digitization of the eCommerce Sector
1. Lack of Personalized Services - Customer data is the key to an eCommerce business’ growth. Many eCommerce enterprises use legacy CRM systems for recording customer data, sending welcome emails, and performing sales outreach. Ultimately, this practice does not help businesses to monitor customer patterns, market demands, and provide personalized services.
2. Evolving Customer Trends - Many eCommerce start-ups and enterprises work with limited resources and time, thereby failing to innovate their business processes. It also becomes hard for enterprises to keep up with the ever-changing consumer trends. Hence, eCommerce firms need to restructure their planning, designing, development, and sourcing practices for enabling a greater customer experience.
3. Fragmented IT Landscape - eCommerce enterprises often encounter problems related to the fragmented IT landscape. This situation arises due to the utilization of various legacy applications in place. This makes it harder for eCommerce businesses to integrate modern applications or systems into their existing infrastructure, which can incredibly affect customer experience and leads to higher costs and reduced productivity at the back-end operations level.
To overcome these hindrances, eCommerce enterprises should adopt the low-code software development approach. By using low-code platforms, eCommerce enterprises can build customized apps that automate processes, improve efficiency, and attain digitization at large.
Introduction to Low-Code Platforms
Low-code platforms facilitate a component-based application development approach that offers visual dashboards for users to drag and drop elements into required places. The low-code methodology reduces manual coding efforts to create web and mobile applications. These platforms also offer templates of coded functionalities that streamline the app development and deployment processes and shorten app delivery times.
Role of Low Code Platforms in the eCommerce Sector
Low-code development platforms can help eCommerce businesses develop & deploy custom apps 10 times quicker than traditional coding platforms. This is highly beneficial for enterprises as it reduces the dependency on highly skilled developers and allows eCommerce owners to launch real-time track-and-trace inventory management, vendor integration facilities, and other customer-centric apps with fast time to market. It has been estimated that around 65% of eCommerce entrepreneurs use low-code development platforms for developing rapid and scalable applications as per their business use cases.
Benefits of Using Low Code Platforms for eCommerce App Development
Rapid Development
The primary benefit of low-code platforms is rapid application development. Low-code platform provides eCommerce businesses a way to build innovative, fully-functional applications faster, providing them the agility to be ahead of the competitors.
Moreover, eCommerce businesses need not hire individual IT developers for creating applications. Any professional (technical or non-technical) in eCommerce businesses can create applications using low-code platforms. Users can easily create and reuse their own modules or components of generic functions to automate business processes. This lessens the pressure on IT departments and offers the eCommerce workforce the flexibility to personalize applications at both code logic and interface levels.
Data Integration
In general, eCommerce businesses handle large volumes of data coming from different technological sources. And, it is important for businesses to consolidate all that data into their eCommerce systems without producing data silos.
Low-code platforms allow eCommerce teams and workforce to integrate any new applications with present enterprise software such as Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), custom applications, and databases. Therefore, store owners or professionals can acquire insights from data across their enterprise to execute valuable marketing analyses.
Personalized User Experiences
For eCommerce businesses, personalized user experience helps improve order acquisitions, client retention, and revenue. Low-code development platforms make it easier to construct and host personalized online shops. eCommerce owners no longer need to worry about the complex integrations or customizations required and concentrate on enhancing shopping experiences instead.
By choosing the right low-code mobile application development platform, eCommerce businesses can create storefronts by easily dragging and dropping the layout from scratch or utilizing pre-built templates. Simply put, low-code platforms allow eCommerce store owners to launch better UX/UI designs, and provide a personalized and engaging experience. With a headless approach, store owners can modify the app interface without impacting the backend.
Wrapping Up
The demand for low-code platforms is increasing among small, medium, and leading eCommerce businesses. Low-code platforms play a key role in the development of innovative eCommerce solutions at lower costs. From the above benefits, it is clear that the low-code platforms will only expand in the future, unlocking opportunities for further enhancements in the eCommerce domain.
Top comments (2)
No no no no no no !
Allowing business users to build applications and integrations using low-code is like letting a chimpanzee rewire your house.
No documentation
No test plans
No source code control
No DevOps deployment cycle
No rollback functionality
Slow! Yes, really slow, by factors of several 100x if not done properly.
They assume perfect data and network resilience
Most of the challenges with software development come from imperfect requirements gathering, vague interface definitions and data integrity
Only an experienced developer will have seen enough issues to know when and where to instinctively write defensive code and non-destructive data transformation and transfer, and by the time they have done that you might as well use 'proper' code and get all the DevOps/secops goodness baked in.
As a professional developer I can and have used lo-code/no-code and I wouldn't let a business user anywhere near them. I can hold a chisel and mallet, but I can't make a dovetail joint.
very true! low code is helping ecommerce business in both domains [1] creating the website and their ecommerce store front [2] designing and developing the right internal tools that smoothen out internal operations.
One of the teams using DronaHQ has seamlessly integrated their Shopify website with Zendesk ticketing system and Stripe payment gateway to give Customer Support rep a unified interface to access data in real time.
The possibilities with low code are unlimited!