Clever online store creations give you a competitive edge. See what the SaaS model can do

Authored by Artur Halik Head of Sales, Shoper.

Associated with the e-commerce industry for over 8 years. He gained experience by running his own online stores, as well as implementing e-commerce systems for hundreds of clients. Currently at Dreamcommerce S.A - Head of the sales department. He is responsible for acquiring premium customers looking for comprehensive support in launching an e-store, tailored to the expectations of their business within the Shoper Premium service.

From the article you will learn:

- How to make your e-store not simply a catalog of products on the web and use the interactive potential of the Internet?
- What implementations of additional features does the SaaS model allow?
- What has worked best for selected stores on the Shoper platform?
- Why use reseller services by implementing special features for e-shops?
- What is the Shoper Reseller Program all about?

There are already more than 30,000 stores on the Polish Internet. The strategies used to break through in this crowd are at least several. If you are a beginner and running a still small business, it will be hard for you to resist the temptation to make a name for yourself through low prices. Once you become proficient in the subject, you'll start investing in website positioning and advertising campaigns, or make heavy use of social media for promotion.

Let's assume that you have already become a bigger player. Or you are starting from a privileged position and introducing a brand with a certain reputation into the e-commerce world and have tried all the above methods. You probably realize that with a lot of competition, such measures may not be enough. You should go back to the core of the business and bet on improving the shopping process. Your store needs to offer customers something more and use the interactive potential of e-commerce. Contrary to popular belief, this does not require a staff of developers to create a shopping service from scratch. SaaS (Software as a Service) is proving to be not only a good solution for a quick start with an e-shop, but also works well for advanced tasks.

- We work with the SaaS model most often. Of the engines available on the Polish market, this one works best when launching integration of a store with courier services, payment operators and a warehouse and accounting system. The SaaS model also has the advantage of being maintenance-free," says Sebastian Stolarski CEO of Netplace, a company that designs and implements Internet systems, with which we cooperate as part of the Shoper Reseller Program.

Offer more than a regular store

Proof of the possibilities of the SaaS model can be seen in recent implementations of Mamezi Studio using the capabilities of the Shoper Premium service. One of the features that can significantly increase the attractiveness of your store in the eyes of customers - regardless of the industry you operate in - is the configurator. This is an application that extends the standard offer with the ability to create a customized product. It is used in industries where customers value the ability to personalize a product: to emphasize their own style like clothing (e.g., their own inscription on a T-shirt); for practical reasons like furniture (dimensions of a bookcase adjusted to the amount of space in a room); because of budget constraints like automotive (a car with different engine parameters).

Among the recent configurators prepared by Mamezi is a tool for "coloring" your own sofa created for the Vero.pl store. The solution allows you to choose the material to cover the base, sides and cushions from a palette of colors and shows in real time the impact of these decisions on the price of the product.

Even more choices are available to those who come to "create" their bed in the Meblemagnat.pl store. The configurator in a few seconds helps to determine its dimensions, wood species and type of mattress or cover, and just as quickly you will see that the biggest impact on the price is not the frame, but the type of mattress.

- A popular myth about SaaS-based e-commerce platforms is that they provide stores with ready-made templates, but do not make it easy to introduce your own creative solutions. Shoper, on whose software we have been working for 7 years, provides many ways with which you can interfere with the appearance and mechanisms of the store, including access to CSS styles, JS code, template files, as well as access to front API, APIs, web hooks and the entire Shoper Appstore ecosystem, where you can create applications that give you even more possibilities to expand your store," says Jakub Ogórek, Project Manager of Mamezi Studio.

Call (and survive) the onslaught of customers

A similar kind of innovation in an e-store is a special promotions sub-site. It will help you take advantage of another advantage of the Internet over traditional sales channels. In addition to interactivity, we all go online because of instant access to news. So why not refresh your offer every few minutes?

An example of such an implementation is the "Gorący Czwartek" promotion page launched by Mamezi for the Outletmeblowy.pl store. As part of the special action, new products at special prices appear on the page every hour. In the case of such attractive promotional actions, the challenge is not so much to write the application itself, but to handle the increased traffic caused by the influx of new users refreshing the page regularly.

The situation when the store's traffic is increased only temporarily clearly shows the advantage of the SaaS model, over an e-shop placed on its own server. The key difference is that in the case of an in-house server, as the store grows, and therefore traffic and sales increase, the cost of a server capable of handling this traffic and sales increases. The greater the traffic, the greater the problems with loading the page, and therefore the loss to the store caused by frustrated customers leaving. A great promotion can put the entire store on hold and turn out to be a big flop.

The biggest challenge is the appearance of spikes in traffic on the store, for example, on the occasion of a promotion scheduled for a specific time or popular sales "holidays" like Black Friday. You have to cover the cost of significantly increased parameters of the server, which should handle more (e.g., thousands of times) traffic than usual, and the frustration of customers who have been waiting for the coveted promotion - they reflect the biggest hiccups, especially when it turns out that, despite strenuous efforts, it failed again.

When you take care of hosting yourself, you usually have to pay extra to serve the above-standard interest of Internet users. Shoper Premium means no such hidden costs. Our solution is the so-called scalable cloud, which can withstand traffic many times greater than that quoted on a daily basis. It will do this without additional fees, requests or calls.

We coordinated similar campaigns like the "Gorący Czwartek" store Outletmeblowy.pl for Selfieroom, Pat&Rub and ModnaKiecka.pl stores. During the special campaigns organized for them for Black Friday, orders flowed every few minutes without stopping.

SaaS - a solid base for creatives

Even if you have gained a competitive edge, remember that this is only half the battle. Many vendors are quick to list what sets them apart from the rest. The thing is to let their customers know it. And ideally, they should be able to find out about it within a dozen seconds of entering the store's website.

The advantage of Estrella drugstore is the very large number of manufacturers and brands on offer. To highlight this, Mamezi Studio created an extensive brand browser for this store, which allows shoppers to quickly find their favorite series of cosmetics. By the way, they can see that the range of products offered is really wide.

Kruger&Matz, a distributor of mobile electronics and related accessories, combines online and traditional sales channels. To emphasize this, Mamezi's designers implemented a map of the manufacturer's showrooms on the store's website. It allows you to manually locate a physical store with its product line, and after entering a postal code, it itself shows you the way to the nearest one.

On Tableo.eu, cork, chalk and dry-erase whiteboards are available to measure. This fact is stated on the homepage, but it is highlighted by a mini configurator by Mamezi, which appears after selecting one of the types of whiteboard. You can enter any length and width in it. This way we will see that indeed the company will provide boards to fit any wall.

- It is possible to design solutions on SaaS that are not worse than those created on dedicated systems. It is a model open to expansion with new functionalities, and when it comes from a good provider it is also always "fresh", i.e. easily integrating with new UX solutions, as well as compliant with the current state of the law, i.e. regulations such as RODO. Examples of our implementations also show that it is possible to make money on them," assesses Izabela Krzysztofik, Project Manager at Mamezi Studio.

Additional support

- The advantage of SaaS-based solutions is the assured maintenance and certainty of software development. When implementing open source software, it happened after a year that we had a problem with maintaining the system, because the contractor resigned from the cooperation. A SaaS software provider guarantees stability and certainty at the expense of some flexibility in modifying operations. However, thanks to the unification of operation and expectations of an e-commerce system, this disadvantage is beginning to disappear ," adds Marcin Kopczynski, advisor and e-commerce analyst of Rewizja.net.

The growth of our business as a SaaS solution provider is also influenced by our partners. By designing additional features integrated with the Shoper platform, they contribute to the development of the delivered software. Our partner program includes both smaller companies, individual freelancers and professional studios. In one place we gather people who run an interactive agency, design websites or implement online store management software. As a vendor, you'll find providers of clever solutions that you can easily implement.