Trends and Tips for starting an eCommerce

Mikołaj Brach, the business development manager of Polcode, explores the critical questions about eCommerce and provides valuable tips on how to start your own. We go over the critical questions most businesses have and how the future of this industry is taking shape.

Interview Transcription

David: Hello, everyone. And welcome to another edition of #AskTheHub, the series where we take questions from the community on Technology, Business, and Product Development and talk with experts in the fields from the Amplifyre Hub. Today, we have Mikołaj, the Business Development Manager from PolCode. And we'll talk about new strands in e-commerce. Hi, Mikołaj, how are you doing?

Mikołaj: Hi, David. Been doing great. It's great to be with you here. How are you?
David: I'm doing fine as well. And thank you for taking the time for this interview. To start off.

David: Tell me a little bit about PolCode.

Mikołaj: We are a software house. We are a team of around 150 people right now at the moment, out of which 100 or so are our developers only. And we've been doing custom software development since 2006. So I think it's good maturity.

David: I believe you are very specialized in E-commerce.

Mikołaj: Yes, Thank you for pointing that out. I think E-commerce is one of the areas of our operations that we can very easily find distinctive from what we do. I think it's a third of our operations, related to the E-commerce project.

David: Good. So let's talk a bit about e-commerce, based on your experience. In which industries do you see E-commerce growing a lot right now?

Mikołaj: Well, I think it's worth mentioning that the last year was kind of disruptive, and I think everybody would agree on that. And it kind of changed the horizon of e-commerce, which added to the picture and so when you ask me about how it looks today, I think it's worth mentioning how it came up to be looking at 2020 also. And what happens, at least from how we see it from our perspective, is that we see two trends.

The first one is that the businesses that previously did not really think about E-Commerce got into that out of necessity, just for the shared reason for survival, like restaurants and some food delivery. Right. But there's also another group of companies that we believe have made heavy investments into E-commerce. Just because of the knowledge that they will simply need to strive on the market and knowing that they need to put effort and money invested into their competitive advantage, I would see that there are other two main trends of companies that do realize that this is the time when everything is shifting more rapidly than it was estimated to shift previously in 2019 or so. And it's going super fast, and they need to hop on that train because if they won't do it at this time, they might lose it and the train will be gone.

David: When a customer comes to you and they have to make the decision. Okay. What kind of E-commerce solution do I want? Do I want to use one of the standard solutions out there, like, again to E-Commerce Shopify and customize them for me? Or do I want to do it from scratch? I really like to make an E-Commerce solution from the get-go. What do you say to customers like this? What do we advise them?

Mikołaj: Typically, I advise them to think about their and reason about their offering. So the product lines or services, if they are very unique, if they are related to a heavy degree of customization, then considering a custom build is the right way to go. In most cases, I think a majority it's more a matter of choosing the right platform and not reinventing the will if it's not necessary. So we rely on the platform in order to build something faster and more efficiently and to have a better value for money ratio.

David: Yeah and actually also like this standard solution you can customize quite a bit already. Right. I can do a lot on top of them.

Mikołaj: Exactly. Every standard, every platform basically goes through some level of customization, both on the visual layer. So there's the design as well as the whole structure. We need to adapt it to the particular environment and the product lines, words being sourced, how is being delivered, all those factors.

David: Okay. Let's talk about the future. What are the trends that you can see and what do you think and what can we expect in which direction will evolve?

Mikołaj: Well, with the shorter horizon, I would see nowadays a trend and is headless E-Commerce, which means that there is no front-end layer in the development. There is only the back end and the visual layer, which can be fully customizable. You just call the API for things that you need. This gives you super-fast and super-efficient machines, and it's very flexible and probably this is also the future because it seems to be like a standard for the IoT era. It allows you to use it with almost unlimited possibilities on wearables like smartwatches and things like that, and basically do shopping everywhere you are and at the same time allow you to collect data from the users. Yeah, I would see this as the first trend.

The other trend is more for fast, and I would see its swirls and is moving around data and data management. So I would say business intelligence tools. That being a part of every E-commerce as well as, let's say, broadly defined artificial intelligence and data modeling with machine learning, and that could be heavily applied to basically any aspects of E-commerce, starting from the personalization experience or the shopping experience through chain supply sales, basically everything data. It will be the case.

David: Yeah. There's a lot of problems with E-commerce. It's fascinating to see how it has evolved and how it will be evolving in the future. So yeah. Thanks again for your time and for this interview.

Mikołaj: My pleasure. Thank you very much, David.

David: And for the viewers out there. If you have any more questions about Polcode or when it comes to E-commerce, feel free to leave them here down in the comments, and we are happy to answer them. See you next time.