In this article, I want to touch on the topic of working on e-commerce platforms and what may be needed for this. In most cases, large and small businesses use some kind of ready-made platforms to promote and sell a product.
You might ask – why?
- First of all – it’s quite simple and fast.
- You can launch a site within a month or a year – it all depends on the degree of customization.
- All principles of commerce are basically the same and they are already implemented in the core of the platforms. You can make your site bright and unique by making certain adjustments.
- The platforms already have many additional applications that help scale the business and are easy to use for users and developers.
- A ready-made data security system has already been implemented.
- There is 24\7 support.
- There are unified ways to import and export data, which is very important.
- All functionality has many settings and has already been tested, random bugs are rather rare.
- Platform allows you to cover sales peaks without problems when the influx of customers to the site has increased significantly.
In general, we can summarize that ready-made commerce platforms are suitable for any business.
An exception can only be a business with a unique content, but to develop a product at this level, you need a clear understanding from the customer what exactly he wants to get in the end. And of course, you have to have a large team of experienced developers and testers.
What skills will be upgraded?
- You need a level of English from Intermediate and higher, as there will be a lot of communication with clients during the development and working process. There’s the catch here is that having several years of experience, as a result, you get a large circle of acquaintances in absolutely different parts of the world.
- You need to be interested in business: how it works, what are the needs, both in general and in particular. Firstly, because all work is directly related to clients and business, in its various manifestations. Therefore, one way or another, it will be necessary to understand the concepts of marketing and commerce as such.Secondly, in order to solve the tasks set by the business, you need to delve into the process itself, then errors will be minimized.
- Along the way, you will have to deal with the services and types of deliveries in different regions and with different payment systems, how everything works and how it works correctly.
- You will have to work mainly with ready-made code, modify it, write custom features. On the one hand, it seems to be a disadvantage, but on the other hand, if we are talking about the native code of the platform, then this is the code written by highly qualified specialists, albeit a little outdated. You can learn a lot just by understanding how it all works.
- You will hardly ever happen to work on the platform with the newest features or popular frameworks.
- Projects are completely different and change quite quickly, entering and understanding new directions and types of business and product – it definitely doesn’t get boring.
- You constantly have to work with different technologies. Both on the frontend and on the backend, you can do application, import products and work with databases, architecture, server.
Of course, this won’t work for everyone. Whoever wants to write always from scratch, does not like legacy code, or you are a total perfectionist – most likely it is better to look for something else.
In general, this is suitable for fast-thinking and flexible developers who want to work closely with different technologies and new directions.
The main advantage lies in the fact that you can grow very quickly in a variety of new directions and face various interesting tasks, gain experience, improve communication skills with customers, and implement many integrations. And then there is no longer a feeling that you are stuck in a narrow specialization, you can quickly adapt to any other direction.
As I mentioned above, the main criterion that will suffer is quality. Since the platform and its main functionality has been tested in advance and the platform itself acts as a guarantor, new features are very superficially tested and reviewed, moreover, there is often simply no time for this.
Namely, the quality of the code is already the responsibility of each individual developer.
WRITTEN BY: Illia Provolovskyi, Speroteck BigCommerce team.