Trinidad and Tobago is in the midst of digital transformation, both in the public and private sector. I am going to focus on the commercial private sector, and look at the challenges from a business owner/manager perspective. These may seem like common sense points, but you will be surprised how many projects end up failing due to one of these factors, not because they are not aware of these issues, but because the adverse affect is underestimated. We will go through each one and explain what to look out for and in part two we will discuss the alternatives you may have.
Lets get started, first lets set the scenario. Imagine you are small business owner, involved in a traditional retail business based around brick and mortar. You may be small with a single store and 1-2 employees, or a multistore outlet with 5-6 stores and 4-5 staff per store. You may have a POS (point of sale) system, but you have no real online presence except for Facebook or Instagram, you may have a social media marketing person or most likely you are doing the marketing yourself.
You want to build my own website.
This is where the fun/challenges start. We will use some analogies, so that you can better understand and relate to what you may expect in the process. We will use the analogy of building a house where you don’t know anything about construction.
The first step is to find a developer. You need to find a website developer, like house construction, there are many different types of skills and techniques you will need. Are you building a single story or double, do you want a pool, security, what type of foundation, are you going up 2 stories and then want to go up a third in the future. It is the same for websites, there is a lot that goes on in the background, and no developer will be an expert in all technologies, they will claim to be but they are not. They will specialise in a particular area and at best will know enough about the other areas to get by.
So how do you know what skills you need ?
You don’t ! chances are you will not even know what you want in your website. This is first issue, the requirements or technical specifications. Usually this is not done, or is vague at best, the developer will lead the businessman into a specification that he can deliver and not necessarily what is best for the situation. Based on this flawed design specification, a price and time line is negotiated, down payment made and the work starts.
In general, I would say, that the website development skillset in Trinidad and Tobago is still in its infancy, there are some very talented developers but they are rare, the main reason is that we are just starting and developers do not have a lot of experience with diverse projects, this will change in time but for now we have a limited skill set.
At different stages of the development the business man will get to test/play with the site, but as he plays and tries to use the website, he will start to playout his own business process and workflow in his head, and will start to raise issues or lack of features and functionality, this is where variations come in and the developer will say, yes we can do that, but it will cost a little more and I need to redo some code and also it will add another week or two on to the time line.
If you are lucky, the developer can actually do the functionality you want to implement, otherwise they will try to figure it out and end up creating bad code. This will most likely play out a few times, and each time the code becomes less structured, and both the developer and business owner will get tired. The business owner will start to fatigue in testing the same site, especially when they are busy running a business. They may find some bugs, the developer tries to fix them and ends up creating more bugs, some of the blame may be put on the extra features that were requested.
Many projects will fail at this stage for this reason. The developer and business owner get frustrated with each other, in their minds, they blame the other, the developer want to finish the product and get out, the business owner has spent a lot of money and is not seeing any light at the end of the tunnel. At some point the business owner may give up and cancel the project.
This scenario is very common, and neither party are to blame, this has happened for years and even happens in larger companies who have much more experience. One way to mitigate against this is to do a very thorough requirements analysis and mock UI/UX, the problem with this is that it is time consuming and will add a lot to the cost of the project.
Let’s say you get passed the first stage and you end up getting your website delivered, now you are presented with a new set of challenges. Where do you host it, domain name, DNS entries, security patches, backups, recoveries, etc… these are all operational matters, most developers may provide these services to you, as their business plan will be based on recurring support revenue after delivering the website. Sometimes this can become an issue, especially when it comes to updating the website with content. If your website is static then it will not serve much purpose, but if you have an ecommerce website then you need to upload the products.
Usually you will be given a management interface to upload the products, and you the business owner has to do this. The developer can do it, but will charge for their time and that will be expensive, so the responsibility will lie with you, and again most business owners are busy with limited time, and will not be able to keep the website updated. They may be active on social media, telephone calls, other marketplaces, emails etc… and to then fit in and find more time to manage a website may be too much, this can also be a common reason why an online strategy will fail. It is very time consuming, similar to a traditional store, you may not have physical stores, but you have other challenges that you need to overcome and that takes a lot of effort.
If you have your products in a POS system or some other software, it may be possible to integrate with the software so the online product uploading can be automatic, this will cost you but also if you have a basic small/old software it may not be an option, you may be able to export your products in a CSV format (excel sheet) and import them into your system. The common issue you may find regardless of having to do it manually, CSV or API is that you do not have the data, you don’t have high quality images or good descriptions of your products and as the purchaser doesn’t have access to the physical product, the images and description are absolutely critical, get this wrong and you will not sell anything.
Let us say make past this 3rd challenge too, and get your products online. Now you sit back and relax, the answer is no, now you need to let your purchasers and customers know you are online, you need to market. This is similar to normal marketing, but you may want to focus on online marketing because that is where your customers are. This can be expensive, especially in the initial stages when you are not generating any revenue from the site. You also need to think about SEO, otherwise you could end up spending much more for the same marketing effect then if you had employed a good SEO strategy.
These are the main areas where an online stores/ecommerce fails :
- Incorrect design specification
- Maintenance and ongoing costs
- Products/descriptions and content upload and keeping it updated
- Marketing your website
Well, do you still want to develop your own website ? What are your options ?
To answer that you need to checkout our next blog on websites vs market places.
bizibi is a full turnkey solution for an ecommerce platform purely focused to the Trinidad and Tobago market. A feature rich multivendor platform that includes delivery and payments as well as a fully powerful marketing engine that not only generates a whole portfolio of marketing material for you, but also with its integration with social media we can also deliver it to your audience.
If you would like to have an online store go to bizibi and signup here.