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Katalyst Technologies recently reported on the rise of e-commerce as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, but the sheer extent of the surge has surprised even us. According to Adobe and Forbes, these past few months have escalated industry growth an estimated four to six years. The $82.5 billion spent online in May marked a 77% increase over last year, with the state of Connecticut seeing a whopping 99% boost.

On the downside, however, with more e-commerce sales come more dissatisfied customers. 25% of people who have shopped online in the last three months say that they’ve had a negative experience. Clearly, there is room for improvement. A better order management system (OMS) such as Celero could be just what your organization needs.

What is an OMS?

An OMS is effectively a one-stop-shop for an e-commerce business’s functions: tracking sales and inventory, managing orders, ensuring security, and collecting data. What the customer experiences as the simple, streamlined process of placing an order is actually an intricate series of behind-the-scenes operations working step by step to flow efficiently.

A customer makes their way towards an e-commerce site, browses the selection of products, adds an item to their cart, and places the order. They can choose a payment method and shipping speed, and their order is placed. Especially with mobile ordering, all of this can be done in the span of about 30 seconds. Meanwhile, internally, the OMS is working on updating inventory and notifying users of their cart status. Furthermore, it is also processing the payment, informing the appropriate delivery company, and preparing to track information and status updates that the customer can access as they wait for their order to arrive. This process must be all be handled with encryption to protect sensitive information. That’s a lot to handle in just a couple of clicks!

Why It’s Necessary

With so many consumers turning to e-commerce now, an effective and easy and secure sales system is necessary to keep up with competitors. But it also makes things better for customers and employees by removing any unwelcome surprises from the order process. What happens if your site is not correctly integrated to manage inventory, and a customer orders a product that is out of stock? You’ve probably lost that customer for life. An OMS will not only make sure that no customer deals with the bait and switch of unassumingly ordering an out of stock item, but can also handle predictive analytics that prevents it from going out of stock in the first place.

If you have multiple warehouses, an OMS can properly balance orders based on priority and item allocation. If you have a brick and mortar location, it can indicate available physical stock. Operating without an efficient OMS will lead to unnecessary complications and stress for customers and employees alike.

How to Choose Your OMS

Depending on your organization’s needs, there are a number of things to consider when selecting an OMS. The experts at Katalyst are ready to assist you in implementing the best solution for your business.

Site integration. If you have an existing website, you will likely want to select an OMS that can complement it, rather than operate separately. Celero can be easily integrated with Shopify, Magento, Quickbooks, ShipStation, and many other leading industry products.

When you’re exploring new OMS solutions, it’s probably because you hope to grow your business. Not all systems are equipped to handle larger loads, so it’s important to select one that can accommodate your organization’s needs, now and in the future.

Customer functionality. The idea of opening an e-commerce site that allows servicing customers all over the world is exciting but also presents challenges. If your OMS is optimized to account for different currencies and languages, as well as determining the best global shipping strategies, it will make the process much smoother.

An effective OMS is the key to a strong e-commerce presence. Now is the time to scale your operations—and Katalyst can help.

Let’s assume you have an excellent idea and want to develop a robust mobile app out of it. To manage the budgetary constraints and minimize the risks initially, you rather decide to create an MVP i.e. Minimum Viable Product instead of a full-fledged app. So after thorough research, you start hiring a team of professionals like UX designers, frontend and backend developers and quality analysts for the mobile app development process.

But how about having a single solution instead of hiring the whole team?

Well, a full stack developer can be a perfect solution for this. Hiring them could be a highly time and cost-efficient decision, especially for start-ups and small or medium-sized enterprises. It can also free you from the day-to-day project management hassle.

Let’s dive into the details about full stack developers and key benefits of hiring them for building an MVP.

What is a Full Stack Developer

Simply put, a full stack developer is a Jack of all Trades and master of a few. These all-rounder developers are well-versed with most of the technologies required for developing an entire mobile app or its MVP version, from the app ideation to its deployment. They are adequately acquainted with multiple software tools and programming languages to work on the frontend, backend, database, etc. and make the app completely functional all by themselves.

A Bit about the Full Stack Development

The full stack app development consists of mainly three phases:

Front-end: It manages the look and feel or the user interface of the app. So, these developers need to be equipped with technical skills-sets like HTML, CSS, JavaScript, latest JS frameworks, etc. For frontend app development. Experience in Angular.js, Vue.js, React.js, etc. is required for JavaScript-based systems.

Back-end: This is the backend of the MVP where the developers write the business logic to power the frontend of the app. For backend app development, the developers should be well-equipped with the backend or server-side programming languages and frameworks like Python with Django, Ruby on Rails, Node.js, Java with Spring MVC, etc.

Database: Database is a significant aspect of the backend and the full stack developers are expected to be well versed with both relational (store data in table format) and non-relational (store data in JSON format) databases. Currently, there are three major database languages available- MySQL, MongoDB, and PostgreSQL, where MySQL and PostgreSQL are relational databases, and MongoDB is the non-relational one.

Potential Advantages of Hiring a Full Stack Developer

One-stop Solution

When you hire domain-specific professionals, chances are that they cannot recognize the underlying root problem in the MVP development. The issue could be outside of their expertise. However, the full stack developers can acknowledge any such issues as they have an understanding of several technologies. They can single-handedly manage the complete project.

Cost-Effectiveness

Hiring dedicated experts for several technologies can cost a fortune. Whereas hiring one or two full-stack developers for an MVP version is quite budget-friendly. This especially benefits small business owners and start-ups.

Easily Switching between Technologies

Being an all-rounder, these developers can easily switch between backend and frontend technologies and/or vice versa whenever needed. Consequently, they can recognize the potential issues and their probable solutions in advance.

Project Delivery within Shorter Timelines

The full stack developers efficiently work either individually or in teams to ensure timely delivery of projects without delegating the work to anyone. Since decision-making is limited to a few developers, its coordination becomes easier and faster. This ensures a better outcome in less time.

Easy Maintenance and Upgrading

Full stack developers usually keep abreast of the latest trends, tools, and technologies. Hence, maintaining the MVP and upgrading it is easier for them as compared to the domain-specific professionals.

Competitive Edge

As you get the MVP with the most basic features of your app at the earliest, you can launch the app in the market before all your competitors. You can thus avail better profits and also get a competitive advantage over your peers who have a similar idea but are yet to come up with an MVP or an app.

Over to You:

Mobile app development is a critical process and requires good investment too. A thoughtful decision like hiring a full stack developer for its MVP version can save a lot of time and effort and also ensure a faster-time-to market.

If you want to identify the right full stack developer for your project, you can expect the knowledge of some specific skills in them. These developers should be aware of HTTP and REST commands, Data Structure and Algorithms, Git tool, and Deployment options.

At Biz4Solutions, we have a team of professionals for developing seamless, interactive, and technically advanced web and mobile apps and their MVP versions as required. Hire experienced and skilled full stack developers who have hands-on knowledge of diverse tools and technologies for building an MVP.