An E-Commerce Agency, also known as a Web E-Commerce Agency or Agence de Commerce Digital, is a company specialising in the creation, development and management of e-commerce websites. It helps companies to implement a comprehensive digital strategy for successful online sales.
An E-Commerce Agency has a number of missions:
Digital strategy and consulting : The agency analyses the company's needs and objectives and defines a tailor-made digital strategy for its e-commerce activity.
Creation and development of e-commerce sites: The agency designs and develops high-performance, ergonomic e-commerce sites tailored to market requirements.
Search engine optimisation and digital marketing : The agency implements natural referencing and digital marketing actions to improve the visibility of the website and generate qualified traffic.
Management of the marketplace : The agency can manage the company's presence on marketplaces such as Amazon, Cdiscount and Fnac.
Animation and community management : The agency runs the company's social networks and engages a community around the brand.
Customer relationship management : The agency can manage customer service for the e-commerce site and ensure high-quality order tracking.
Calling on the services of an E-Commerce Agency offers a number of advantages to businesses:
Business expertise : E-Commerce agencies have in-depth knowledge of the e-commerce market and the latest trends.
Save time and resources: The company delegates the management of its e-commerce site to professionals, allowing it to concentrate on its core business.
Best results : E-Commerce agencies generally have a better knowledge of SEO and digital marketing than the companies themselves, which can translate into better results in terms of traffic, sales and conversions.
Customised strategy : Each agency offers a personalised approach tailored to the specific needs of the client company.
If you're thinking of creating an e-commerce site or improving your online presence, it's important to choose a competent and experienced E-Commerce Agency. Don't hesitate to ask for quotes and compare the different offers before making your choice.
The best E-Commerce agencies are those that have mastered the main CMSs on the market, and can advise you on the one best suited to your digital online sales strategy.
A Digital Agency is generally confined to the single technology mastered by its developer and project manager.
But an ecommerce agency needs to be able to adapt the tool to the size of the project, depending on whether you need to interface your front office with your back office to a greater or lesser extent.
Do you have stock management software to link to the website? Do you have a CRM or ERP system to interface with? And which ones?
A good E-Commerce agency must first and foremost analyse your organisation's overall digital environment before proposing the best solution and launching project management.
Of course, all the other aspects will also need to be taken into account (visual identity, graphic charter, user experience, traffic acquisition, estimated conversion rate, customer journey, browsing experience, etc.), but the first thing to do is to find the best CMS 'for you'.
Only then will we be able to start writing the specifications for the site itself.
Wordpress is the world's leading CMS and Woocommerce its extension dedicated to ecommerce. Although the CMS was not designed for e-commerce, unlike the other 3 below, it powers more than 70 million online shops and accounts for 22% of sites using e-commerce technologies.
This Open Source CMS has the merit of being mastered by most web agencies, and makes it fairly easy to set up an online shop with its well-known Woocommerce module.
For small online shops run by craftsmen and tradesmen, this will undoubtedly be the CMS of choice because, in terms of development and maintenance costs, your digital agency will be able to produce a quality site without developing complex modules and with secure online payment systems either provided by most banks or by third parties such as Stripe.
The best e-commerce agencies trust Prestashop. It is without doubt THE benchmark CMS on the market today, including for very large sites.
Prestashop provides the code and makes you the owner and independent manager of your site. There is no specific monthly subscription fee, unlike CMS such as Shopify (see below), which charge you a monthly subscription fee, or even a percentage of the turnover you generate online.
The big advantage of Prestashop (like Magento, by the way) is that it was designed specifically to address E-Commerce issues.
As a result, the themes (or Templates) offered by Prestashop are already designed and conceived from the outset to optimise the UX associated with online sales.
In principle, the navigation proposed is already optimised so that the Internet user can move easily from browsing to buying.
Just like Prestashop, Adobe Commerce Magento is the second largest CMS operator specialising in E-Commerce.
It's clearly a direct competitor, except that fewer digital agencies master this CMS than Prestashop.
If you want to 'switch', you'll probably have a slightly more limited choice when it comes to switching from one provider to another.
Here too, Magento is currently supplying very large e-commerce sites, and has a large number of high-performance modules (banking, logistics, web marketing, etc.).
Shopify is like the Wix of e-commerce. Available to almost everyone, this CMS allows you to create your own online sales site very quickly in SAAS mode.
Some online retailers are now even making a very large turnover with Shopify.
However, as soon as you want to go ultra-customised, you are quickly constrained by the limits of SAAS mode.
Here again, given the commissions payable on the turnover generated, Shopify is aimed more at small and medium-sized e-merchants.
Whatever your business, and whatever CMS you choose to develop your online sales, you and your e-commerce agency will need to pay close attention to a number of other aspects.
Mastering the levers of acquisition, multimedia content, campaign management, product personalisation, etc. and many other aspects will have to be taken into account.
Unless you choose a CMS such as Shopify, which de facto hosts its own solution, you will need to choose your hosting provider for other CMS.
In all cases, choose a web host capable of providing security and creating regular back-up versions of your website and its content...
Depending on the size of your site and the response time you require, you will also need to choose a specific hosting method (shared hosting for small sites, dedicated hosting for very large sites so as not to compromise your site's performance).
Theoretically pre-established, the purchasing path for some templates will not be as efficient as for others.
Choose templates where the number of clicks between the product page and payment are as short as possible.
The longer your buying journey, the greater the risk of losing visitors (and therefore sales) along the way.
A shop window that is not found, no matter how beautiful, will not generate any sales. All the more so in e-commerce, where the field of possibilities is potentially global.
Plan ahead natural referencing and its paid referencing right from the design stage, is essential.
Optimising the writing of product sheets for SEO purposes is also key.
Too many of the product sheets on the main e-commerce sites are so poor...
Take a look at Amazon's... and you'll see the importance of the copywriting around the product sheet itself.
That's a big question to start with... because there are many aspects to consider. Not least logistics, language, currency, etc.
These days, brand strategy has to take into account the following aspects E-Reputation.
Specific platforms are dedicated to e-commerce and consumer product reviews (Avis Vérifiés, Trusted Shop, TrustPilot, etc.).
Turning prospects into customers... but at what cost and what ROI?
More than anywhere else, e-commerce sites have an absolute need to track sales performance vs. Google Ads or Social Ads investment.
This is especially important in e-commerce, because websites are "alive" and must constantly evolve.
Management of ranges, management of promotions, as well as incentives and online competitions.
Having hours of E-Commerce TMA is something that really needs to be taken into account from the moment the site is created.
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