Please introduce your company and give a brief about your role within the company?
Proud to be one of the leading eCommerce solution-providing company based in Atlanta, Commerce Pundit today has its branches located in four cities from three countries. Being associated with the company as a COO of the company, I have to closely analyze the operations and keep myself updated with the strategies and implementations that can eventually reap productive results for clients and the company.
What was the idea behind starting this organization?
“Rome was not built in a day, well, nor is a startup”; I believe every entrepreneur can relate to the phrase. It’s an idea, which gets accompanied by passion and investment in form of time and efforts that transforms an idea into a full-fledged setup. Having said this, the idea to start Commerce Pundit wasn’t an overnight fable. After working for over a decade with eCommerce pioneers, I realized that the industry is going through a major disruption and blend of right technology and innovative approach would help profusely to build new benchmarks.
It was then that I and my friend turned business partner Rajan Shah laid the founding stone of Commerce Pundit in the year 2009. Prior to which, the industry being at its evolving stage, our primary focus was to serve industries with innovative and custom eCommerce solutions to reach the massive audience and unveil new realms.
What are your company’s business model– an in-house team or third party vendors/ outsourcing?
When it’s about serving the clients, we solely rely on our in-house team. Commerce Pundit has over 250 experts working at its three offices located in Atlanta, Ahmedabad, and Mumbai. The team comprises of certified Magento developers, designers, and Adwords certified marketers with years of experience in serving clients from different geographical location and belonging to distinct niches. The proven knowledge and experience of working on ‘ground-zero’ to accomplish client requirements, empower the team to assist them in reaching their set targets.
Not only this, the experience of working with clients belonging to distinct industries, the team has grasped an intuitive ability to think out of the box and serve them with eCommerce solutions their business needs to flourish.
How is your business model beneficial from a value-added perspective to the clients compared to other companies' models?
It is the process flow of Commerce Pundit which makes it unique and stand ahead of its competitors. The company has designed some inbuilt tools and applications which help us build a transparent work culture with our clients. We keep them notified of real-time progress and track the progress to ensure that the work is moving as per the defined deadlines.
What industries do you generally cater to? Are your customers repetitive? If yes, what ratio of clients has been repetitive to you?
We are primarily into eCommerce services. However, we have served clients with custom digital marketing solutions as well. Jotting down precisely, we offer services like content marketing, mCommerce, marketplace solutions, CRM implementation, Magento solutions and many more.
Mention the objectives or the parameters critical in determining the time frame for developing an eCommerce store.
We have served clients from different industries and belonging to distinct niches over the last one decade. However, we firmly believe that every online retail store requires special dedication and time. While determining the time frame, we analyze certain key aspects like purpose, audience, geographical location, nature of products, shipping methodology, ERP/CRM Integrations involved, UI/UX, QA, and testing, etc. and based on these we determine the time required to develop the eCommerce portal.
How much effort in terms of time goes into developing the front end and back end of an e-commerce mobile app?
It depends on the final custom requirement of the project however; we have worked on e-commerce mobile apps ranging from 2 months to 6 months in time frame perspective.
What are the key parameters to be considered before selecting the right platform for an eCommerce store?
The key parameters include industry, purpose, target audience, location, time and cost involved etc.
Which platform do you suggest your clients, to begin with when they approach you with an idea and why?
Now, this is a subjective question. However, our experts firmly believe in using Magento 2.0. Over the years, the platform has served numerous start-ups and brands with a world-class standard eCommerce store. Also, the range of customization features makes it further tempting and irresistible, whereas about 50% of the basic e-commerce is fulfilled by Magento default framework itself.
Android or iOS, Native or Hybrid — which platform is best to use to build your app? What are your recommendations?
This largely depends on questions like development speed, the purpose, budget, features etc. While native apps are developed to serve specific devices, hybrid serves different platforms and is an amalgamation of HTML5, CSS, and Javascript. When comes to our suggestion we build it only after understanding the need of our clients. If in near future he has no plans to make his application available on other platforms and has a limited budget, we keep native apps only as they can be built faster at a lower cost.
What are the key factors that you consider before deciding on the cost of an e-commerce application?
We take many aspects of the project requirements into consideration for e.g nature of products, its description value, the total number of products to start with, shipping methods, the logic of discounts/pricing, customization in Magento, Integrations with 3rd party ERP/CRM, payment method integration & many more.
What kind of payment structure do you follow to bill your clients? Is it Pay per Feature, Fixed Cost, Pay per Milestone (could be in phases, months, versions etc.)
We do have both Fixed cost (Pay as per Milestone payment terms) as well as Monthly dedicated (Monthly resource cost advance) model payment options.
Do you take in projects which meet your basic budget requirement? If yes, what is the minimum requirement? If no, on what minimum budget you have worked for?
We are open to all sorts of budget requirement, but the minimum billing should be for at least 40 hours with a total cost of $1000
What is the price range (min and max) of the projects that you catered to in 2017?
We have worked on a project ranging from $10,000 to $100,000
Which business model do you suggest to your clients enabling them to generate revenue from mobile applications? Why?
In the E-commerce industry, we have 3 types of Business model, B2C, B2B & Omni channel. Now based on the client’s products & business nature we explore the model keeping them in confidence.
