FAQ: All

Question 1

When is it worth moving from Allegro / brick-and-mortar to your own e-commerce?

Accepted Answer

In the omnichannel era we shouldn't talk about a transition or migration, but about adding new channels to your sales mix. Allegro is a good way to start your e-commerce journey if you already have a product and want to ship it to the market quickly. Once scale and the related commissions become significant, it's worth thinking about your own store and converting some customers (especially loyal ones) to your own platform. Allegro should still remain a branch for those who only buy through that platform — and there are quite a few such people, not least because of the increasingly popular Allegro Smart service.
Not every Allegro presence ties to business scale: bear in mind that this platform attracts specific user segments and profiles. Not every offering is suited to selling on this channel. The list includes niche products, where uniqueness of inventory and the broader product context dominate: there, price — so important on marketplaces — drops in priority.
For brick-and-mortar sales, in the era of the COVID-19 pandemic there's hardly anyone left to convince about adding an online channel. For offline businesses, e-commerce is also a great tool for cost-effective expansion into new cities or countries, and for testing demand for new products before mass production and physical distribution.

Question 2

What is a user story used for?

Accepted Answer

A user story is a method used e.g. in product design or UX design. They are short stories whose goal is to define user needs toward the product. They are written in the following format: As a (user) I want (need) so that (goal to achieve). User stories are built on personas: they reference how those personas behave, their needs, and potential concerns. With such scenarios we can map out the specific functionality our customers need: this lets us record individual site features in a way that is concise and understandable to everyone. An example user story for e-commerce could be the following sentence: As a customer I want to be able to see the shipping cost for my items at the cart level, because shipping cost determines my purchase decision in a given store. Well-written user stories will help cooperation with developers: through written stories we can verify what resources designing a feature will require from the IT team, or whether a given technology meets our business needs.

Question 3

What is VP and what does it mean in e-commerce?

Accepted Answer

VP (Value Proposition) is the definition of what a customer of a given company or brand receives and what costs they have to bear for it. In short you can describe VP with the equation:

value = benefits − costs

For e-commerce, a well-formulated value proposition helps build the image of our store or product as better than the competition and encourages the consumer to spend their money with us. In an increasingly competitive online business (when a unique edge — a USP — is harder and harder to come by), the value proposition is most often a combination of several benefits that build real value for the user.

To achieve that, remember three success factors:
Value must be delivered and recognized — that is, our product or store should genuinely respond to real consumer needs and pain points; the Value Proposition Canvas is a very helpful tool to find them,
Value must be argued and communicated — our value proposition should be clear and visible also to people who hadn't been in contact with us before, e.g. it's a good practice to expose it contextually at various stages of the user journey,
Value must be measured, tested, and improved — for the value proposition to work, its evolution must be based on real data — it may turn out that our edge is not price after all, but e.g. fast shipping and great customer service.

Question 4

How to validate your idea for an online store?

Accepted Answer

If you're not sure that your idea will be profitable and you're afraid the investment won't pay off, your main goal should be to minimize cost. There are a few ways to check whether our plans match reality:
 consider the dropshipping model before stocking up and locking money in inventory sitting in a warehouse. Although it gives you less control and a lower margin, the product investment shrinks to a minimum,
use cheap SaaS platforms or the Allegro/eBay/Amazon channel — although it requires concessions, it lets you save on big technology investments,
do solid research — find stores similar to your idea and try to estimate their sales scale — e.g. by monitoring them with tools like Allegro Tradewatch, or placing orders with the competition at the start and end of the month and inferring volume from the difference in order numbers,
study user demand by entering keywords describing your idea into Google Ads Keyword Planner, which reports the search volume of specific phrases on Google.

Question 5

Why does e-commerce need a backup?

Accepted Answer

A backup — a copy of the code — is required to keep the site running. Continuity is especially important from an e-commerce point of view: every hour of store downtime can directly stop us from generating revenue. A mundane reason like physical disk damage on the server is one of the reasons regular backups are mandatory. But making backups serves many more purposes:
 the option to create alternate environments where you can comfortably develop different features in isolation and test changes without touching the live store (although Ansible auto-installers or Docker-based solutions are much better suited for that),
 daily backup cycles let us travel back in time to any point — e.g. when a hard-to-identify problem appeared on our site, or it was discovered after enough time had passed that the consequences are hard to fix,
 running the backup service to the right standards is also today one of the GDPR (RODO) requirements.
Having a backup shouldn't lull our vigilance. Just having backups doesn't mean we're properly protected against an outage. Without periodic tests that involve recovering the service via the so-called disaster recovery procedure, it may turn out that copies sitting on backup servers are worth nothing to us.
If you want to read more on how to ensure the stability of an online store, especially during Black Friday or pre-holiday shopping, do read the article on our blog.

Question 6

What is a framework?

Accepted Answer

A framework is the skeleton for building an application — a kind of template containing repeatable, ready-to-use software components. Using a framework saves the developer time needed to write the application — by reusing ready elements, they can focus more on what is specific to the application.

Question 7

What is PWA?

Accepted Answer

For e-commerce, PWA (Progressive Web App) is a store "shell" built using technologies similar to those used for mobile apps. The difference is that the code runs in the browser — the user can use the same version of the site on desktop by entering the URL in the browser bar, and also launch it via an icon on their smartphone home screen, without having to install another app.
For that reason PWA is a good compromise if we can't afford to maintain both a store and a separate mobile app. Even though the store keeps the look and functions of an app, we don't have to publish it on Google Play or the App Store. 
Thanks to PWA we can deliver a smoother experience to the user: responsiveness ensures the layout fits any device, and caching lets the store work even out of network coverage. Importantly, it is often possible to build a PWA on top of an existing online store, including on the Magento platform.

Question 8

What is DevOps?

Accepted Answer

DevOps is a fast-growing term denoting the methodologies and area of work aimed at preserving operational continuity even with parallel development and ongoing engineering work. The methodology emphasizes close collaboration and communication between IT administrators and developers. It also points to the strong interdependence of IT development and IT operations. The lack of DevOps maturity inside an organization often produces the following scenarios:

a production bug means that — with the service unavailable — you lose dozens or even hundreds of orders,
 developers couldn't ship business-expected features on time because of a mass of small problems they had to handle along the way,
 the technology debt has reached a level that prevents updates and performance improvements without a giant investment in rebuilding the system from scratch.

Today this term is often expanded with an additional Sec component (DevSecOps), adding security standards in an increasingly digital world.
If you want your organization to live through digital transformation properly, fully use its potential, or grow intensively without fear of technology debt, you should start exploring and developing DevOps inside your company.

Question 9

What is WMS?

Accepted Answer

WMS (Warehouse Management System) is software for managing a warehouse. For small-scale e-commerce businesses ERP systems (Enterprise Resource Planning) can play that role, mostly due to the cost of running two tools. In addition, at a small scale a single system holding all relevant logistics information for the e-store will be more efficient.

However in cases such as:
 a high volume of orders varying in size and pick-pack complexity,
 a growing number of inter-warehouse transfers,
 outbound flows across multiple sales channels: B2C, B2B etc.
rolling out a WMS will simplify managing many warehouse operations.

The basic difference a WMS brings beyond other systems is direct alignment of the chosen tool with the required processes. By default, WMS systems handle basics like:
 inbound planning,
 goods reception,
 putaway to the right locations,
 top-shelf storage planning,
 goods release,
 release control,
 picking,
 packing,
 dispatch via carriers,
 shortest pick path planning,
 fast-rotation algorithm,
 stocktaking,
 pairing with handheld terminals — useful for receiving, releasing, and stocktaking by easy scanning of EAN barcodes.

What sets WMS apart from other tools capable of those default tasks is easy automation and using the warehouse for harder tasks such as:
 sorting automation,
 packing automation,
 product assembly from components,
 production line tie-in,
 efficient resource management,
 auto replenishment (analyzing and controlling stock levels and lead times).

In addition, WMS systems are by default ready to support large-scale businesses: out of the box they handle big operation volumes and large data sets. At the same time, because such systems are used by many companies, these tools have proven solutions and minimal-friction integrations with many other systems.

A well-chosen logistics system can simplify many e-commerce processes, so it pays to think carefully about what functions it should fulfil in your store.

Question 10

What are microservices?

Accepted Answer

The term microservices most often describes the approach to technology architecture when building a system or systems. Instead of building one giant system — a so-called monolith — we build a network of smaller applications that talk to each other and meet the same requirements and business goals. An example of a microservice in the e-commerce ecosystem could be a PIM (Product Information Management) system — an application managing product data.
Microservices are a response to the ever-faster pace of change in the technology race. Building smaller systems makes them easier to evolve — we can pick a single piece of the service and improve its performance without investing in the whole system's infrastructure. Beyond more flexibility in development this also lets us increase the pace of work, e.g. through dedicated development teams that can work independently.

Even if your e-commerce currently runs as a monolith, migration to microservices can be a flexible process: you can spread it over time and move the service piece by piece, focusing on specific priorities. This also reduces the risk of mistakes and destabilizing your business. Even if some setbacks appear during the migration, fixing them won't affect the stability of the entire store.

Ecommerce, Magento 2 and AI concepts explained