As an ecommerce entrepreneur you’ve taken the bold step in starting a lucrative retail business online.
You’ve managed to get to where you’re at without much help, and things may be moving along slowly but surely for you. You’ve probably got your store up, picked a theme, and maybe even made some sales.
Or maybe you’re an already established store, bringing in thousands of dollars in revenue each week.
Either way you’re a rockstar, and I congratulate you for getting where you’re at!
But to get to your next level in growth, you’re going to need a dedicated team with WooCommerce expertise to handle the technical aspects of your store. At the very least, have someone you can regularly call and rely on for their expertise.
Here are 6 reasons why every WooCommerce store should hire an expert (in your time zone) to manage the technical aspects of your store.
1. It’ll save you money and lessen the headaches
If you’re anything like you me, you’re all about saving money. You’re not afraid of rolling up your sleeves and do the work yourself if it’ll save you a few bucks.
But there comes a point when you realize that going it alone is costing you more time and effort than you’d care to spend. Or worse, you’ve gotten yourself into a dilemma that’s beyond your expertise and you’re now scrambling to get professional help. I’m sure you’ve been there before; stuck trying to sift through developers on Upwork while your site is sitting there broken, losing money.
As with many areas of business, taking shortcuts can only hurt you in the long run. Working with shoddy developers or trying to wing it yourself may be saving you pennies now, but cost you much more in the future. Especially when you’re talking about such a critical area of your business as your website, where having even a small error on your site can cost you thousands of dollars in revenue.
On the other hand, by bringing on an expert who understands the intricacies of WooCommerce, and can troubleshoot and fix any issues fast, you can save yourself a lot of headache and money. That’s the best investment you could ever make for your ecommerce business.
2. You’ll have free time to focus on other important aspects of your business
Wouldn’t your time and effort be better spent on growing the business instead of worrying about theme tweaks and updating plugins? Think about it. How many hours a day do you spend on fixing website issues, website design changes, broken themes or even trying to track down those developers in another time zone? How much of that time would have been better spent on handling things like planning your growth and marketing initiatives?
Your time is precious and you need qualified and dependable developers on your team to help tackle your store’s technical needs so you can focus on the most important stuff.
3. In case of an emergency, you’ll have someone who’s got your back
Do you have someone available in your time zone that you can reach out to in the middle of an emergency technical issue? Do you have confidence that person can handle the majority of technical issues thrown at them without spending hours or days to resolve? If you can’t answer those confidently, you need to seriously re-evaluate your decision to use your current developer or technical support team.
Critical technical issues happen, and in the online ecosystem your dealing with an ever changing landscape of bugs, security holes and internet issues. The important thing is that you have a responsive support team that’s got your back.
4. It’ll improve your store’s security
If your site were to be comprised right now, what would you do? Who would you call?
There’s a lot more to managing the technical aspect of a website, especially an ecommerce site. Your customers depend on your site to be secure and safe. Ignoring these things can be detrimental to your business and having a dependable WooCommerce team you can call can help ease your mind.
We’ve seen plenty of store owners think of security as an afterthought. Many believe by keeping the site up to date and slapping on an SSL certificate they’re covered. While these things are very important, they’re just the tip of the iceberg. There are multiple other areas where your store could be compromised and not locking these areas down can leave your WooCommerce store incredibly vulnerable.
At Tribe, we actively follow WordPress and WooCommerce security updates to be aware of any critical bugs or holes, run weekly security scans and will proactively make adjustments to your site that will improve security.
5. You’ll never have to worry about plugin updates & conflicts
Your store is complex cocktail of scripts, plugins and 3rd party tools. It’s software running on machines. Machines require ongoing maintenance and upkeep to prevent breakdowns and technical issues. Just like your car requires regular tune ups and oil changes, your website requires updates and maintenance checks.
As a WooCommerce store, your uptime is vital to the health of your business. Any downtime could bring your sales to a halt. While it may be tempting to click that update button in your WordPress dashboard, doing so cavalierly could cause irreversible damage to your store.
The WordPress and WooCommerce ecosystem consists of thousands of 3rd party plugin and theme developers. Sometimes the code they create doesn’t play so nice together and often times we’ve seen sites completely go offline due to incompatible plugins or themes. So while clicking that update button may sound easy, there are actually some important things going on in the background that you need to be cautious about.
Having a WooCommerce expert who knows the intricacies of the many WooCommerce plugins and how they work with each other is vital. Most WooCommerce experts will do updates on a staging server and test throughly before pushing live. This way your WooCommerce expert can identify potential conflicts, troubleshoot and fix any such issue before it gets to your live site.
6. You’ll have WooCommerce and Ecommerce expertise at your fingertips
In order for you business to grow, you need a team who understands WooCommerce and preferably understands the many facets of running an ecommerce business. Someone who can handle all the technical issues that come along your way, as well as guide you in the right direction when it comes to which plugin you need or which payment provider to use.
Why bang your head and scour Google for answers when you can ask a dedicated expert with a simple email or call? When you have a support team who understands how to work with 3rd party ecommerce vendors, is familiar and can recommend the best ecommerce tools and services, you’ll save yourself a lot of time, money and headaches.
We’ve seen over and over again clients come to us frustrated because their developer threw up their hands, unable to solve a WooCommerce issue. In fact, we also maintain relationships with many WordPress agencies who hire us to manage their WooCommerce clients because it’s not their expertise.
Bottom line is this: If your serious about your online business and interested in growing a scalable, secure and profitable business, you need to have a team with the expertise on board to manage your store in a technical and consultative capacity. Otherwise you’ll continue to run the risk of losing time, wasting money, damaging your store and hurting your growth.