The future of selling and buying belongs to those who know how to provide their users with the best shopping experience. And only those who have the most efficient, dynamic, and robust web application will survive the cut-throat business.
One of the smartest ways to stay ahead of the curve is to choose Laravel web application design and development company. It will contribute immensely to your ever-expanding business.
Below mentioned points will prove why to choose Laravel to develop an E-commerce website.
Laravel facilitates a business owner from migration to integration. By partnering with a Laravel web application design and development company, one may leverage functional web solutions. Building large scale web applications require a well documented & efficient ecosystem which Laravel’s framework provides.
Laravel web application solution enables horizontal scalability which assists developers to increase the capacity of the application.
Business demand may increase with time, particularly for eCommerce websites. More products, services, and media are going to be added to the platform in the future, therefore, the decision to increase capacity without affecting the performance is paramount for the business owners.
Scalability can be defined as the ratio of the increase in system performance to the rise in resources used. Simply put, scalability deals with the ability of an application to accommodate a sudden increase in demand. Generally, when the demand increases, the performance goes down. The challenge is to maintain the same response time for the increased number of users.
However, no one technology or architecture can fulfill all your requirements. Technology stack is required to develop and run one single application which can maintain the same level of scalability. In fact, a survey done by scalegrid.io suggested that 44.3% of businesses amalgamate two or three databases to scale their application.
By using multiple databases, a web application can handle several users simultaneously while still providing reliable performance. By using and locating databases geographically across the world, it provides the quickest access time.
If your main goal is to store media files where durability matters, it makes a lot more sense to use object storage. Object storage can be used to get a higher level of scalability and can also store/manage data volumes that are close to terabytes (TBs), petabytes (PBs).
A proven way to increase scalability is to make things asynchronous. Reading, updating, creating, and deleting resources is used in almost every application. Laravel assists in making the process easier by using resource controllers. Resource controllers can make life much easier and take advantage of some cool Laravel routing techniques.
Laravel’s comprehensive testing also enables businesses to determine scalability bottlenecks. For an eCommerce website, it is critical to know how much load their system can take before it starts losing its pace. It enables business owners to prepare for the future in a much stable way.
For an e-commerce web application, loss in performance is an alarming condition. Therefore, it becomes essential to identify gaps in the structure and conduct a periodic troubleshooting session for performance tuning.
Refactoring the web application source code, analyzing the current configuration settings, implementing new caching strategies and conducting a series of investigative procedures towards different tiers of the web app enables businesses to sustain and grow in the right direction.
Most of the business owners believe that one-size-fits-all support systems work, however, it is far from the truth. What distinguishes service leaders— Amazon in e-commerce, Chipotle in quick-service restaurants and Uber in transportation— is the level of visibility and control that they provide to their customers. Transparency and personalization is the progressive way.
Furthermore, the simplest way to meet liquid expectations is by increasing the scope, volume, and quality of customer service interactions. Autonomous Analytics & end-to-end customer experience human-centered design and ethnographic research methods, including interviews, contextual observation, and heuristic evaluations can help uncover more insights surrounding user expectations.
Besides, for building a successful e-commerce website, designing a great experience that performs is essential. Evidence-based experience design, a clear-headed approach to building a better customer experience that sits at the intersection of design and data is what differentiates the average from the best.
Businesses have an unprecedented opportunity to reshape engagement with a deluge of emerging technologies, customer data and market expectations to empower their online businesses to accelerate swiftly.
Sometimes, new businesses prefer to become “the app that does everything” by integrating with several third-party apps. If a problem occurs, it becomes difficult to manage considering the added pressure on your core service due to excessively external dependencies.
Besides, this kind of experience is too disjointed to be helpful for the users. The core idea behind third-party app integration should be its usefulness to the user. It should directly make sense in context to your web application. If the majority of the users are on Slack, it doesn’t mean that it works as an integration if you’re an eCommerce web app.
Business owners also need to understand that alliances are beneficial, they offer a tremendous added value to the users. Leveraging social proof to improve conversion rate is another recommended practice for e-commerce businesses recognizing the fact that making a purchase is a journey, not an isolated event.
For e-commerce businesses, customer retention is arguably the most important part of the funnel. If you can retain your customers, you will be able to grow without “leakage”, and you’ve got real product validation. Besides, if they don’t like your service, they wouldn’t stay.
Building an eCommerce website with Laravel’s futuristic features and web solutions enable seamless integrations with apps which users are already using. A lot of time and money can be saved by tapping into existing resources rather than building new ones from scratch.
This feature is also advantageous from a marketing point-of-view. Creating and publishing content that promotes both can be an important strategy for gaining some reciprocity. Let’s examine how Laravel’s dynamic framework answers business owners’ predicaments concerning third-party integrations:
New businesses are not always equipped with the resources needed to develop effective business tools. Lack of talent, money or infrastructure could be some of the challenges. Third-party integration comes in handy at such times. Furthermore, these valuable alliances could become long-term partners as well.
Consider Uber, for example. The company uses APIs for mapping (Google Maps), payment (Braintree), mobile SMS (Twilio) and more, to build its service while focusing on the core competency of peer-to-peer transportation.
It enables businesses to build holistic web applications without compromising on their core functionalities.
Most of the business owners are troubled by this dilemma. Questions about performance, updates, communication, and adoption arise while mitigating the risks.
For an ecommerce application, support is key. A malleable and ingenuine approach is required to bring clear value to your business. Besides, to generate maximum ROI, API-first design is recommended which scales and adapts with the valuable third-party alliances.
Web applications exist in a constant development state. Due to the continuous upgrade work, they lack input/output sanitization which may result in vulnerabilities and actions which were never intended. A stout framework could fight off some threats but no framework could claim to be 100% secure.
Web apps are under constant threat from hacktivists, cyber vandals and extortionists. Besides, not every application is equipped with the best security features. Hackers & cyber-thieves are always looking to exploit vulnerabilities in the security system to infect it with malware.
Their common targets are content management systems, database administration tools and SaaS applications. Therefore, business owners are advised to practice safeguarding measures to mitigate vulnerabilities.
E-retailers are at maximum risk. They lack enhanced network security measures with a defined security philosophy to secure them from such attacks. One of the preferred strategies is Zero-Trust Architecture model which is based on the principle of maintaining strict control access and not trusting even those who are already in the network.
Individualized, adaptive security combined with an analytics-driven forensics approach is necessitated. Especially for e-retailers, Data Exfiltration Prevention methods are recommended which enables new & old businesses to secure their networks with simple yet effective security methods.
Regular database network traffic monitoring is also an effective way to keep a check up on the overall health of the system.
Cyberattacks are not a rare occurrence anymore. It is crucial to remain vigilant throughout and identify potential vulnerabilities. Encrypting data and communication is key, along with due diligence. Validate and enforce regular patching of endpoints, servers and gateway appliances to defend your web application from unwanted attacks.
From the past few years, cyber thieves have been using much more sophisticated methods of attacks. Phishing, E-skimming, brute force attacks are some of the examples. These are much more complex to identify and resolve. Due to the increased intensity of the attacks, E-retailers and new business owners have been pushed to the brink.
Nowadays, businesses are being forced to invest in cyber liability insurances & rigorous fraud prevention methods to shield their assets from malicious attacks.
Laravel has countered this problem with its refined security and login features. Small and big businesses build an ecommerce website with Laravel due to the protection it provides to their web applications. This not only permits businesses to focus on improving their efficiency but also preserves precious time and money which could be invested for further business expansion.
For an ecommerce-based web application, securing sensitive user information is as vital as other aspects of the business model. Attacks against IT infrastructure may result in ‘leakage’ of delicate information, therefore, security experts prescribe a comprehensive backup of your website.
It is also recommended to avoid using a shared server and to deploy web application firewalls. Filtering and Validating all data, using strong credentials, set authorization and authentication for users is also a common practice.
Security is the central component in Laravel’s framework which is used to build robust ecommerce websites. Its extensive security features defend against abnormalities considering an average cost of a DDoS attack to an organization can run at $40,000 per hour.
Its automated system balances risks, controls and usability according to the business requirements. It inserts “guards” which fulfils the purpose of authenticating users for each request they make, while the “providers” facilitates to retrieve back the users from the database.
Afterwards, Laravel’s inbuilt system compares the request with the one saved in the user’s session. If the request does not match, the request is classified as invalid and no further action is executed.
In a modern web application’s architecture, no singular structure is the mother of all structures. Moreover, the infrastructure is application-specific, and as per the requirements of the business. For an e-commerce web application, features, structure, and important touch points would be different.
Today, business owners require interactive software system architectures. A scalable, transparent and portable web application is what they need for their ever-expanding businesses considering the surge in e-retailers and increase in online shopper’s base.
Business owners further demand more control over application behaviour which specifies the need for a test-driven development approach.
Things like analytics integration, base repositories, exception handlers, queue infrastructure, testing helpers, and custom validation rules, among other things, become part of the codebase. Hence, demand for an expressive, creative and elegant syntax arises. This is where Laravel’s intrinsic Model-View-Control (MVC) comes into play.
The three-tier architecture improves the development and organization of the interactions between implementation files for faster response. It structures the code in the aforementioned parameters for parallel development which makes it characteristic and more useful than PHP.
Laravel’s MVC pattern architecture gives the idea of separation of concern. It helps us to implement the separation of concern among the model, view and controller classes within the application, making it clearer and coherent.
In order to set up an optimized ecommerce website, business owners need to understand their user’s demands as well. Proper brand coverage, social media presence and overall lifestyle affinity may win Gen Z over, but it may not work for others. Therefore, user-specific & service-oriented architecture – a set of modules for integrating various functionalities – is the need of the hour.
Furthermore, for a better understanding of your user-base, multiple ways of communication are needed. A drastic improvement over traditional support paradigms is necessary. Besides, if a limited idea is not matched with sophisticated messaging options, it may lead to loss of user base – a loss in revenue.
Solution – Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) combined with Laravel’s dynamic framework to build an ecommerce website. PWAs unite different attributes of an ecommerce website into one progressive, reliable, discoverable application. Not only it enhances the page speed and lowers the bounce rates, it positively affects the rankings from an SEO point of view as well.
Not only that, but it also increases the user experience, and provides yet another channel for marketing content to visitors with push notifications. AliExpress has seen an astounding 104% increase in their conversion rates for users visiting via their progressive app.
Laravel’s framework supports multiple languages, has customizable themes and SEO ready tools which helps in designing a responsive layout for the users to browse through. Its state-of-the-art cache system enables the development process to be more vibrant. Everything needed to render a page is stored locally for optimal performance.
Business owners across the world struggle to get their web applications working in time. This is one of many problems that Laravel’s comprehensive framework solves by enabling application deployment with zero downtime. Extensive and customizable deployments to multiple servers together with application health checks making it one of the most acclaimed frameworks for e-commerce web applications. Let’s examine some real-life scenarios that Laravel efficiently takes care of before they could become an obstacle:
If a web application crashes, business owners are bound to lose money, notably in e-commerce where users visit in thousands/second. Laravel’s out-of-the-box features and pre-built components availability permits faster deployment. Also, effective integration with third-party applications enables faster testing of the platform, API deployment and prototyping.
Essentially, shorter project development duration means faster Time-to-Market (TTM) and reduced software deployment costs incurred. Business owners look for means to save time, money and labour which they can invest in the expansion of their business.
Laravel’s object-oriented library – Laracast – is every business owner’s dream. It’s an educational gateway offering one thousand screencasts which facilitate the development team to cover issues they might encounter. This feature massively increases the odds of having the software built on time and in the budget.
The Model-Controller-View (MVC) architecture of Laravel enables developers to perform various tasks simultaneously. Moreover, Laravel is a microservices-based framework that can be modified and updated independently. Regular updates perpetually mean it’s safer, saves money, time & labour in the longer run.
A web application has to go through rigorous testing in order to be stable, scalable and secure. Unit Testing is done to deduce a variety of defects in the workings of a web application.
It performs a single cohesive function & it’s easier to design, execute, record and analyze test results. Errors revealed are easy to locate and relatively easy to repair – saves precious time. Furthermore, It allows automation of the testing process, reduces difficulties of discovering inaccuracies contained in more complex pieces of the application, and enhances test coverage since attention is given to each unit.
Laravel is built with testing in mind. The framework is equipped with convenient helper methods that permit expressively testing of an application. Laravel’s testing makes a web application more agile. On top of that, refactoring of old designs becomes easier as well.
Also, the complexity of a web application increases with time, therefore, backtracking of the problems may be costly if found towards the end. Laravel’s testing saves time and money spent on the manual labour of developers as it detects issues, bugs, and missing parts of the specification early in the development cycle.
Usually, business owners undermine the importance of a sturdy web application required for a successful ecommerce website. They venture into the highly competitive market with half the arsenal needed to excel. Due to this, their stint is short. Whereas those who understand the significance of a strong, efficient, and evolving structure, choose Laravel web solution.
Laravel not only allows businesses to grow but also enables them to be futuristic in their vision. It evolves as the business grows and becomes an essential part of their success. On top of that, the immense security it provides is invaluable. Even though there are several other frameworks in the market, Laravel’s unique qualities and robust features make it the best for an e-commerce website.
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Mohammed Zeeshan is a content and branding analyst at FATbit Technologies.
Comments (1)
Janki Thakkar
eCommerce businesses really need powerful websites and I do believe that Laravel is a fine technology to build robust eCommerce solutions. However, I was wondering about the cost of the solution. Also, will API integration also cost more or it’ll be included in the cost of the solution. Similarly, I am also thinking of getting PWAs for my business but I am not sure. Can you people detail me on the difference between PWAs and regular mobile apps? Any help is more than welcome.