More Than Just A Fling: Why We Don’t Believe In Short Term Projects

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In the gig economy, flings are more common than long-term relationships. 

An eCommerce business owner is likely to hire a developer from Fiverr to set up a custom feature on their site. When they have another requirement, they hire another specialist from another freelance platform. And we understand why. In our initial days of starting CodeRapper, we were also open to such sporadic 10 to 15-day projects. 

But, through our growth from a one-man army to a full-fledged team and through working with eCommerce brands across the globe in different industries and at different stages of growth, we’ve learned a thing or two. One of them is our cardinal rule to choose long-term retainers over short-term requirements.

We’ll walk you through why.

TL:DR; Long-term = more involvement, sustainable growth, and better results.

Why we prefer long-term retainers over one-time projects.

Too many cooks really do spoil the broth, or in this case, your eCommerce website. Many eCommerce owners try to mitigate risk by hiring specialists as and when new requirements come up. Their prevailing logic is that if one specialist fails, they will have backup.

But there’s a big downside to this. Having multiple stakeholders creates inconsistencies, bulks up your tech backend, and makes it harder for your brand to grow.

1. It helps us streamline site performance

A long-term partnership helps us maintain and monitor your codebase, implement effective version control, and avoid potential on-site issues. Since site performance is a crucial metric in how your store converts, we’ll be able to implement new feature additions and tweaks while ensuring that your tech stack stays optimized.

2. It helps us organize your martech stack

As your audience grows, you’ll need additional tools and integrations to announce offers and personalize the customer experience for segments of visitors. 

While the Shopify App ecosystem simplifies app integrations, too many apps can bog down your site speed and infuse unwanted snippets into your codebase. A long-term engagement allows us to anticipate, implement and unify marketing functions through custom solutions, enhancing your store speed further.

3. It helps us optimize the post-click experience

Long-term retainers aren’t just for eCommerce design and development. Our in-house digital marketing team handles performance marketing (ads) and conversion rate optimization (CRO) - and time is an important variable in improving ad campaign performance.

All eCommerce conversion campaigns are long games that hinge on the post-click experience. An extended engagement helps us organize the hierarchy of content for organic, inorganic, and direct visitors with the help of landing pages, guides and other resources that enable lead generation and conversion.

A long-term engagement also helps us map important customer touch points through analytics and tracking tools. This way, your ideal customer journey, and eCommerce goals can be measured efficiently.

4. It simplifies cross-platform migration

Migrating your store is quite a task, with so many variables, issues, and optimizations to look into. Post migration, you typically need to audit your eCommerce store, from your tech and marketing stack to your UX, ensuring that every aspect of your store is functioning like a well-oiled machine. 

Such a project is best done with one team, from start to finish, and requires constant and long-term support, just in case something breaks. With a long-term partnership, we’ll have prior knowledge and understanding of your business, its needs, and any issues that your website faces. We’ll be able to ensure that your migration goes smoothly, without the customer even noticing the switch.

5. It helps us dedicate experts for better support

While working with a client over a longer period of time, we’re able to anticipate the exact requirements that they would have and dedicate specific experts as per these needs. A long-term engagement allows us to dedicate our time and resources to your goals and work with you closely to get the results we promise. 

Here’s how our engagement style benefits eCommerce partners:

• We are highly involved in your goals and processes, helping you set up a sustainable way to grow.

• Since we are already aligned with your store, we can work on ad-hoc tasks as they come up without requiring any knowledge transfer. What’s more, you don’t have to hire someone externally to add a new feature or create a campaign.

• We maintain your tech stack routinely, keep your store optimized, and make changes as required, while keeping your code base lean.

When it comes to commerce, we commit.

I hope this helped you understand why you should work with an agency long-term if you’re looking to grow your business.

If you want more clarity over whether you need an agency for your eCommerce store, you can conduct a site audit, or better yet, work with us for one. You can reach out to us at enquiry@coderapper.com to understand the gaps in your eCommerce strategy. 

Let’s talk!