How to Minimize Technical Debts in eCommerce?

eCommerce is a vast, dynamic, and continually evolving industry. However, managing the technicalities of an eCommerce business is not that easy.

You never know when traffic spikes and if your website goes down during that period, you may lose millions in sales in just a few hours. This is exactly what often happens even with big brands during the holiday season.

Similarly, if your eCommerce development team skips a minor error during manual testing, it can slow down your website by many folds and your conversions will go down. I am sure you will be able to relate to all these situations that increase your technical debts.

This article lists what exactly is technical debt in eCommerce and what businesses can do to reduce it. So, let’s get started.

What is Technical Debt?

In simple words, technical debt is the “cost of rework” that businesses need to pay because of making wrong decisions or steps in the development process to deliver digital solutions faster. It is basically the result of prioritizing faster delivery over code quality. 

In some cases, even if an eCommerce solution looks and works fine externally, it may lead to technical debts later on if its internal quality is not up to the mark. Even bad code can sometimes generate good-enough results. Now, the question is, is good enough really enough?

Maybe, for now, it is but later on, it might cause problems. It can be a slow killer of your digital solution that one day may lead to the business going expensive eCommerce Replatforming, loss of confidential data, or any other thing. 

Thus, eCommerce businesses should always focus on developing quality solutions along with feature-rich online stores that keep the technical debts to a minimum. Let’s see how that is possible.

How to Develop eCommerce Solutions to Avoid Technical Debts?

The way you develop your software or digital solution impacts your technical debts up to a large extent. Here are some of the best practices that your eCommerce development team must follow in order to keep the tech debts to a minimum.

1. Use a Future-Ready eCommerce Platform

According to Wikipedia, technical debt is defined as the cost of work that teams need to do for selecting an easy solution now instead of leveraging a better approach in order to save time. 

So, what does it mean in eCommerce?

When businesses choose an eCommerce development platform that does not suit their future business needs but helps them in the faster launch, it increases the tech debt. For example, some businesses plan to scale their operations and have aggressive growth targets, but just to keep things simple, they opt for a Shopify-like platform, which doesn’t offer unlimited scalability, their tech debt increases.

Such businesses invest in eCommerce platform migration after a few years and that causes additional expense. Check out the blog on Why Magento is Better than Shopify for businesses desiring scalability and aggressive growth.

2. Follow a Test-Driven Development Process

To develop a digital solution in the test-driven environment, you must rely on shorter development and delivery cycles. The process is very simple. Developers shall focus on writing an automated test case that defines the improvement required. 

After that, developers shall focus on writing minimum code to pass the previously written test. Build, test, and re-build. By following this process, an eCommerce development team can keep the tech debts to a minimum by writing code that is well-tested and free from bugs.

3. Hire Developers that Prefer Quality over Anything Else

Even if it takes a bit longer, you should always hire an eCommerce development agency that prefers quality. They should promote a work culture where quality eCommerce development solutions are above every other factor like development speed.

If the developers write low-quality code to enable fast delivery, maintaining it would be hard for your team and you will end up spending more than what you initially saved. So, hire agile developers that ship fast but do not cut corners on quality.

Conclusion

Technical Debt is as serious as your financial debt, particularly if your business depends on technology. It ought to be perceived by engineers and CTOs as well as by entrepreneurs and leaders. So make sure you share this article with your team and it will inspire the practices you use in eCommerce.

We at Envision eCommerce (a leading eCommerce Store Management Company) focus on Technical Debts from the start of the project and make sure our clients are able to avoid or minimize them in the best possible way.