Startup e-commerce platform

The best e-commerce platform for startup organizations

For any startup, there is a choice - to use an existing e-commerce platform, or design and develop an in-house solution.  It often seems that developing startup e-commerce platform in-house will fit your MVP better; however, using an existing solution may bring your MVP vision to life more quickly.

What are the top e-commerce platform challenges of startups?

Out-of-the box solutions don’t fit startups. Startups aim to break an existing business model based on either new technology or new business approaches. Since startups do new and creative things via e-commerce, they face a challenge: inflexible out-of-the-box solutions do not fit innovative models by design, and they are too expensive for an MVP. 
Licensing does not fit many startup business models. Traditional licensing is another challenge. Traditional licensing models are structured for conventional business models and practices, but not for companies with disruptive business models.
It is challenging to find qualified experts to build your MVP fast. The third critical problem is the lack of relevant e-commerce experience and expertise to deliver an MVP. Startup MVPs are about minimizing time and costs. It is essential to select the fastestway to MVP, which is not always obvious, and move forward as fast as possible. It is necessary to find a reliable e-commerce partner who will and can handle these risks: help to define the MVP scope accurately so that your business model will be implemented as cost-effectively as possible and delivered in a timely manner.

Top implementation risks for a startup e-commerce platform

Starting with an inflexible out-of-the-box platform makes changing directions painful

Traditional licensing makes it impossible for your business to scale

An in-house solution means there will be critical dependencies on technical employees

By selecting an inflexible platform as the basis of your business, you will need to invest heavily in development or adopt your business model, forcing a re-build of your solution every time your business direction changes.

There is a high risk of spending a lot of time and effort on delivering functionalities that are not valuable to customers, and therefore does not provide traction. Even if it is possible to create your desired functionality at the end of the project, it will demand significant additional time and money.

Traditional licensing is also a challenge for startups. For example, when building your own industry or market-specific platform to resell, you are usually limited not just by the technical weaknesses of “native” e-commerce solutions, but also by their licensing policies, which make it impossible for startups to earn money.

The lack of experience in selecting e-commerce solutions can be a killer for startups due to the reasons listed. Facing these challenges, startups often decide to build a unique in-house solution because it looks deceptfully cheap.

Building an in-house solution often entails the same issues as choosing an inflexible platform (too long, expensive) along with additional overheads, such as the risk of dependency on internal technical specialists. Imagine only a few people in the world know how to maintain your solution - it's a risky proposition.

With Virto Commerce, we were able to launch an optimal real estate e-commerce site that uniquely positioned us in the market to serve our audience – with a premium user experience that our brand required and our users deserve.

Olga Lomko

CMO, Estate Spain

How does the Virto Commerce platform solve the risks for startups in their e-commerce journey?

Virto Commerce's platform is designed for fast MVP delivery

Our license model fits startups

We have startup experience and provide reliable technical expertise

Thanks to our customizable and extensible platform and modular architecture, the Virto Commerce platform is designed to be adaptive and flexible. We provide enablers for building up a solution of any complexity on top of the platform with minimal time, costs and risks.

Based on our experience with startups, we realize the license-related challenges startups face. Being a market disruptor ourselves, we respect and facilitate market disruptors. That is why we developed specific licensing models that fit startups and companies who are introducing new disruptive business models and practices into the e-commerce market.

Virto Commerce has extensive successful experience in facilitating startup MVPs and we share our experience (both technical and management) with our partners and customers.

Our partners, together with Virto Commerce, help startups solve the expertise issues they face. We help our clients to select the right implementation partner and engage our experts when needed to guarantee a successful project.

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How to get a startup to be successful in e-commerce in 6 months?

Before finding Virto Commerce, the team initially built the site in a basic website builder called Tilda, and immediately saw its limitations upon launch. The main disadvantage was that they could not create a catalog online with search or filter functionalities.

Despite the challenges, the site continued to grow, so they knew it was important to further develop the site's infrastructure. In the first year, they collected 840 purchase applications, grew a newsletter list to 1,322 contacts, sold 29 properties for a total of €4.2 million, and hosted 2,300 webpages.

The team transferred the current version of the Estate-Spain.com front end to a new Virto Commerce platform in three months, within budget, and on time. The solution also included a robust administrator panel. The team collaborated to tackle a long list of technical requirements, business requirements, and desired features.