Forem: Pete Heslop

Tree Exchange App

Pete Heslop — Thu, 29 Oct 2020 12:57:33 +0000

In early September, we made a radical change to our working week at Steadfast Collective.

We started The Friday Collective, an initiative for all team members to make Fridays a time for learning, teaching and exploring new ideas.

André (our Technical Lead) got to work on a new project idea; TreeExchange.app, a micro-app encouraging companies to think green and to plant trees.

But how many trees? And what could be the basis for planting them?

Each month, as a studio, we spend a large amount of money on server costs to keep our websites and web apps running.

So we wondered what it would look like to spend a proportionate amount of money on something that would keep the planet up and running.

As a studio, we rely on Digital Ocean to host our websites and applications online and know that thousands of other companies and organisations use Digital Ocean for their hosting. We decided to utilise the amazing Digital Ocean API to convert the size and number of Digital Ocean Droplets (servers) people have into planted trees.

We had a feeling we wouldn’t be the only ones interested in this.

How does Tree Exchange work?

Log in securely with your Digital Ocean credentials and, using the Digital Ocean API, we pull a count of your Droplets and their sizes.

We then use some magic (basic math really), to calculate how many trees we believe you should exchange for your usage.

For example, for a droplet up to $40 we add 20 trees. For a droplet that costs more than $40 and up to $80 we will add 30 trees, and so on. At this point, you are able to increase (or decrease) your monthly tree commitment, add your payment details and hit save.

Automagically (see what we did there?!), each month, we will send an API call to Ecologi to plant the agreed number of trees into our new Tree Exchange forest – https://ecologi.com/treeexchange.

Each person signed up will then receive an email celebrating the total of numbers of trees you have planted, so that you can give yourself a high five.

Why did we choose Ecologi for the tree planting? Read our previous post about why we believe in the work Ecologi is undertaking.

You can give our Tree Exchange app a go over at https://treeexchange.app/

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Fathom Analytics (The Google Alternative)

Pete Heslop — Wed, 16 Sep 2020 12:45:47 +0000

Let’s just say it, Google shouldn’t have a monopoly on website analytics. Not only does Google track more data than is ultimately required, it’s then used to target ads right back at yourself and customers. Not only that, it’s overly complex and, quite frankly, a headache to navigate.

That’s why Fathom exists. A simple, light-weight and privacy-focused alternative to Google Analytics which tracks what you want to know, without the need for cookies or excessive data collection. Now running on over 11,000 websites, Paul and Jack, the co-founders of Fathom have designed an elegant solution.

It’s a paid service, and let-me-stop-you-right-there, that’s a good thing!

Like we tell our clients with Craft CMS, by paying for your products and services, you can ensure you’re getting a premium product and supporting those championing good on the web.

Let’s be honest, if you’re not paying for your products, you ARE the product.

Their plans start at $14 per month, for 100,000 page views over an unlimited number of websites.

Three things I like about Fathom… other than its privacy focus:

1) The dashboard.

Site Uniques | Site Views | Avg Time On Site | Bounce Rate | Goal Completions

The important metrics are front and centre, followed by a graph and then more detailled metrics around which pages are most popular, where your traffic is coming from etc.

A quick glance is all I need to understand the overview; it’s not needy for my attention. It’s also well designed; it looks fantastic.

2) Team or public sharing

That beautiful dashboard we just spoke about, Fathom have made it so easy to share. You have three options:

1) Viewable by you

2) Viewable by anyone with the shared password

3) Viewable by everyone

The idea of quickly creating a viewable by everyone dashboard is magic. Pair that with Baremetrics Open Startup movement and you’ve got yourself the tools you need to push ahead with your transparent startup.

3) Technology Focus

The Fathom team are using cutting-edge technology to run Fathom and, even better, they’re sharing their knowledge about it. In August, Jack wrote an excellent article on what happened when one of their customers got over 10m page views in a few hours; What happened to our infrastructure when a customer got over 10 million page views in a few hours? – Fathom.

Their already stable technology stack is getting better and better with each release, pushing the boundaries on what it is to manage millions of data points in real time.

If you want to take a stand in protecting your customer’s data, or you just like the look of the dashboard, then head over to https://usefathom.com/ for a 14-day free trial and $10 off your first invoice.

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Apple’s App Store controversy; from an agency’s perspective.

Pete Heslop — Mon, 22 Jun 2020 12:02:47 +0000

Today, 22nd of June 2020, is the start of Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC).

Each year, Apple uses WWDC to announce new software updates, new hardware and to talk about how much revenue its App Store processes.

In 2019, 30 billion dollars was paid out from Apple to developers who use the iOS and Mac App Store to sell their digital products.

This year, there’s an elephant in the room. That elephant is called Hey, and it’s a new email application built by Basecamp.

Long story short, the new email application, Hey, was accepted into the iOS App Store without any questions from the black box, which is Apple’s verification team. When they pushed a bug fixing update a few days later, it was denied on the following grounds; Hey doesn’t use Apple’s in-app purchasing mechanism.

When you buy an iOS app or upgrade/make payment within an iOS app, Apple processes this payment and takes a 30% cut for the first year of your subscription, 15% thereafter. This isn’t the case on physical goods, such as Airbnb, but it is the case on say, Headspace.

Apple not only processes the payment, but they also own the customer, handling; refunds, cancellations and updating payment cards – limiting the support businesses can offer their customers.

Here’s where things get different with Hey. If you download the Hey iOS application, you get nothing, just a login screen. You can’t sign up or even find out where to sign up. This isn’t uncommon on the iOS App Store. To work around the 30% IAP payment split, app owners have required users to signup on their computers and then login via their iPhone. This means that the app owners can take payment directly from the consumer, bypassing Apple.

Ever wondered why you can’t sign up for Netflix on iOS, buy a new Audiobook on the Audible app or why Spotify is 30% more expensive if you pay through Apple’s ecosystem?

The problem Hey have run into is that, even though they obey all of the unwritten App Store rules of not telling customers to pay out-of-app, they’re still being denied access to the App Store, unless they hand over 30% of their iOS revenue to Apple.

This is a different precedent compared to Netflix, Slack, Outlook or even Hubspot.

Apple only allows its App Store to run on their phones, which, in turn, has caused a monopoly effect. They control the rules and don’t have to follow precedent if they wish.

This new controversy has caused many large and small app developers to speak up of their frustrations around the rules governing the App Store. Many small developers fear speaking out in case they find themselves mysteriously slipping down the App Store ranking.

So, as a digital agency, how do we feel about this?

30% is a lot
When we tell clients that Apple will take 30% for the first 12 months of their app’s life, they struggle to understand why Apple takes a 30% cut when comparatively other companies, such as Stripe, will only take 1.4% to 2.9% for processing a payment.

Apple is taking a cut around 27% higher than competitors, but for what? Well, the iOS App Store is the only storefront available to 2 billion iOS devices. Apple has created a trusted ecosystem, where they have end-to-end control…

That 27% extra cut is for access to the highest revenue App Store in the world.

Control
Once you pay for a subscription through the iOS App Store, that’s it; you’re Apple’s customer now.

You have to speak to them for refund, upgrades and even to update your payment card. If you run a SAAS business, you know the pain of handling refunds and of payment cards expiring, the latter being a large reason for churn.

If your customer paid through the App Store, you can’t help them with any of the above. You can’t offer them a refund, help them to update their card details or even offer them discounts; all normal things where you run a payment system.

Let’s say your grandparent gets a new smart security camera for their home. They download the app and start paying through the iOS App Store. The customer support for that platform wouldn’t be able to help them with any of the financial details, only point them towards Apple documentation.

Let’s then say your grandparent moves to an Android device and downloads the app required for the security system. It’s all working no problem to begin with. They’re still paying money to Apple, even though they are now on Android. Now imagine trying to explain to your grandparent what to do when their payment card expires in three years.

Our customers
As an agency, we hear time and time again from clients and potential clients how their business wouldn’t work with 30% chunk of their revenue vanishing. Often they already have customers on their web-app and simply want to give them better experience on mobile devices. Should this really cost 30% of their revenue?

There are currently multiple investigations into Apple around this. Both the EU and the USA have ongoing investigations into antitrust and monopoly matters.

We knew a lot about this issue before the Hey controversy, but with Apple in the press’ spotlight, it’s highlighted the need for this to be more forefront in people’s minds as we consider the future of digital.

Let’s see if Apple address any of their controversy over the next week. Our money’s on absolutely not.

Lessons from Panic Inc

Pete Heslop — Thu, 05 Dec 2019 09:45:49 +0000

Panic is a team-based out in Portland, America who published the recent video game Untitled Goose Game and the award-winning Firewatch.

What you may not know is that Panic’s legacy was built crafting Apple applications, especially those who help web-developers.

Other core products of theirs include, Coda, Transmit and Prompt. It was only later in 2016 they starting publishing video games.

Through their 22 years of developing products, the Panic team have gained a reputation for delivering high-quality products.

Here are three lessons we can learn from watching how they work.

Lesson One: Focus

Panic’s products are excellent, and if a product is not exceptional or preforming as hoped, the team will cut the product from their range. Status Board was an excellent example of this. Status Board was an iOS app designed to create beautiful data dashboards, however back in 2016 they announced they were discontinuing the product due to lack of market, you can read more about that here.

Speaking of Transmit, it's been quite a journey since 1.0. pic.twitter.com/fWdJt4X4p8

— Panic (@panic) March 4, 2019

Lesson Two: Transparency

Panic has always been open and transparent in the way they operate. Their blog is fantastic look into how they work and the direction they’re facing.

I believe that transparency is a good indicator that a business is moving forward and keen to take their customers on that journey.

Lesson Three: Self Awareness

I believe Panic understand their key audience and products, which in turn is their core income. While Panic is now publishing games, their focus is on building a suite of development tools for an audience which they have grown over many years.

For a long time, they ran their customer services enquires through Twitter, giving customers a quick and direct way to reach them.

Panic has been around for 22 years, and I expect they will be around for 22 more. They consistently build outstanding products, and we should all be looking towards them.

Image from https://panic.com

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How we hire top talent – Inside The Studio

Pete Heslop — Tue, 19 Nov 2019 11:02:47 +0000

In this week’s Inside The Studio episode, we chat through hiring in an agency context.

We’re worked hard to develop our team of smart creatives, and we’re proud of our team!

We wanted to share our top hiring tips on how we grew that team.

_Before we jump into that; have you subscribed to our YouTube channel or podcast stream yet? _

YouTube – Spotify – Apple Podcasts

1) Run events.

Through running events in our local area, we’ve hired two people. By being present and active in your local community, you’re likely to meet likeminded folk who, if you make a good connection with, will reach out next time you’re hiring.

If you’re not quite ready to run events, go to other events! Hiring will always be easier if you have a more extensive network.

2) Focus on smart. Not skillset.

You can teach skills; you can’t teach smart.

As you run your business, you gain a sixth sense for talent. When I re-met Josh at a wedding, he told me how he hated his job and would love to become a game developer.

I knew Josh’s integrity, and intelligence was there, just the skillset for development that was missing.

Josh spent the first six months at Steadfast learning to code while being our project manager. Josh now is a talented developer working on client projects daily.

3) Being transparent

Be honest from the offset. We always publish salaries on our job adverts, we feel this sets the tone for the culture of openness we expect at Steadfast Collective.

We always interview in our office, again we don’t want to hide anything about what makes us Steadfast.

These three things have helped us develop into a team of seven, ensuring we have built our core ideas into every section of the business.

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Setting goals for your team (which they’re onboard with).

Pete Heslop — Mon, 18 Nov 2019 14:34:46 +0000

Setting goals your team does not fully understand is like shouting into an echo chamber. Let me explain…

Last week, we met as a team for our quarterly all-hands meeting, where we discuss goals, targets and the past three months. In this episode of Inside The Studio, we speak about our last all-hands meeting in length. Watch the video to find out a little more about what we did on our Q4 away day this November.

As part of our Q4 meeting, we looked back on our 2019 goals and took stock of how we did.

Without spoiling the entire episode, we achieved about half of our goals – not bad, but room to improve.

Later that day, perhaps, more importantly, we spent an extended period of time looking forward to 2020 and setting goals for the year ahead.

From the early days at Steadfast Collective, we have tried to be as transparent as possible; this includes opening our financials. The whole team know our current turnover, break-even point, and turnover targets.

When setting our 2020 goals, I spent a long time agonising over each target to ensure they are ambitious yet reachable.

During our Q4 away day, I broke down each goal, and explained the following;

– How did I come to set this target?

– Why is it important?

– How can we achieve this?

Starting Q1, we will lay out how each team member can contribute to these targets, understanding their part and how they can help The Collective to reach these goals.

Here’s the thing, setting goals without explaining ‘the how’ and ‘why’ is problematic…

Let’s take your companies profit goal; why do you as an agency need a 25% profit margin? Is the sole reason to help your shareholders to make money?

I’m sure there’s more to it than that. That profit margin helps you build a financial runway and gives you the ability to grow, but have you explained that?

Do you want to increase your customer retention? Why?

Well, increasing your customer retention takes the pressure off of your new business team and lets your creative team build meaningful relationships so that you can make a real impact. These may be obvious to you as a business owner, but are they clear to every member of your team?

Much smarter folk than I have researched goal setting, but I thought I would explain our basic foundations for goals and targets at Steadfast:

Understand why we are setting the goal
Think about how the goal benefits the company
Individually consider how we can all help to reach that goal
Tell everyone the goal and update regularly

Using these four goal-setting concepts, we hope to set out targets that are well understood, realistic, achievable, and owned by the whole team, not just the one or two. Here’s to 2020!

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Jeff Gardner of Intercom shares his lessons learnt

Pete Heslop — Fri, 26 Jul 2019 12:52:21 +0000

Jeff has been at Intercom for seven years, as the fourth employee he headed up customer support while fixing bugs and odd engineering tasks. He then went on to lead the support team. In the last 18 months, Jeff has taken on the role of Head of Platform Partnerships.

We asked Jeff to share three lessons he has learnt during his time at Intercom.

1) Do something that matters

Intercom has a really compelling mission; how to continually connect businesses to their customers.

Jeff explains that it’s vital to have a mission you can get behind when it comes to growing and hiring teams.

2) Put your principles down on paper

Your principles are how you go about solving problems, building products, or helping customers. Having principles written means you have a reference point when you’re in a meeting or working with many people.

Intercom recently shared their product development principles here.

Jeff goes onto explain that understanding the problem, before solving it, is vital to crafting the best solution.

3) It’s all about the people, and it’s all about the long term.

When you look back over the company you built, it’s the relationships you’ll cherish. The way businesses make it through hard and stressful periods is by having a team of people to help prop up the idea. Jeff goes onto explain that we should be looking 20 years ahead, rather than just hiring a team for the short term.

Sometimes you outgrow people and sometimes people out-grow you and often the best thing to do is it part ways.

Join the other developers, designers and product owners by subscribing to http://thedigitalproductplaybook.com for monthly insights into how to start and grow your digital product.

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The Smart Creative.

Pete Heslop — Tue, 23 Jul 2019 11:57:29 +0000

Based on a study of 101 post-mortems, 23% of them concluded that the primary reason behind their startup’s demise did not have the right team.

That was the third-highest behind, no market need and ran out of money.

When you dig a little deeper, it’s clear why having the correct team dynamic is critical when working in a fast-moving and lean business.

If your team is lean and agile, adding in a new person into the mix adds new layers of complexity, cost and changes the dynamics within your organisation.

If you asked 101 startup owners how easy they find hiring the right person; I expect you would find that nearly all business owners struggle to recruit the correct talent for their team.

So, what do we look for at Steadfast Collective?

We look for Smart Creatives.

Here’s how Google defines a Smart Creative:

A person that doesn’t chase compensation; they pursue the ability to cause change and disrupt industries.

When you dig a little into their book, How Google Works, they expand on this.

A smart creative has technical knowledge of their trade, hands-on experience, an expert in their field.
They’re analytically smart.
They’re always referring to data to drive home a point.
Quick to iterate on their ideas and flex to the data’s results.
They create technical solutions to business problems. They understand the user and what the user wants. They don’t design and build for their ego; they look at the business case and user feedback.
They’re a firehose of new ideas which are actually good.
Often hard to manage.
They’re the person in the meeting who’s often frustrated because they’ve already come up with a solution before the agenda is readout.
Self-directed, they don’t like to be micro-managed although happy to collaborate and can articulate ideas to team members.

When thinking through the ideology around Smart Creatives here was how I summarised the traits:

Technically
Driven
Business

A smart creative is someone who is technically able to do their work, Michael Gerber in his book The E-Myth, would use the phrasing Technician.

As part of this technical mindset, they care about the data surrounding their tasks and role. They’re not going to jump into a task without first analysing the facts.

A smart creative isn’t only technically gifted; they’re driven , self-motivated, hands-on and able to articulate.

One of the key differences between a person who is solely technically gifted and a Smart Creative is that a Smart Creative is able to articulate their ideas and processes to other team members, often making them excellent at delegation and leading teams.

Finally, a Smart Creative has a hybrid mindset; Creative and Business. Everything they work on has to help the business, and they’ll be creative in achieving those tasks.

This means the Smart Creative is often results-focused, full of ideas and interested in success outside of their silo.

Leading the Smart Creative

Sergey Brin and Larry Page make this clear. Their plan for building the world’s best search engine was this; hire as many talented software engineers as possible and give them freedom. Jonathan Rosenberg, who was hired from Excite@home had degrees and proven management record, but he was in for a shock when he presented Larry page with a business plan.

Larry hated it and said. Have you ever seen a plan delivered early? Have your teams ever delivered better products than what was in the plan? No? Then go talk to our engineers.

As Larry spoke, it dwelled on Johnathan that then engineers he was talking about weren’t engineers in the traditional sense. Yes, they were brilliant engineers but along with a business savviness along with a healthy streak of creatively.

He realised then managing them with traditional structures would not work.

At companies experiencing hyper-growth, we see talented people who are not confined to specific tasks departments. We see engineers starting companies. These smart creatives are taking risks and are having an impact on the entire business regardless of their position or role.

Smart creatives are trying new strategies, products and ideas, not keeping quiet when they disagree, happy to push ahead with new business ideas.

They blur the line between business and creative.

As it happens, we’re looking for our next Smart Creative! If you’re a web developer, looking for a new role in the Southampton area; get in touch!

If you enjoyed reading this article; we think you’ll really enjoy The Digital Product Playbook. A monthly playbook full of insights, ideas and plays on growing your digital product.

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Strong Customer Authentication (SCA), What is it and how does it affect your business?

Pete Heslop — Mon, 17 Jun 2019 10:21:36 +0000

New regulations are coming into effect on 14th September 2019 called Strong Customer Authentication (SCA). SCA is part of the PSD2 regulation in Europe and will impact how your customers authenticate payments online.

You will be impacted by SCA if you meet the following criteria:

Your business is based in the European Economic Area (EEA)
You serve customers in the EEA
Your website or app accepts credit or debit card payments

What is SCA?

SCA’s primary aim is to reduce fraud. It is set to achieve this by requiring additional validation steps when making purchases online.

To accept payment online, websites must now receive two of the following three categories of additional validation:

Something the customer knows (e.g., password or PIN)
Something the customer has (e.g., phone or hardware token)
Something the customer is (e.g., fingerprint or face recognition)

These additional validation steps will be a hard requirement by banks from 14th September 2019. Payments that do not meet the additional validations will be declined. Therefore, it is imperative that all websites that meet the criteria, update their payment processing to receive the additional validation.

It is worth noting that SCA will likely be enforced in the UK, regardless of the results of Brexit: https://www.fca.org.uk/publications/consultation-papers/cp18-44-brexit-regulatory-technical-standards-strong-customer-authentication

What is Steadfast Collective doing to reduce the impact of SCA?

We are currently investigating the impact of implementing SCA on our client’s existing projects and researching how we can ensure this has a minimal impact on their conversion rates.

We are also aggregating our knowledge to share within our community to help reduce the burden of SCA.

What steps do Steadfast Collective plan to undertake next?

We are currently waiting for clarification on the impact for subscriptions that offer a free trial; this is still being discussed by banks, with confirmation expected by 1st July 2019.

As a company, we will continue to research the implications of SCA and are preparing our team to swiftly resolve any SCA issues you may face.

In July 2019, we will be holding a free SCA workshop event in Southampton , presenting more of the finer details of the regulations and making you aware of any actions you will need to take.

We also hope to help answer any questions you may have.

Additional details about the event will follow in due course.

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Introducing the Digital Product Playbook

Pete Heslop — Wed, 29 May 2019 09:45:01 +0000

The Digital Product Playbook is a monthly playbook of insightful articles and thoughts on building and growing digital products.

You may have seen our teaser for The Playbook earlier in the month with our Intercom: On Starting Upbook giveaway, where entry was via sign up. We can now announce that the winner of the book is Sophie! (It is on its way, Sophie!).

Why did we start Digital Product Playbook?

As part of our fundamental love of digital products, we find ourselves increasingly fuelled by books, articles and video content written by those who have gone before. We love learning about growth tactics, development thoughts, and reading founder stories on how people grew their idea into a sustainable business.

We want to read, implement and collate the best ideas, the ideas that have really made an impact on our own products, or our clients’ products, sharing them with like-minded individuals.

You can follow along at thedigitalproductplaybook.com. If you think you have an interesting article or idea that we should know about, send it over to pete@steadfastcollective.com.

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Podcast: Directors growing up

Pete Heslop — Mon, 06 May 2019 09:49:29 +0000

In recognition of our fourth birthday as a business, we’ve recorded a special run of podcasts looking at what has inspired us along the way, the lessons we have learnt, and to bring some focus to what’s next for us as a company.

The first instalment of these podcasts is entitled ‘Directors Growing Up’.

If you don’t have time to watch our video podcast or listen along, then have a read of the key talking points below:

Steadfast Collective’s beginnings

Our original idea for Steadfast was to create a creative place where we could build web applications for ourselves and for our clients. Pete started out as a PHP-developer contracting our for other agencies and clients. Two years later, we then hired, got our first office and grew the business from there.

Our first office: Canute Road, Southampton

Where we are now: our fourth year in business

Steadfast Collective is now based in an office on the outskirts of the New Forest in Ower, with a great team. We’ve just taken on our first designer and we’re now in a position where we are working on client work a good chunk of the time, spending the rest of our time working on our own internal products that are close to our hearts, which we build, grow and market.

Three lessons we have learnt over the past year:

Design is important The last 12 months have been a bit of a whirlwind. We’ve grown the team and taken on a lot of new processes to accommodate that growth. A key lesson in the process has been understanding the importance of design. As a group of developers, design hadn’t been something we were particularly excelling in and we came to recognise the importance of having our own designer in house. Having a designer allows us to increase the value of our work offering and having a designer sat alongside developers has been key.

We’ve been really proud of the work we have been releasing both for clients and internally – telling our own story in a creative and visual way.

Always be networking

This is a lesson that came up a lot through our podcast series ‘Three Lessons Learnt’, mentioned by several of the business owners that we interviewed. At Steadfast, nearly all of our work comes from referrals so networking and getting ourselves out there is key. Online networking through Linkedin, Twitter and other social media both for ourselves and by our staff has been helpful. We have come to realise that our staff need to be having meaningful conversations to help make the brand known so that not all sales come through one person. Networking, whether to gain business or expand your contact list, allows you to bounce ideas off other people outside of your immediate sphere.

When networking, we have learnt to always make it easy for the other person – arrange an easy meeting place or go to them. Further down the line, you never know what could become of that relationship.

Leadership should be calming and inspiring for your team

It’s important as a company that your employees feel safe and secure in what they are doing. Empowering leadership is based around having trust in your team and conveying that sense of trust by giving them the responsibility to get things done. If you are leading a team or business, you need to be able to instil a sense of calm and authority to your team. Through trusting your team and giving them opportunities, you propel them to stepping up, going above and beyond to excel in new areas.

Sprints should be short, not constant. Running at 120% all the time is tiring and causes burn out so only pull the fire alarm on a project if it is a real emergency.

What will the next year look like for us?

The next 12 months are all about stabilising the growth we’ve seen in our team and learning how to work together to consistently develop the best standard of work, without losing the creative edge.

Creating a stable place of process gives us space and flexibility – we know we are going to be hitting deadlines, so we have the flexibility to work on our own products.

We’re excited to continue working on one of our main products, Tap, which we have recently invested time into, re-building the back end.

As a team, we’re going to be out and about a lot over the next year. We are going to Laravel Live, WXG7 and lots of other events, so follow along with us on Twitter to see where we are heading to next and arrange to meet us along the way.

Thanks for listening/reading along. We hope you have enjoyed finding out more about our back story as a company and our hopes for the future. We would love to get to know you, so get in touch and meet us for a coffee.

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Why you should choose Shopify as your eCommerce platform

Pete Heslop — Tue, 23 Apr 2019 14:25:35 +0000

Shopify is a fully-managed eCommerce platform which has the perfect balance of being both client and developer friendly. Over 800,000 people have chosen to use Shopify to sell their products; from small local brands to larger brand names such as Unilever, the Cambridge Satchel Company, and Gymshark.

At Steadfast Collective, we work on Shopify sites for multiple clients. Here we outline just a few of the reasons why we like the platform:

1) Plays well with others

The Shopify platform has its own app store, similar to the one on your phone. These easy-to-install apps are quick and easy ways to extend your store to include additional bells and whistles. They range from Facebook ads and bulk importers to apps for very specific purposes, such as the Happy Birthday app which will email your customers a unique discount code on their birthday.

As well as these third-party apps, Shopify has a range of their own extensions built in. Both Instagram and Facebook store integration is built in as standard (multichannel selling), giving you a wider reach for your storefront.

2) Servers, security and reliability

In a similar fashion to how Apple has built its fully-comprehensive technical eco-system, Shopify is fully managed and hosted. They will handle everything server-side, including security updates, meaning that you can focus on selling your products knowing that your website is in safe hands.

An extra benefit of having a fully-managed solution is that, even if your product is featured on prime-time television instantly receiving a large quantity of traffic, your website should never go down and your store will always be available.

Shopify is a safe place to process online payments, the SSL certificate (Secure Sockets Layer) verifies this to both customer and shop owner so you can rest-assured your transactions are secure.

3) Big brands are using Shopify

You should rest easy in the knowledge that Shopify is no-longer a startup, but a 13-year-old business with over 4,000 employees and an impressive portfolio of customers. If you opt for the platform, you’ll be in good company with many big-name brands also utilising Shopify.

4) We love building with Shopify

As creators, we love tools that let us express our creativity. Shopify gives us the tools to work with our partners to create an effective and engaging online store. Letting Shopify handle the heavy lifting such as taking card-details allows us to focus on the user flow and experience. Here are just a few more reasons why we, as a development studio, love using Shopify:

Shopify sites are highly-customisable, allowing us to get creative with the design.
Sites are easy to use and full of possibility when it comes to expanding and growing (giving both development teams and customers ultimate flexibility and functionality).
The wide range of apps and extensions allows you to evolve your site to suit your audience.
A wide range of blog and video tutorials are available for how-to support.
24/7 help is provided Shopify should a problem arise.

If you’re looking to start a new store or to build on your existing brand with an eCommerce arm than converts visitors into customers – get in touch with us today.

The post Why you should choose Shopify as your eCommerce platform appeared first on Steadfast Collective.