Tushar, Author at anteelo

Choose Mobile App Technology Stack (Comprehensive Guide)

Posted on 03/01/202012/06/2021 by Tushar

If you are even a month old in the world of mobile application development, the probability of you have not heard of the concept of Technology Stack is very minimal.

No matter what mobile app development process you are planning to follow, it would never turn fruitful until you get together a set of robust technology stack. Technology Stack is what decides the future of a software product.

Well, we will get to the exact definition of tech stack in a while. For now, here’s the snippet – The present and future of your mobile app depends on nothing but your mobile app technology stack.

Defining and choosing the technology stack for app development at an early stage helps entrepreneurs achieve their ultimate business objectives much more easily.

In this article, we will be looking into the concept of technology stack for mobile application in more detail, while throwing the light on the importance of knowing the technology stack that your mobile app would be based on. We will also talk about the tech stacks that power the apps on the basis of their type.

But first things first.

Let us quickly refresh our understanding of mobile app technology stack.

What is a Mobile Development Technology Stack?

The complete technology stack for mobile application development can be divided into four areas. And these are also the areas that also constitute the anatomy of an application.

Here are the four components which together make one Technology Stack –

Frontend Development – The interface on which users interact with the mobile app

Backend Development – The part which takes the user input, processes it, and convert it into an output

Development Platform – The place where interfaces and libraries come into the picture to design and develop the mobile application.

Additional – The technology elements that affect app performance, security, and robustness.

Now that you know what mobile app technology stack stands for, let us now look into the reasons why it is important for businesses to sit with their partnered mobile app development company and look at the technology stack that would be put into their mobile apps.

Why is it Important to Find the Best Tech Stack for Mobile App?

There are a number of elements that are dependent on the selection of the right mobile app tech stack. The probability of whether your app is robust or will it be able to scale to different operating system versions, relies heavily on the technology combination that you choose for its development.

Any wrong or hasty, uncalculated decision with respect to the selection of nothing but the best technology stack for mobile application, will affect its current performance and future growth prospects negatively.

While these are the issues attached at a much deeper level, which you would face only when you are deep inside the mobile app development process, there are a number of first level issues attached with the wrong choice of the mobile app technology stack as well.

Since you now know what tech stack is and why it is important to know the technology stack, let us come to the section where we look into the technology stack that powers the development of powerful, scalable, and innovative mobile and web apps that comes out of the factories of any skilled app design company and their development domain.

Native App Technology Stack

Native apps are known for their robustness and performance. The quality standards that a business usually looks to achieve in their mobile journey are the ones that their investment in Native App Development perfectly solves.

Native Apps allow businesses to integrate the device’s in-built functionalities in their mobile app, without calling for an external third party API.

Now, when we talk about Native app, we usually talk in the context of Android and iOS App development. The two platforms come with different capabilities, which call for different technology stacks as well.

Let us look at the most commonly used mobile app technology stack that goes in the iOS app development and Android app development.

Android Tech Stack

Programming Languages: Kotlin and Java

Although Kotlin is the official programming language for Android app development, Java language is still used to a great extent by many android app development company. The popularity that Java sees makes it one of the best technology stack for mobile app development.

However, Kotlin is also not lying too behind in the popularity race. With time, Kotlin has become a lot more stable option for the developers to workaround in the Android studio. The fact that the language is clean, lightweight, and much less verbose is making it a solution to all the Java problems.

Toolkit: Android Developer Tools & Android Studio

Android Studio gives developers the feasibility of editing code, debugging, flexible build system, performance tooling, and an instant deploy system.

The platform enables you to focus entirely on building high quality and unique apps.

With help of the Android Developer Tools, you will be able to gain complete support for the whole Android app development process. Along with that, it allows developers to use multiple on-device debugging tools, emulators, graphical UI builder, and a completely scriptable test automation support.

Android SDK

In order to write programs with the latest features, the developers are made to download and then install each version SDK for a specific phone.

Using this Android tech stack, developers have been able to increase the app count to over millions and have made the Android app development industry the one that businesses opt for when they are looking to reach the masses.

iOS Tech Stack

Programming Languages: Swift and Objective-C

The most preferred languages that find themselves being a part of the iOS mobile app development technologies are Swift and Objective-C.

Objective-C being the superset of C language provides a dynamic runtime environment and object-oriented capabilities.

But we recommend Swift over Objective-C, simply because the language is a lot more functional and offers codes which are a lot less error-prone. It also consists of dynamic libraries which are uploaded directly to memory, cutting down the initial app size and increasing its performance.

Toolkit: Xcode and IntelliJ AppCode

Toolkits are the full feature environment that allows one to create both mobile and desktop apps. The ones that are most commonly used by the iPad and iPhone app developers are IntelliJ AppCode and Apple Xcode.

iOS SDK

The iOS SDK consists of an API which acts as the link between platforms that they run on and the software application. The iPhone SDK offers tools used for Apple’s touchscreen interface and for the proprietary iOS operating system.

At the back of this technology stack, Apple app development industry has been able to brand itself as the market that businesses head out to generate revenues on their mobile apps.

While this was for Native apps, there is one app type which calls for a different set of full stack mobile development altogether. The apps we are talking about here are Hybrid Apps.

Although they are not used to a great extent anymore, there are still a small class of entrepreneurs who select them at the back of their low cost and time to market advantage.

Hybrid App Technology Stack

Hybrid apps are usually developed with the help of the standard web techniques like CSS, HTML5, and JavaScript. They usually consist of two sections – Backend and Native shell. These apps can run on all platforms and tend to provide access to API and acquire device storage and a camera etc.

The three frameworks that are most commonly used for the development of Hybrid apps include – Cordova, Sencha Touch 2, and Ionic.

Now that we have talked about both Native Apps and Hybrid Apps, it is time to move our focus on the Tech Stack for Cross-Platform App Development

Cross-Platform App Tech Stack

Cross-platform app development means using the same code to develop apps that would then run on multiple platforms – Android, iOS, and Web.

Businesses usually go with the cross-platform app development because of the simple fact that they are able to operate around a greater demographics. All the while taking advantage of the low development cost and faster go to market time.

The cross-platform application technology stack is usually made up of these major technologies’ combinations –

A. React Native & TypeScript or JavaScript

React Native is a JavaScript framework that is used for writing mobile apps which work like native apps. When you use React Native, the application logic gets written and runs on JavaScript or TypeScript.

B. Xamarin & C#

Xamarin allows development engineers to share 90% of codes across a series of major platforms. The tool uses C# as the main language.

Now that we have looked into the tech stack that powers the development of a variety of app types, ranging from Native apps to Cross Platforms and Hybrid Apps, it is time to look into something that matters to a mobile app development company more than knowing the tech stack: Knowing How to Choose the Best Technology Stack for Mobile Application.

How to Select the Best Tech Stack for Mobile App?

The ideal mobile application development technology stack that can power your product for success is an outcome of careful consideration and analysis of a number of factors. Here are the factors that tend to influence the mobile app technology stack choice for the development of a mobile app –

1. App Considerations

There are a number of factors that vary from one app to another –

The device on which the app would function
The network condition it would run in
The user experience you are aiming to achieve
The estimated go to market time
The platform would run, amongst others.

All these app elements clubbed together help decide the set of framework, library, languages, and the software that would be combined to develop the mobile

2. The Goal of Mobile App

The choice of tech stack for mobile application development also depends heavily on the goal that your mobile app is going to achieve.

There would be a stark difference in the mobile app technology stack choice when you are looking to develop a high latency app vs a quick response, low latency mobile app.

A mobile app that is dependent on heavy load processing call for a much robust tech stack than the ones that operate around streamlined interactions.

3. Development Team Skill-Set

There are a number of languages and frameworks that tend to give the same result but have some differentiating factors that separate one from the other. Now, when you are to decide between two similar-ish tech stack, the ideal thing to do is to rely on the developer’s skill-set.

If you introduce a tech stack that your team is not acquainted with, it will increase not just the development effort and time but also the cost of mobile app development. While on the other hand, introducing a mobile app technology stack that your team is comfortable with, will help expedite the process while saving the quality.

4. Technology’s Parent Company

The parent company of the technology stack that you are going with also makes a lot of difference in the choice.

There are some brands that offer a lot better documentation and community support than the others. Like, Google, Microsoft, and Adobe are known to offer a lot better community support and advanced development options than Facebook with React Native.

5. The Choice to Operate on Multiple Platforms

The technology stack of an app that runs on one platform would be a lot different than of the one that runs on all – Android, iOS, and Web.

The level of scalability that you will have to introduce in your mobile app to make it portable on other platforms, e.g. in case of Hybrid App or Cross-Platform App Development, would call for a different toolset than one that would go into the development of a Native app.

6. Security Level of the Tech Stack

Every mobile app development technology comes prepared to combat the security-related vulnerabilities that an app can come across after it is launched it is market. The problem comes when you choose a technology stack which is not sufficiently documented or which requires writing long line of codes.

And then there comes the element of developers’ skills. No matter what technology stack you are including in your mobile app, hackers will find their way in, if the app is not developed in a secure manner. So along with the tech stack, your app developers team need to be skilled as well.

7. Compatibility with the Existing Technologies

Going with a mobile app tech stack that is in line with the technology that you are using in the project is very important. Especially if you are introducing a new tech stack after the mobile app development process has started.

Apart from checking the compatibility of the tech stack with the current project, you should also check how compatible would the tech stack be with the tools that you might be planning to add in the app at a later stage.

With this, you now know everything about technology stack that you need to get started with your first mobile app development project. Now no matter which technology you end up using, make sure that they work well with your present app structure and prepares your mobile app to be innovative and scalable.

FAQs About Mobile App Technology Stack

Q. What is meant by technology stack?

Technology stack is the collection of tools, languages, frameworks, and APIs, etc that come together to develop an entire software.

Q. What is app stack used for?

Mobile app technology stack is responsible for the success of the entire design, development, and maintenance process. A wrong decision on this front can lead to your app’s demise in the market much before its natural survival timeline.

Q. What technology is used to develop mobile apps?

The technologies used to develop an efficient mobile app are mainly divided into three subsets which are – Backend, Frontend, Development, and Additional.

Q. What is the best platform for mobile app development?

There can not be one answer to this question. The choice of the best platform depends on a number of different factors like the support of tech stack, design capabilities’ software, users’ demographics, etc.

Q. How to Choose the Best Technology Stack for Mobile App?

There are multiple factors that you will have to consider to establish which mobile app tech stack will best suit your need.

App Considerations
The goal of the mobile app
Skill-set of the team
Security considerations
Compatibility on multiple devices.

Agile Scrum Methodology in Mobile App Development-Guide

Posted on 02/01/202012/06/2021 by Tushar

Agile scrum methodology is one of the most commonly used practices in project management in today’s time. The benefits that the method comes with such as increased business value, faster go to market, greater transparency among the team, and better quality management is enough to push a number of businesses across a range of industries to follow the Agile development Scrum approach in their everyday work process.

If your business, seeing the benefits that the methodology has to offer, is also planning to take the agile scrum development route, this article is for you.

But before getting further into the topic, you should first understand what is agile methodology?

Interestingly, there is a slight difference between agile vs scrum if we speak of them individually. Strictly speaking, Agile is a development methodology based on incremental and iterative approach. Whereas, Scrum is just an implementation or a type of agile methodology. Here, incremental builds are passed to the clients bi-weekly.

Meaning, an agile methodology for application development starts by outlining the users and documenting a statement on a scope of problems, opportunities, and values to be addressed. This vision is then caught by the product owner who works with different teams to provide quality end results.

Now that we are clear on the basic difference between agile vs scrum, there is something else that you need to consider before adopting distributed agile development methodology. Let us first touch bases on what Agile Methodology Scrum actually stands for and how it single-handedly brings the model miles ahead in the Agile vs Waterfall debate.

What is Agile Scrum Method in context of Mobile App Development?

Holistically, the role of Agile in mobile apps is well-renowned and Scrum is the most commonly used sub domain of the agile methodology, which has quickly expanded to handling big and complicated projects that might have otherwise taken a lot of time to finish.

When it comes to the role of using agile project management on mobile application development then one needs to take into account that the mobile application developers make an app for a device with a small screen, less memory and less processing speed. Thus, the use of agile and scrum methodology includes programming, development and project management with breakdown of the software development life cycle into smaller modules.

Used mostly by mobile application development services companies or agile software development company, the scrum team breaks down their allotted work aka product backlogs in actions, which they could cover within the two-week cycles, also known as – “sprints.” By completing every sprint, the team is expected to produce a working mobile app, which they continue to work upon and improve.

Every sprint comes with a timeline that extends from 2 months to maximum 4 months. And each of them have these following components to make the agile mobile app development process more efficient –

1. Scrum Roles

How effectively you run an Agile Distributed team is dependent a lot on how well you distribute the roles?

Product Owner – The person is responsible for overlooking what the team is working on and is also responsible for ensuring that the backlog is up to date. The communication of the end customer and team members are also looked at by them.

Scrum Master – He is the one who is assigned to ensure that the agile scrum is followed rightly by the team. They are also responsible for overlooking how the team is performing and resolving any issue that is coming up.

Scrum team – They are the ones who are actually doing the tasks. They own the development and testing part of the whole project and for this purpose the team is said to be self-organized, cross functional, and agile.

2. Product Backlog

Handled by the product owner, product backlog is a list of tasks that the team needs to perform. The modifications and priorities are set as and when needed. The backlog contains various documents which are continuously updated and used when required.

The idea is to have a list of backlogs ready before the sprint starts.

3. Agile Sprint Backlog and Planning

In this scrum project management methodology step, the mobile app development team decides on the backlogs they will be targeting in the current sprint. Sprint backlog is the list of things the team plans on achieving in the delivery. Usually, sprint backlogs are divided into workable actions and once the team agrees upon the backlog items, the sprint begins.

4. Daily Scrum Meeting

Once the above steps of agile application development are done and the team starts working on the product backlogs, a practice called daily scrum is initiated. A stand up daily meeting is held every day for 15 minutes. In the daily scrum everyone in the team tells about the last day’s work and the day’s plan. The daily scrum lets everyone in the team know of the whole project’s progress.

5. Agile Sprint Review

After every agile sprint, the team demonstrates what was developed to the stakeholders and look into the steps where they got stuck and which went well. The findings of one sprint becomes the action statement of the next.

6. Increment

The end result of a scrum is called Increment. The aim of everyone involved in a scrum is to deliver an increment that is complete on its own.It should adhere to all the quality standards set by the product owner and team.

7. Learn. Repeat. Improve.

This entire cycle is repeated in the next sprint.

Sprint Planning chooses the next set of items in the Product Backlog and the sprint cycle starts again. As the team executes the Sprint, the Agile Product Owner simultaneously ensures that the items which are on top of the product backlog are executed first in the next Sprint.

The short, iterative cycle offers the team a lot of opportunities for learning and improving.

How Does Agile Scrum Methodology Makes Mobile App Development Efficient?

Unlike usual desktop applications for PC that may work for a couple of years without any redesign, upgrade, etc., mobile apps ought to be significantly more flexible and adaptable for users. Users’ requests may change rather regularly, thus app owners should update the app each time when it requires new changes. Furthermore, the best approach to make a top notch mobile application without extra revisions is to opt for an agile development company.

1. Improves the Mobile App Quality

Since testing and QA is integrated at every sprint throughout the agile scrum process, the app is checked at all stages, ensuring that it is developed according to the set quality standard, thus sealing its future in terms of high performance and acceptance.

2. Greater Client Satisfaction

Since Agile Method is based on involving the clients at every point, they have a clear access to the app progress, as they are given an app demo with every set of newly added features after every sprint.

3. Greater Transparency

Since the practice of agile methodology is based on involving everyone who is a part of the mobile app development process plus the client, everyone knows the exact work that is to be done and its status.

4. Faster Return on Investment

One of the perks that come associated with Agile software development is Faster development and ROI. With the help of Agile, app development companies are able to start the development process much faster, and are able to take up multiple areas of the process at the same time. Add this with the ease of testing the app function by function on the go, and you will get an expedited app development timeline.

5. Rapid Changes

With the use of agile project management with scrum for mobile app development, it is handy to make changes in apps due to the presence of sprints. The best part is that there is no negative impact on the development as the scrum agile development methodology avoids the problem of revision, time and cost.

Now that you know what agile scrum development process stands for and what are the advantages of Scrum, let us now move on to the factors that you need to consider before you adopt it in your mobile app development branch.

Factors that You Should Consider Before Implementing Agile Scrum in Your Mobile App Development Process

1. Do you have a person in your team who can fill in the role of a scrum master?

This is one of the crucial components of agile scrum development. Before you even move on with the Agile scrum methodology, you will have to appoint a scrum master who would be overlooking all the development processes and the challenges that the team faces. The scrum master will be responsible for gathering requirements from the end users. He will also be responsible for holding the scrum meetings and managing the backlogs.

The role of a scrum master is a very crucial one when it comes to development using the Agile methodology. He would be single handedly responsible for the easy completion of the project.

2. Is your team’s role and responsibilities clear?

The success of your mobile app development process based on agile scrum development methodology depends entirely on how clear your team is with the roles they have to play and how willing they are to handle their part independently. If the individual team members are not comfortable with their roles, the project will face a number of execution challenges and you will never be able to take the full advantage of the agile scrum methodology.

3. Will the Agile Scrum Method actually work for your industry?

One of the rules of the agile scrum that we adhere to before even we start working on an agile approach is gauge if it’s necessary at all. Even though Agile Scrum framework is used by a number of industries globally, it is not fit for all the industry types.

The development method works best for small size teams who handle scrum project management with unknown solutions, varying deliverables, and constant interaction with the end users or clients, which makes it ideal for projects that deal in marketing, software development, supply chain silos, or strategic planning.

Processes like accounting, sales, and even the purchasing domain, which deals with established processes or static deliverables won’t really benefit from it. But companies like Software Development, IT, Operations, Marketing, etc., do practice agile and the rate at which they are adapting is increasing at a fast pace.

In the end, if you understand the benefits that agile scrum development methodology will bring with it and you are prepared to change your work process around it, go ahead with it. But ensure that you have got your stakeholders and team on board with the idea.

What are the Agile Scrum process best practices?

1. Always create product backlog and vision together

So what is a product backlog? Well, it is a list of items needed to be added to product development. Now, it is advised to make the product backlog and product vision together because this way, developers and stakeholders both are in the loop and aware of everything.

2. Employ burndown charts for sprints

In order to track the progress of sprints, the experts at Anteelo suggest that you should use burnout charts. They graphically show the amount of work that has been done. What is more, these charts also help in identifying certain risks related to undelivered work.

3. Establish communication guidelines

If there is one thing that can greatly affect the workflow, it is uninterrupted communication. If not tackled, it becomes one of the greatest challenges of scaling agile practices. There is one thing that can be done – develop a communication strategy based on the guidelines for the teams. This is something that can prove to be very useful for remote teams in making their process transparent.

4. Practice stand-ups

A project/product development process speeds up once every member of the team is on the same page and knows the progress of work. These stand-up meetings are also known as ‘daily scrum’ held at the starting of the working day and last for no more than 15 minutes.

Frequently Asked Questions

1. Why use agile scrum methodology?

Agile Scrum methodology is beneficial in the app development process if done right and religiously. It helps in improving mobile app quality, increases client satisfaction, gives immediate ROI, promotes transparency, and so much more.

2. Who Uses Agile Scrum Methodology?

Almost all the companies irrespective of the industry domain take benefits of agile scrum methodology in order to make the management and process more transparent and smooth.

3. What is Scrum methodology in relation to Agile Project Management?

Scrum is a part of the agile project management methodology which includes a team managed by a Scrum Master. The main job of a Scrum Master is to clear away all obstacles to the team completing work.

Here, the work is done in short cycles known as sprints, and a meeting is arranged including the whole team on a daily basis daily to discuss current tasks and roadblocks that need clearing.

A Guide To Get Million Downloads On Your App

Posted on 01/01/202012/06/2021 by Tushar

With the immense amount of competition on both the Google Play Store and Apple Store (over two million and counting), convincing the users to install a new app is very challenging.

How many times have you heard people say that no matter how innovative your idea is, only those rule the stores and users’ devices that have already established themselves in the market?

Having developed a series of apps that have hit the million downloads mark, our team of app developers that it is nothing but hearsay. With the right blend of development and marketing, you can boost mobile app downloads and can help it reach the million mark too.

While you have the support of our app developers to help build a robust app, to bring you up to speed with the marketing front of getting million app downloads, we have curated a guide for your journey.

We have divided this guide into two parts – Pre and Post Launch of your Mobile Application, both of which together will help you get answer to ‘How to Get More App Downloads’.

Let us start with the pre launch part of mobile app promotion strategy first to to ensure that you are prepared to woo the Million of App Store users, even before it has found a place in their devices.

Pre-launch success preparation of your mobile app

Ideally, the efforts you are putting in this stage should start at least 2 months before the actual launch in the stores. Start with the pre launch stage as soon as your app enters the last testing stage.

How to ensure that You Get Maximum App Download From the Technical Front –

Ensure that Your App Doesn’t Crash

Prepare your app in a way that it doesn’t crash even once after it is downloaded on users’ devices. You have to understand that the stores are full of extremely impatient users, who will abandon after even two repeated instances of crashes.

Presence of an Intuitive UI

Run through your App’s UI as many times as possible. Look into how easy it is for your audiences’ demographics to move inside the app, if the UX elements are in line with what they are used to work around. And, finally, it’s easy for them to move inside once they have done the app download deed.

Get Your App Tested Enough

Test your app not just on different devices but also on different operating system versions and in under different network conditions. Don’t even think about rolling it out for downloads, before you have ensured that your app is tested and secured against every permutation and combination of users’ movement.

How to ensure that You Get Maximum App Download From the Marketing Front

Set Up Pre-Launch Ad Campaign

Start with creating anticipation about your app on your website, the social media channels, platform where your people of your app community visit and uses most often. Through all your mediums, prepare your audience for the time to come and how it would change their life.

Don’t show them anything other than your logo at this stage. Your time to showcase your app would come, but it’s not now.

Prepare to Rule the App Store Listings

Your probability of getting maximum app downloads is directly proportional to your placement in your category list. The higher you are in the list, the greater are the chances of visibility and click through rates.

Draft an ASO and PSO strategy. Start getting videos and screenshots made to showcase your creation in the stores, have a set of keywords ready with you, draft content to post in the app description section.

Open your Doors for the Press

Just days, around two weeks before the actual launch of the app, send invites to the press and PR agencies to cover it and post its coming in their dailies. Infact, now would be time when you contact websites that curate lists like ‘App of the day’ and get your name on the lists.

With just two or three weeks to the launch, announce your coming to the Android and Apple Store to the world.

Invest in PPC

Just week before you become available to app downloads, invest in a PPC campaign. Run your ads on Google on every keyword and phrases that are related to your app category and similar to what your users are looking for.

This was it on the Pre Launch part of Taking Your App towards Million downloads. To sum up, you have to create anticipation, promote your application everywhere your audience is and while you are doing this, focus on how the development process is coming up.

Now that you know the pre launch part of ensuring the success of your mobile app before it is launched in the stores, let us look into the post launch parts of its success. This is exactly where all your efforts would pay off.

Post-launch success preparation of your mobile app

The cumulative effort that you had put up until this part both in development and marketing, boils down to this stage, when it’s time to reap the benefits. But your dream to achieve a million downloads still requires time and efforts to become real.

Post Launch efforts to reach million app downloads are in many ways much higher than your pre launch work as now it’s time to deliver the users what you had created anticipation for.

Here are the ways you can pave the last road to your million app download mark –

Submit Your App To Sites Like ProductHunt

There are a number of websites like ProductHunt that allows app developers to post their live app and get helpful feedback, visibility, and more often than not investors for their apps.

While investing in PR agencies and mobile-based news websites will help you sail through the initial growing awareness phase, there are not viable for the long run.

To keep getting downloads in the long run, you will have to make your application visible to people who would be genuinely interested in them.

In-App Advertisements

The next step in the process of ensuring that you have left no door unopened is by investing in in-app advertising models. Get in talks with popular apps that have space to insert your ad in theirs.

By placing your ad in the popular applications, you will be able to increase your visibility score to a great number.

Plan Referrals

One of the major reasons behind Uber’s success is their referral program. They make it beneficial for users to share it with their friends and family, in the form of discounted rides.

Depending on what your app is about, you can offer free lives, discount, free product, or even a gift voucher to the user and their family/ friend who uses their referral code.

Inauguration Discount

If your app belongs to the paid category, you should offer yours for free in the first month or make the prime features available on an off or discount.

While planning on the features that you would be offering for free, make sure you go with the ones that will become coveted after they are not free or on discount anymore. If you make those features free which already comes with no price tag in the same category apps, the users will abandon yours.

Remain Visible

It is very easy for the users, both prospects and the ones who have your app installed with them, to forget about your existence amidst the billions of other in the stores. So, keep reminding them of the value that only you can get them. Continue making appearance in the places they frequent.

These are the ways you can not just pave the road to a million downloads but also ensure the longevity of your mobile application in the overcrowded stores.

Having developed a number of million hits products with the help of our app developers, we understand that while a major portion of your app’s success depends on how far you are able to promote it in the world, it all boils down to your idea and its value offering ability.

If your application is able to offer some value to its users that they cannot get in the same form, ease or speed elsewhere, they will spread the news.

Another thing that matters in defining your app success is how much attention you are paying to your customers’ needs. How responsive you are to their issues and what is your correction time.

So, what really matters in the long run is how well your app is developed, the kind of value it is able to offer, and how responsive you are with your users’ needs.

How AI is likely to transform the Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) Industry

Posted on 16/06/201917/06/2021 by Tushar

The future is Artificial Intelligence (AI), and various industries are investing heavily in creating self-evolving AI applications. The CPG industry (consumer packaged goods) has till now been somewhat dormant and is looking at opportunities to improve efficiency and reduce expenses. Amazon, Microsoft and Facebook have been among the front runners in this domain. Amazon, for instance, spends more than 10% of its yearly revenues on Tech research, whereas top CPG companies are still at 1-2%. This is changing and changing fast, more and more CPG players recognize the hidden power and are putting in robust efforts in the area.

Expansion of AI Application in the CPG Industry

Overall, the possibilities of AI application in the CPG industry is infinite. However, presently the state of AI application is still at a stage of infancy, lagging far behind other sectors such as retail and technology. Even though investment in AI from CPG companies has considerably increased, most companies are still working on identifying the critical applications with high business impact. In 2015, CPG firms, on average, spent 0.66% of revenue on AI application. This percentage is expected to keep increasing until a precise evaluation of their AI maturity is established. This article will discuss the areas in which CPG companies can expect to find successful applications of AI.

Consumer Feedback

Receiving feedback from customers at a massive scale usually involves leveraging natural language processing (NLP) programs for sentiment evaluation. Fundamentally, NLP focuses on teaching a machine to infer the gist of raw text. It is tremendously valuable but more complicated and resource-demanding than processing structured data. Structured data is greatly systematized and easily cognized by machine language. For instance, an AI program will be easily able to compute names, credit card numbers, geo-locations, stock data, etc. Analyzing customer sentiment, on the other hand, requires much more resources. The analysis is only the first step. A comprehensive AI-powered system must also be able to integrate ways to convey this analysis to the company’s customer feedback manager in plain and simple terms so that essential modifications can be made.

For instance, Hitachi devised a way to analyze customer feedback in a bid to reduce food wastage. They conducted a test in a hospital where trolleys mounted with cameras were used to collect trays from patients. The camera clicked images of the leftovers, and machine learning was used to detect the patterns of leftovers. In future servings, these wasted food items were not included in the patients’ meals.

Supply Chain

Another heavily researched field of AI application in the CPG industry is forecasting consumer demands. The data of wasted and sold food items in the past can help businesses efficiently forecast market demands. At the retail level, supermarkets will be able to stock precise amounts of food, considerably reducing wastage and avoiding stock shortages. CPG companies can easily supervise product locations and stock availability using AI tools that will eliminate the need for manual labor and boost effectiveness in logistics.

For example, when a major apparel company was faced with exceeding supply chain expenses, their products were not being able to reach potential customers, making lost sales a critical problem. Even a 1% recovery could provide a substantial increase in its yearly revenue. The company implemented AI to examine its products and discover how in-demand they were in the eyes of the customer. This application of AI was able to forecast precise classifications by store and by item. The AI program was able to predict which store would sell which item, ranking each item in terms of expected demand. Based on this analysis, the company was able to cut down on excess inventory and provide its customers with improved product-availability.

Marketing

A recent Nielsen survey revealed that over seventy per cent of CPG investment in marketing fail to breakeven. The major problem that CPG companies have when it comes to marketing is that they fail to integrate forecasting and planning in order to find the best promotional solutions. AI has the capability to introduce a data-driven method for CPG industry marketers. Powered by historical data, they can easily detect which marketing avenues are expected to generate maximum returns. An efficient program will be able to forecast and make recommendations on whether an in-store marketing tactic like – ‘buy two, get one free offer’ is the most effective for a specific product or brand, or if television advertisements will give the desired results.

AI programs can evaluate thousands of scenarios, incorporating even the littlest amounts of data before providing the ideal suggestion on which promotional channel will deliver the best results. Providing marketers with vital data like this is the only way for CPG companies to implement operationalized marketing projects on a large-scale yet cost-effective manner.

Pitfalls to avoid

CPG companies find themselves in a perfect place to make the most out of the AI boom. The technology is widely accepted as useful, and there are several verified methodologies shaped by other industries. By analyzing companies that are already reaping the benefits of AI application, the key takeaways include –

AI as a means, not an end – CPGs can apply AI to various aspects of their business operations and get augmented results. However, this is only possible when AI application is treated as a means to help workers, not eliminate them. For instance, when applying AI in marketing, any substantial discoveries or predictions should be provided to the experts in the marketing team so that they can then make even more informed decisions.
Streamlined Approach – CPG companies should avoid incorporating AI into every aspect of the business. Launching ten initiatives at once will more than likely result in those projects being stuck in the development phase for the next ten years. Companies must narrow down on one or two aspects of their business in order to have a better chance of delivering mass-scale results.

CPG company heads must stop viewing AI investment as “research projects” and welcome it as a way of carrying out day to day business tasks. Accepting the use of data-driven models in departments where employee intuition has always led operations can be a challenging and combative change. There is lot that CPG companies can achieve by using AI applications to support business but choosing the right initiative may be the key to its successful implementation.

Criterias to Consider When Choosing an Email Hosting Provider

Posted on 02/06/201917/06/2021 by Tushar

For business communications, your first choice of getting in touch is likely to be email. It’s quick, easy and unlike the many messaging apps, everybody has it. You can send it internally and externally, attach documents or add links and use it for all manner of purposes. For a business, an own-domain email address is essential. However, while there are plenty of email services you can use, not all of them are the same. Here, we’ll explain what things you need to look for when finding a business emailhosting provider.

1. Security

As virtually everyone has an email address, email has become a popular tool for cybercriminals. Aside from the mountain of spam that can clog up your inbox and waste hours of your employees’ time, emails are used to defraud, to phish, to spread malware and to ransom computers. For businesses, not only is there the threat that comes from receiving, opening and acting on these emails, there is also the potential of unknowingly passing on malware to recipients, including your customers, from an infected computer. In addition, some cybercriminals may send fake emails in your company’s name to try and scam your customers.

All of these threats can have damaging consequences for your business and its reputation; that’s why you need solutions that will minimise the security risks. These include email scanning and filtering tools that detect spam, phishing and malware, preventing them from arriving in your inbox and stopping infected emails being unwittingly sent. Also, look for emailsigning certificates that both verify the legitimacy of your outgoing emails to customers and secure its contents, including attachments, by encryption. You should also look for email backup services that ensure your communications are never lost and can be easily restored.

For businesses that need to comply with regulations like GDPR and ISO, you may want to consider enterprise-level email. This detects, alerts and blocks sensitive content from being sent, as well as archiving emails and providing powerful auditing tools.

2. Reliability

The sending and receiving of timely communications are vital for companies. When your phone call ends with, ‘I’ll emailit now,’ or your website tells customers, ‘Check your inbox’, most people will sit waiting for the delivery. When it doesn’t happen, it leads to disappointment and sometimes to the loss of business. Companies cannot afford their emails to be hosted on unreliable servers that frequently go down. As a minimum, you should look for a guaranteed 99% uptime and, if needed, choose enterprise email that offers 100% uptime.

3. Accessibility

Whether you are sending or receiving, email should be easy. You should be able to access it in the office or on the go, on computers or mobile devices and via both web portals and email clients such as Outlook. You should also have the option of using both Pop3 and IMAP access. What’s more, your email should be synced so that everything is available on all devices.

Make sure that your hosting provides the level of accessibility your business needs, especially if you have remote employees who need to send and receive away from the office.

4. More than just email

Email services should do much more than let you send and receive communications. They should also provide you with the ability to manage your contact lists, calendars and tasks, share files securely and fully integrate with clients like Outlook. This valuable suite of features makes it easier for your business to communicate and for employees to collaborate and manage their schedules or projects.

5. Adequate storage

Whether it’s for compliance or future reference, many of the emails we receive, together with their attachments, will be kept in our inboxes or archives. Over time, the amount of storage you will need increases, especially if you regularly send or receive large attachments.

It is important, therefore, that you choose a provider that offers email packages with gradually increasing storage. This means, as your storage needs grow, you can upgrade to a larger package without having to migrate your email to a new host.

6. Enough email addresses for your needs

Even very small companies often need multiple email addresses, some for individuals, some for departments (e.g. sales@) or some for specific purposes (e.g. info@ or newsletter@). You will often find various options available from email providers; at Anteelo, for example, our packages range from a single email address to unlimited addresses, so as your company grows, you can upgrade when it is appropriate to do so. Make sure you choose a host that provides packages which offer you enough addresses for your current needs and the flexibility to grow.

7. Easy management

Another consideration is the ease at which you can manage your email service, carrying out such tasks as adding or deleting email addresses or configuring your account settings. The quality of the control panel you use for this purpose is key. Control panels like cPanel and Plesk are ideal for this purpose, enabling you to manage your email from the same interface as you run your website and offering a suite of tools to improve the email service. cPanel, for example, can compress email on delivery, helping minimise the amount of storage you need.

8. 24/7 technical support

As email is essential, it is critical that, should you encounter any problems or need assistance, support is available 24/7. Check carefully that your email provider offers technical support, not just customer service, so that you can be confident an expert can help you out there and then.

Conclusion

Businesses rely on emails to deliver their services. Being almost universally used, they are necessary for both internal and external communications. Choosing the right email hosting solution is crucial to ensure you have a secure, reliable and fully featured service that is accessible, flexible and easy to manage.

Emerging trends in Cloud Computing

Posted on 10/05/201910/06/2021 by Tushar

Barriers to enterprise adoption of cloud computing including security concerns and regulatory compliance continue to crumble. As new cloud computing capabilities mature, such as support for containers and serverless computing, multi-cloud environments are becoming the platform of choice for innovation and digital transformation.

Cloud computing, a fundamental component of the digital trends affecting businesses today, will continue to grow in 2019, driven by these key trends:

Edge computing is on the rise

The proliferation of IoT devices and the need for organizations to deliver near real-time services based on advanced data analytics is pushing the action out to the network edge. The explosion of data at multiple edge locations has profound implications for data management, hybrid cloud models and digital technologies such as machine learning and AI. Sending data collected at the edge back to a single public cloud or to an enterprise data center for processing is ineffective because companies need to be able to make fast decisions as close to the data sources as possible in order to minimize analytics latency.

Multi-cloud management becomes an imperative

In an edge computing world, companies must embrace a multi-cloud strategy in which compute power and analytics capabilities exist in multiple locations but are managed seamlessly across the enterprise landscape so there is no interruption in producing the business results the company needs. Functions such as security, governance and auditing need to run across all platforms, but there are other operations that are better managed within individual clouds, so companies need to sort that out and draw clear lines.

Data management gains new importance

As data becomes increasingly distributed due to the requirements of edge computing, data management across multiple clouds becomes critical. Companies need to understand where the data is located, who has access to it, and how it needs to be processed throughout the data lifecycle.

Regulatory compliance impacts infrastructure

The full ramifications of the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) will be felt in 2019 and are expected to have a significant impact on how companies handle and secure data that falls under regulatory scrutiny. This affects edge and cloud data and requires companies to re-think their data management and data control systems. However, the barriers to running highly regulated applications in the cloud are evaporating and many companies are finding they can meet even these tighter compliance and security standards in a multi-cloud environment.

Data centers continue declines

As more and more workloads move to the cloud — even crown-jewel, mission-critical applications such ERP software — the pressure builds to close enterprise data centers altogether. There will always be some workloads that have to run in an on-premises environment. But companies can move those workloads to a co-location facility that features high-speed, low-latency connections to the cloud to maximize data integration, so companies can still shutter their data center without impacting the business.

Modern operating platform adoption grows

Organizations that simply lifted and shifted existing applications to the cloud are now taking advantage of maturing approaches like serverless computing and containerization to re-factor their applications for a cloud-native environment. While there is still some apprehension as organizations try to figure out the best way to benefit from these new approaches, companies will see a real payoff in application optimization on these new platforms in 2019.

DevOps and security merge

Increasingly, security best practices will be codified into the application development tooling pipeline. In a DevSecOps scenario, security is baked into the agile development process via automated systems. On the operations side, companies will benefit from the improved monitoring and increased visibility provided by cloud service companies. In fact, it is difficult to argue today that a small or mid-size company has better security than cloud providers who have made security a top priority. And third-party cloud-based providers will use machine learning to offer security services like threat detection-as-a-service.

High-performance computing moves to the cloud

There have always been some specialized, high-performance applications that organizations were reluctant to run in the cloud. But cloud providers have built high-performance, GPU-based systems that are now allowing organizations to migrate niche, high-performance applications, thus making it easier to shutter their data centers.

Cloud computing was once associated with shadow IT or with apps that could be opportunistically migrated, but in 2019 we will see multi-cloud environments emerging as strategic platforms for driving innovation.

6 Reasons Why Businesses Should Use The Linux Operating System

Posted on 29/03/201922/06/2021 by Tushar

The Operating system (OS) is the program that manages your serverâ€™s hardware and software resources and which provides the services other applications need to run. Without it, your server would not be able to function. In this post, weâ€™ll look at the Linux OS and explain why it is one of the best choices for businesses.

1. Linux is open source software

One of the biggest advantages of Linux is that it is open source. Unlike Windows, it has not been developed by a single company but by a wide range of contributors. As it is not owned by any individual business, developers are able to take it and make improvements and modifications to it. As a result, Linux has seen constant innovation over its lifetime, where developers have sought to iron out issues and make enhancements that have extended its capabilities. This has led to it being one of the best OS solutions available.

One of the consequences of Linux being open source is that, over time, different versions have been produced. Known as â€˜distributionsâ€™, each of them takes the Linux kernel and builds their own system around it, each with different functions and abilities. This gives users a greater choice when choosing their Linux OS. Some of the well-known ones are Ubuntu, Fedora and CentOS.

2. Itâ€™s free to use

The other major advantage of being open source is that Linux is free to use. As no company owns the software, you cannot be charged a licence fee. Thatâ€™s brilliant news for small and medium-sized businesses who have to be careful with their budgets. This is one of the reasons that Linux hosting is cheaper than Windows hosting: if you use Windows, the cost of the licence will be included in your hosting fees.

3. Itâ€™s perfect for developers

As an open source program, Linux is designed to be played around with. This means that companies with specific requirements are able to give it to their developers to make business-driven modifications which they can trial in cloud-based testing environments. This is exceptionally useful if you are developing a new application or if you have an existing application that isnâ€™t fully compatible with your Linux distribution. The only proviso is that any improved version that comes out of the development process must also be open source and free for others to use.

4. A robustly secure OS

While no piece of software currently stands invincible against cyber attacks, Linux has consistently proved itself to be highly resilient. Again, this is partly due to its open source origins. With so many developers working on it around the world, any security holes are spotted and dealt with very swiftly with the quick release of security patches.

The other advantage is that Linux is much less of a priority for cybercriminals. Although it is widely used on web servers, it doesnâ€™t feature much in other forms of computing. There are far more home computers to hack into and the vast majority of these are using Windows and Mac OS. This makes them far more appealing prey to the hacker â€“ especially as PCs and laptops are generally less well secured than business servers.

5. A fast performing OS

As a business, you want your server to perform as quickly as possible, whether thatâ€™s to deliver blisteringly fast website loading times or to run big data analyses. Although there are a lot of factors involved when it comes to speed, your choice of OS does play a part.

Anyone who owns a Windows PC will be aware that it can get bloated and sluggish over time. There is always a plethora of background processes hogging the resources and a regular need to defrag the drive and the registry.

What makes Linux faster is that it doesnâ€™t format its drive using NTFS and nor does it have a registry. So, two of the things which are renowned for slowing Windows down are completely absent from the Linux make up.

6. Consider your app choices

When comparing Linux with Windows, you also need to think beyond the operating system itself and to the wider software ecosystem. If you opt into a specific system, you may be restricted in the types of software you can use. Just as an Android phone canâ€™t run an iOS app (and vice versa), there are certain apps that can only run on a Windows or Linux server â€“ this even includes your choice of control panel app. If youâ€™re a big fan of cPanel, for example, youâ€™ll be disappointed to know itâ€™s not compatible with Windows servers.

When making your choice, you also need to consider that the open source nature of Linux has led to the development of a multitude of open source applications which can run on it. These are also free to use.

Conclusion

Linux is an exceptionally popular and widely used server operating system. Itâ€™s free to use, continually updated and comes in a range of distributions, each offering their own unique features. Itâ€™s a highly secure system, fast performing and works with a huge range of other free, open source applications.

Website Loading Times: 4 Ways They Affect Your Business

Posted on 28/03/201922/06/2021 by Tushar

Hereâ€™s a question for you: whatâ€™s the first thing any visitor notices on your website ? Your header? Your logo? Your headline? The answer is none of these; itâ€™s your loading time. Before a visitor sees any of your content, theyâ€™ll watch your website load. The expectation is that this will happen almost instantaneously. If it doesnâ€™t, theyâ€™ll start to leave and this will impact on your conversion rates. But there are other reasons why a slow loading site causes problems: it increases your bounce rate, it makes your site harder to crawl, it gives a poorer experience for your visitor and, perhaps most crucially, it lowers your ranking on search engines. In this post, weâ€™ll look at the importance of site speed for your website.

1. Google uses site speed as a ranking factor

Googleâ€™s mission to provide users with the best possible search results means it is actively demoting slow loading websites. It doesnâ€™t consider it good business to send visitors to websites that take too long to load as it reflects badly on itself. So, even if your content is great, your ranking in search results can still suffer. And this means less traffic and fewer sales.

Whatâ€™s more, this applies to searches done on mobiles as well as on computers, so if your desktop site runs fine but your mobile site is sluggish, youâ€™re still going to rank lower.

2. Site speed affects search engine crawling

If you want all your content to be searchable on the internet, search engines have to discover whatâ€™s there. This is done through what is known as site crawling, where a search bot will go to your homepage and follow all the links until it has made an inventory of every page it can find. These pages and their content are then indexed so they can be searched for.

When undertaking a crawl, a search engine needs to send requests to your server to receive information about your content. However, as each request uses up a part of your serverâ€™s resources, search engines are reluctant to send too many in case they slow your website down for genuine visitors. If your loading times are slow or you have a poor server response time, then, to prevent overburdening your website, search engines will crawl fewer pages. As a result, not all your pages may get indexed or updates to existing pages may not get noticed.

This should not be a big problem for small websites, however, if you have a large website that is constantly adding new content or if you have a significant amount of older content, it could be an issue. One way to improve crawling efficiency is to improve your site structure. Delete outdated content, eradicate any broken links, put in redirects where necessary and tidy up your menus and categories.Â This will cut down on the amount of unnecessary crawling a search engine has to do, so it can focus on the content that counts.

3. Faster sites have higher conversion rates

While studies into the effects of site speed have come up with different figures, they all agree on one thing: the faster a website, the higher its conversion rates. HubSpot looked at 12 different case studies and showed that a 1 second delay in loading times reduces conversion and revenue by 7% and page views by 11%. Similar results were shown for bounce rates: the faster the loading times, the lower the rate. A page that loaded in 9.9 seconds had a 58% bounce rate, compared to 12.8% for a page that loaded in 2.4 seconds.

This goes to show that even the smallest delay can impact your bottom line. Quite simply, the longer people have to wait, the fewer of them are going to stick around all the way to the checkout. To grab those sales and remain competitive, you have to have a website that loads faster than your competitors.

4. A faster website equals happier users

If you want visitors to stick around until they purchase something, you have to provide them with a great experience. This is especially so if you want to retain those customers over the long term. Studies have shown that site speed is an integral part of creating a good user experience â€“ this is why Google places so much importance on it when ranking sites. The statistics for conversion rates and bounce rates back this up.

If you want to improve your brand reputation and increase customer loyalty, making your website faster should be one of the things that you consistently try to achieve.

How to improve your site speed

The first stage for anyone wanting to make their site faster is to discover its current desktop and mobile loading times and to find out where improvements need to be made. You can find this out easily by using the free Google PageSpeed Insights Tool. Just type in your URL and it will give your site marks out of 100 for its desktop and mobile loading times. The higher the mark, the better. Of more value, it will also identify the issues which are causing your loading times to be slow and provide you with a list of modifications that can make it load even quicker. These will include things such as caching, compression and image optimisation.

Another issue which can affect your loading times is the performance of your web server. This can be due to your host using slower hardware or not configuring the server for optimum speed. For those on a shared hosting plan, it can also be due to other users hogging all the server resources and your host not dealing with the matter.

Conclusion

As you can see, slow loading speeds can affect your site in all kinds of ways: lowing search engine ranking, preventing pages from being indexed, reducing conversion rates and revenue, and negatively impacting the user experience. Hopefully, the information provided here will help you check your own site speed and put measures in place to make it load faster.

7 Mistakes to Avoid When Starting an eCommerce Business

Posted on 27/03/201922/06/2021 by Tushar

If you are investing time, effort and money in setting up an online store, you want to make sure it is successful. Often the focus for startups is on the products being sold and creating a website with the right brand image. While these are obviously important considerations, there are other matters which if not handled correctly can cause your fledgeling business to fail. Here are seven mistakes that eCommerce business should avoid.

1. Ineffective product photography

For all its convenience, the big drawback of purchasing anything online is that consumers donâ€™t get to see the product in real life. For most consumers, the biggest clue to what a product looks like is the photograph. The product image, therefore, is crucial to achieving a sale. Indeed, for 82% of Netflix viewers, it is the main factor in helping them choose a movie â€“ so much so, that the company now serves different images to different audiences.

One of the mistakes new eCommerce business companies make is to overlook the importance of the product image. Photographs not only have to be of a high quality, but they also need to be resizable and show the product in a way that is compelling. For many products, a single image will not suffice. You may need to have a series of images showing the product from all angles and others which zoom in to show features and details. This is what customers want and those stores which provide this are going to get more of the sales.

2. Badly written product descriptions

If a product image catches the visitorâ€™s eye, the next stage of their purchasing journey will be to read the product description. Although no-one is looking for a long-winded essay, generally, customers do want more than a couple of lines of text. The more information you can tell them about a product the more they are likely to find a feature or a benefit that makes them want to buy it.

Any text should be in plain English with technically accurate spelling, punctuation and grammar. Details given must be accurate and include things such as size, colour, weight, energy efficiency ratings and part numbers.

3. Dodgy customer reviews

After images and product descriptions, one of the other major factors that help consumers make purchasing decisions are customer reviews. Reviews are increasingly important as they let potential customers discover what others think about a product, warts and all.

However, as the BBC recently highlighted, there are some ecommerce business that will write 5-star reviews of the products they sell or pay individuals to write 5-star reviews for them. Consumers, though, are a sceptical lot: just as they are alerted by gushing product descriptions, they are equally as suspicious of a product with a perfect run of 5-star reviews. The moral is a simple one â€“ donâ€™t be tempted into writing 5-star reviews of the products you sell, not only is it likely to get you into hot water, it can have the opposite effect on sales to what you intended.

4. Aggressive returns policies

From a legal point of view, online customers in most countries have the legal right to return goods bought online. In the UK, for example, the Distance Selling Act means that anything purchased online from a business (not from private individuals) can be returned within 14 days of delivery. They then have 14 days to return the products and the refund must be given within 14 days of their return.

While these protections are statutory, many ecommerce business have other clauses in their policy designed to make it difficult to return the products â€“ such as making the customers pay for return postage or requiring special repackaging conditions. While some of these conditions are understandable, the main consideration should be on how these affect purchasers. If your returns policy puts customers off buying from you, it will lose you sales. Offering free returns may improve overall sales and help retain customers, even if it is inconvenient and costly.

5. Hard to navigate site structure

It can be a challenge just to get customers visiting your site. When they do, you want to make the most of the opportunity while they are there. You canâ€™t do this, however, if they canâ€™t easily find what they are looking for.

A user-friendly website enables customers to find products without any hassle. The easier it is, the more chance they will buy from you. For this reason, make sure you have your products correctly categorised and that you use menus and search bars. The search feature, in particular, should enable visitors to refine their search by things like price, colour, size, brand, etc.

6. Complicated checkouts and unexpected surprises

You will be surprised by the number of people who abandon a sale at the checkout. There are two main reasons for this. One of the big issues is that some eCommerce business companies hide their shipping costs until the very last part of the process. When customers suddenly see how much more things are going to cost, they bail out of the sale. It is always better to include shipping in your product pricing and state that you offer free shipping. If you canâ€™t do this, be upfront and transparent about what the costs are before customers get to the checkout.

The other chief culprit is an over-complex checkout process. Forcing customers to register on your site, fill in detailed forms or having list after list of last-minute bargains thrown in front of them can leave some customers just to click on the X. If you have a sale in the bag, donâ€™t lose it by making customers jump through unnecessary hoops. If you want this information, ask for it after the sale has been completed.

7. Poor website loading times

This is a problem we have mentioned numerous times before: a slow loading website sells fewer products. Even something as small as a one second delay has been shown to reduce conversion rates and website revenue by 7% and cut the number of page views by 11%. Quite simply, in the age of superfast broadband and 4G, consumers donâ€™t wait around for a hanging website to load.

With increased competition meaning ever-smaller profit margins, improving your site speed by one second can be the difference between success and failure. To solve this problem, visit Googleâ€™s PageSpeed Insights Tool to discover how fast your site is loading and what you can do to improve your siteâ€™s speed. In addition, make sure your site is hosted with a service provider that uses high-performance servers that are optimised for website hosting, this can make a real difference.

Conclusion

As you can see, there are a lot of mistakes that new eCommerce sites can make which can have a negative impact on the performance of their business. Hopefully, the information provided here will help you avoid them and give your site the best chance of success.

What are the differences between IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, CaaS, and MaaS?

Posted on 26/03/201922/06/2021 by Tushar

Confused by all the different types of â€˜as a Serviceâ€™? Itâ€™s not surprising. When youâ€™re considering a managed service, youâ€™ll frequently come across a range of IT acronyms, such as IaaS, PaaS and SaaS. Although youâ€™ll soon learn what each one stands for, understanding what they mean and what kind of services each one provides can be a challenge. To help you get your head around the concepts and be able to differentiate between each service, this post will provide an overview of the main aaS types you are likely to find.

Iaas: Infrastructure as a Service

Infrastructure as a Service is when the service provider supplies the preconfigured hardware and equipment you need to run your businessâ€™ IT system. In this way, you lease the use of hardware rather than owning it, and the service provider takes responsibility for the effective operation and maintenance of the equipment.

IaaS often includes the use of a server and storage, as well as failover server replication, remote backups, load balancing and firewalls.

In most situations, customers are charged on a pay as you go basis, where the more resources you use, the more you pay â€“ with the advantage that you can be flexible when it comes to scaling up or down. As this is the lowest level type of cloud service, infrastructure software, such as an operating system, are not usually included so you would need to provide your own.

PaaS: Platform as a Service

Platform as a Service goes one level higher than IaaS, providing both the hardware infrastructure and the web applications that organisations need. Using this kind of service means companies can often save on the cost of acquiring these applications for themselves and do away with the burden of deploying them or managing them. The savings come from the fact that the software licenses are owned by the service provider and the costs for these can be shared out among those who opt to use them.

One of the advantages of using PaaS is that you can be guaranteed that the applications are entirely compatible with the service providerâ€™s system and, being based in the cloud, they are also web accessible.

Users will have total control over their apps and, for some solutions, may also take control over the hosting environment. However, as IaaS is part of PaaS, they wonâ€™t have to deal with the more complex burdens of managing the infrastructure.

Benefits for PaaS for enterprises include a quick time to market and speedy solutions for application design, development and testing. It can also provide these services significantly cheaper than doing them in-house.

SaaS: Software as a service

Software as a Service is essentially software made easy. Service providers offer a range of on-demand applications, such as enterprise resource planning (ERP), HR, customer relationship management (CRM), payroll and productivity apps like Microsoft Office. Subscribing SaaS users can access these easily through an internet browser.

One of the main advantages of SaaS is that the management of the applications and the server they are housed on, together with the storage and backup of data, are all taken care of by the service provider. In addition, as they are cloud-based applications, it enables users to log in to the services from any compatible device with an internet connection and ensures that data can be easily synced across devices so that everyone has the latest versions of files and documents.

CaaS: Communication as a Service

Investment in the creation of an enterprise level, unified communication system can be very expensive when you include components such as email, telephony, online chat, VPN and video conferencing.

Communication as a Service can bring several benefits to businesses. Firstly, it removes the burden of managing the services by transferring responsibility to the service provider and, as a consequence, it saves money by removing the need to employ staff to undertake that management. Also, should an issue arise with one of the communication systems, the task of dealing with it is left to the service provider who will be in a much better position to provide continuity of service through their redundant, failover resources.

MaaS: Monitoring as a Service

With so many critical applications being moved to the cloud, monitoring the performance of cloud-based applications has become crucial to ensure that businesses do not suffer from unnecessary downtime. This has led to the emergence of Monitoring as a Service (MaaS), which removes the need for expensive in-house tools to keep an eye on applications and infrastructure and replaces them with a service provider hosted, internet-based, monitoring dashboard.

This enables users to monitor the status of their critical apps on a pay as you go basis and, crucially for many businesses, can be accessed over the internet.

Conclusion

As you can see, there are clear differences between these types of cloud services, hopefully, this post has given you a better understanding of what each type is and how it can benefit your organisation.