Managed e-commerce

Our experience over several years of delivering natural and paid search campaigns has shown that one of the recurrent obstacles to success is the inability of the site’s manager to persuade the development team (who may well be part of another company) to implement – in anything like a timely fashion – the changes we have specified.

Both natural and paid search campaigns require quite early changes to be made to a Web sites and experience has shown that arranging for the development resources to be available precisely when needed can be difficult and unreliable. We have experience of some clients having to suffer a lead time of a few months in order to get a few days' development time. This situation is often worse when the Web site is maintained and supported by a third party organization.

As a consequence, ivantage offers a managed e-commerce service which enables us to both create designs for good search results and implement them quickly. We can propose different ways of charging for the service. One is on the basis of charging a percentage of the increased revenues resulting from the optimisation; this makes it effectively self-financing.

Details of the service

ivantage has established a strong partnership with Verio, an NTT Communications company, who supply world-class hosting and server management services of all types and sizes. We can either build complete e-commerce solutions on this infrastructure or re-locate existing ones so as to take over their maintenance and development.

Our development resources are located in both the UK and Pakistan. Using our UK resources to handle all interactions with our UK clients, including the design, specification and documentation of the services to be provided, we then deliver exceptional value by assigning particular development work to our team in Lahore. By means of NTT’s high-speed worldwide communications network, our Pakistan team have the same access as do our UK resources to the development, testing and production systems.

As soon as a client’s system has been commissioned and is delivering a reliable production service, our search marketing team can start to issue the change requests which specify the updates to the site’s contents necessary to improve its visibility in the search engine results pages (SERPs). Change requests no longer have to be issued in batches – as is common when a third party development team has to implement the changes we specify – so we can very quickly see the effects of particular, individual changes and use what we observe as feedback to guide the search marketing activity.

Before taking an interest in search marketing, many clients do not anticipate the scale of the response which may result from some quite small and specific changes to page design, both in natural and paid search processes. If such subtleties are buried in a batch of changes all implemented at the same time by developers with little interest in the outcome, their individual effects can be missed so as to conceal the entrance to many optimisation possibilities.

Similarly, when a specific conversion rate optimisation project has been started, it is important to activate the highly converting page variants as soon as they have been identified so as to avoid wasting the potential traffic due to a delayed implementation.

By using ivantage’s managed e-commerce service, our clients therefore benefit not only from the controlled costs of the service itself, but also from the greatly improved efficiency of the search marketing processes which deliver measurable and profitable results far more quickly than would otherwise have been the case.

Contact ivantage to discuss the possibility of managed e-commerce for your site