e-Commerce Engineering

Most e-Commerce agencies focus on only one or two technology platforms. We don't work like that. We believe that the same challenges and the same opportunities exist regardless of the chosen platform. Either as a discrete service or as part of the full lifecycle of site build, Ratio is there to guide you through platform selection, making the right development choices, and delivering the platform built, tested and launched

SAP Hybris

One of the most powerful, scalable and adaptable enterprise e-commerce platforms, with solid back office integration capabilities, and from version 1905 the incredibly flexible Angular-based storefront capabilities of Spartacus.

Combined with other SAP products, Hybris unleashes truly powerful omni-channel opportunities, and can form the backbone of your website, in store sales and marketing effort.

SAP Hybris remains our platform of choice for large scale, complex, B2B and B2C e-commerce, but it comes at a price in terms of licensing costs and development and support team requirements.

Magento 2

Adobe's Magento bridges the gap between high-cost, high-end enterprise systems and the smaller less advanced products.

We like Magento for it's ease of use, powerful bundled core features, support for multiple storefronts out of the box - giving it true multi-language, multi-currency and multi front end views capability. Magento has good support for RTL languages making it a good choice for sites that need to be in or include Arabic as a language interface.

Available as an Open Source no license fee solution, or as a licensed version with Adobe support and additional features

PrestaShop

As an Open Source solution PrestaShop offers many of the benefits and features of Magento, but at a lower overall cost and with less intensive development effort required.

It shares many of Magento's multiple store features, but in our view lacks the scalability of Magento and integration to back office systems like ERP, accounting or CRM can be more difficult and less reliable.

However PrestaShop remains a great platform for e-commerce and web shops that do not need the complexity of an enterprise system, but do need a fast, feature-rich solution

Salesforce Commerce Cloud

Salesforce Commerce Cloud, formerly Demandware, is an enterprise Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) e-commerce platform, meaning it is only available as a cloud solution, hosted by Salesforce.

Popular with fashion retail clients, it is a powerful platform when combined with other Salesforce solutions such as CRM and Marketing Cloud, however it has relatively high license and operating costs, and takes time to develop and launch, partly due to Salesforce's requirements for a pre-launch audit process before go live.

Salesforce CC comes with some powerful sophisticated features, including a built-in personalisation layer and machine learning capabilities via Commerce Insights / Einstein.

OpenCart

In the same open source market position as PrestaShop and sharing the same PHP-based technology, there's actually not much to chose between them beyond personal choice.

OpenCart offers the same extensible capabilities and a marketplace of plugins and extensions (many unfortunately of dubious quality).

With a nice WordPress-like feel to the admin interface, OpenCart is easy to use and manage for administrators and store owners with limited technical knowledge, but like its cousin PrestaShop, it is not the right tool in most cases for large, complex product catalogues or outlets with many 1,000s of SKUs.

WordPress + WooCommerce

WooCommerce brings the simplicity and usability that has made WordPress the powerhouse of the web, to e-Commerce.

As a plugin to the WordPress core, WooCommerce is easy to administer for low technology retailers and businesses with limited administrative resources. It's also easy to build and develop for software engineers, and to create a totally customised look and feel.

However WooCommerce also shares all the downsides of WordPress; a lack of fundamental security and limited reliability at scale, and poor support for multiple languages. WooCommerce is a great solution for small e-shops and stores, but unsuitable for anything more advanced.

Shopify

For us Shopify represents the simplest and fastest way to get your store or products online.

What it lacks in flexibility and functionality, it makes up in time to market; however as another Software-as-a-Service platform, it restricts what you can do and how you can do it to a significant degree.

Ideal for simple sites with just a few products, we can help you to extend it's capabilities with custom-built plugins - but just be aware, you could outgrow it fast if you product line grows or your business requirements get more complex

Custom Development

There are times when what you have or what you need, requires something completely custom.

Whether it is PHP or Java-based, AngularJS, ReactJS or Ruby, we can support you with custom development and custom payment integration.

Building an e-commerce system from the ground up isn't for the faint-hearted; but with modern concepts like headless e-Commerce, building a front-end application on top of an e-Commerce CMS offers powerful flexibility and limitless design freedoms

Mobile Apps

With today's visitor and buyer behaviours, building your e-Commerce platform 'mobile first' is essential; but there comes a point when responsive design reaches its limits and the smoothest and most effective way to deliver you services is via a mobile app.

Whether that's through deploying native apps for iOS and Android, or taking advantage of cross-platform capabilities with React Native, Xamarin or Flutter, we can support and guide you into making the right decisions and then architect, develop and launch your apps.

Project-focused or Dedicated team

In addition to our developers delivering your site as part of a full service project, we provide pop-up teams for development projects working to your specifications; and hire and resource dedicated long-term application development teams, based on your skills requirements and working directly for, and managed by, you

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