/Insights/Evaluating web design and development agencies? Ask about their partnership network

Evaluatingwebdesignanddevelopmentagencies?Askabouttheirpartnershipnetwork

Apr 5, 2023

5 min. read

As the Associate Director of Partnerships here at Codal, I cannot stress this enough: Web design and development agencies should have—no, must have—well-established relationships with a wide range of technology providers in order to deliver the best possible results for their clients.

Why technology partnerships matter

Ecommerce stores, marketing websites, mobile apps, and internal business applications require a variety of third-party integrations to function. Your standard online store, for example, needs functionality to support payment transactions, inventory management, tax calculations, shipping, product search, customer support, and so on. Rather than constructing these features from scratch, merchants purchase and install pre-built services for their site, saving time, money, and effort in the long run.

However, when these services aren’t implemented or managed properly, the digital product—along with the greater business strategy—takes a hit. Departments are held back from reaching their goals by slow deployment times, inefficient workflows, website downtime, bugs, and errors. All of the cogs in the machine must work together seamlessly for the product to operate correctly and scale alongside business growth.

When connecting one technology to another, whether it be an eCommerce platform to CRM or data analytics tool to IoT device, obstacles are bound to emerge—as every organization has its own unique technological infrastructure, processes, and limitations. The key is to work with experts who have integrated these tools before, learned the ins and outs of the technology, and established a relationship with the third-party’s internal development team over years of working on projects together.

Here’s a quick example of what I’m talking about: When building an online store for the world famous popcorn retailer, Garrett Popcorn , we leveraged our partnership with ShipperHQ to meet the brand’s complex gifting and multi-recipient shipping needs. You can learn more about that collaboration here .

Speaking from experience

Over the past 13 years, Codal has developed partnerships with many industry-leading technology providers by collaborating on all kinds of digital strategies for our clients—from DTC storefronts and B2B sales portals, to workflow management platforms and internal compliance tools.

Some of our key partners include:

Shopify

BigCommerce

Buy with Prime

Accumatica

Stripe

Avalara

Algolia

Shipstation

ShipperHQ

Contentful

Yotpo

Klaviyo

Our partnerships in action

Codal plans and executes top-to-bottom digital transformations for enterprise companies, where we analyze their legacy technologies, make recommendations for superior third-party platforms, tools, and services, then implement and manage those solutions to enable long-term growth and success.

Our extensive partnership network allows us to recommend the best solutions, based on the client’s unique goals, requirements, timeline, and budget. Once the right solution has been identified, we leverage years of experience working with that technology provider to develop the integration with maximum speed and efficiency. For the client, this means:

Realizing the technology’s full potential.

Going to market faster.

Experiencing fewer errors and redundancies.

Having a quick-fix solution to any problems that arise.

Focusing more time and resources on other areas of their business.

One of our more recent digital transformation projects was for GOREWEAR, a leading manufacturer and retailer of outdoor gear for runners, climbers, and cyclists. You can learn all about the project here .

With GOREWEAR, Codal needed to migrate 5 brands across 14 countries into a unified, scalable technology stack. In our initial Discovery stage, we identified BigCommerce as the optimal platform for a headless implementation with Contentful to provide eCommerce functionality for each brand and locale under the GOREWEAR umbrella. So we migrated the business from its legacy eCommerce platform to BigCommerce, integrated key third-party technologies, and trained team members on how to utilize the platform.

Codal has a long history of collaborating with BigCommerce on successful digital transformation projects. Our team understands the platform’s wide range of capabilities, from its built-in features and functionality to its API infrastructure. At the annual BigCommerce Agency Partner Awards, we’ve been recognized as Agency Partner of the Year, and have won the award for Best User Experience Design two years in a row. We also regularly host events with the BigCommerce team, participate in beta testing for new features, and make recommendations to improve the platform.

The speed, efficiency, and ultimate success of our eCommerce platform migration for GOREWEAR would not have been possible without the long-standing professional relationship that we’ve developed with BigCommerce over the years.

Our partners also help our team to stay educated on a wide range of new trends and technologies. We regularly host “Lunch & Learns” with experts from partner companies, where our designers, engineers, project managers, strategists, and other team members can ask questions, learn about product updates, make improvement suggestions, and discover new ways to add value for our clients.

Wrapping up

The agency-merchant relationship is all about trust. Well-established partnerships with leading technology providers is a key indicator of a qualified, versatile web design and development agency. So if you’re looking at agencies to help build your brand a new digital experience, modernize your outdated legacy systems, or completely reimagine your technological ecosystem, don’t forget to ask them:

What is your process for recommending, implementing, and managing third-party platforms, tools, and services?

Which technology companies do you partner with and how long have you worked with them?

What are some of the challenges you’ve faced integrating those solutions, and how did you work with the partner’s internal team to overcome them?

Long story short: To accelerate growth for your business, collaborate with digital experts who understand your business, the technologies it needs, and how to get the most out of those technologies.

Topic

Experience design

Product engineering

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