These days, faster is just not fast enough. No matter the subject matter, we want it faster, cheaper, and easier than last time. This ranges from food orders, all the way to enterprise software purchases. Start-ups like Eat Club, FixIt, and Uber are all great examples of that. But what about you? What about the eager to please company that simply wants to launch their next great e-commerce website?
One of the most resonating quotes I heard while at IRCE 2014 was from Kim Hansen, Senior VP of E-Commerce Marketing at Winston Brands. She said, “It is easier to step out of a bad marriage than to move off of an e-commerce platform.” This was of course a very humorous way to get the point across… E-commerce platforms are not making your life easier. Not one bit.
It’s been our mission from the start to change that!
3 – Integrate with Anything, Anytime
Let’s face it… Unless you’re selling self-made products or services and on a small scale, you’ll need to integration with something. There are all kinds of possible ERP’s, CRM’s, e-mail campaign managers, marketing automation systems, and other solutions that you might need to integrate in order to have a seamless experience for yourself or your customers.
Your e-commerce system should allow for this, and not just by providing a one-size-fits all solution that doesn’t quite fit your usecase. The previously mentioned systems all allow for and often do get customized quite a bit. This makes integration using an out of the box plug-in challenging to put it nicely.
We have an extensibility model that allows you to connect your online store to any other system. Hotcakes will be able to talk to that system at all of the key events that you need, and vice versa. This isn’t just a marketing statement either.
Our founders have rolled out more than their fair share of online stores themselves. Our carefully architected extensibility model is based upon the thought you’ve had hundreds of time over, “Why couldn’t the platform just do it this way? This would be so much easier.”
2 – Write Less Code
Any developer that’s worth their salary will be looking for the easiest way possible to solve a problem. As a developer, there needs to be a quick, easy-to-learn, and well-documented way to plug-in to the framework at hand.
Many platforms use words like extensible, plug-ins, apps, and module – very much the same way we do. However, what they don’t tell you is: (1) how difficult it is to simply get started writing code, and (2) how many things there are that you simply cannot do without changing their platform.
Most of the popular platforms today were written far before extensibility was really a feature. Therefore, their resulting extensibility model was largely built as an afterthought.
With Hotcakes, we took your needs and desires very seriously from the start. We want your developers and designers to worry about the thing that matters most to them… THEIR code. They shouldn’t have to waste hours upon hours simply figuring out how to use a system. This is a waste of everyone’s time.
Developers and designers using Hotcakes not only get thorough documentation, but videos, code samples, and even sample Visual Studio solutions. The only thing that they have to do in most cases is add a reference to the other API, and write the mapping code that they’re worried about. From there, it’s a simple configuration update after they build their code. Easy!
1 – Stand Out From the Competition
Designers and marketers should all pay very close attention here…
Nothing is worse than either deciding to or needing to use a platform, only to find out that your store will end up looking like everyone else using that platform. Sure… You can change the colors, logo, and make it look like your brand.
What if you could make your chosen e-commerce platform embrace your branding instead of the other way around?!
Web designers using Hotcakes will very quickly find our standards-based approach to be far superior to anything they’ve used in the past. You can literally change 100% of the HTML that your customers will see. Yes. EVERY single line of HTML and CSS can be changed, kept, or deleted at your discretion. You can even include any kind of display frameworks or plugins that you want.
Like previously mentioned, we make this easy for people new to Hotcakes. We also made the act of dynamic designs MUCH easier. Gone are the days of memorizing or keeping a cheat sheet list of proprietary tokens posted on your wall. Your web designers will get intellisense that allows them to browse and use any property that they need, without guessing.
Do You Want More?
We know you do. It’s one thing for someone like me to write an article. It’s another thing altogether to be able to back it up with a solution. We are available to answer your questions and even give you a personalized demo. All you have to do is ask. We’ll take care of the rest.
Give Me a Demo!