In October, our web development team made the journey to Leeds to attend the first-ever Aero Commerce Partner Day. It was a great day filled with information about exciting updates coming to the platform, with opportunities to meet the Aero team, as well as other agencies and partners working with the company.
What is Aero Commerce?
Aero Commerce is a powerful ecommerce platform designed with the evolving needs of online retailers in mind, and to solve many of the problems that other competing platforms have, from lack of customisation to poor performance and expensive running costs.
What Were the Most Exciting Things We Learned?
Aero is a relative newcomer to the ecommerce ecosystem but their team is stacked with a wealth of development experience across other leading ecommerce platforms. They have learned lessons from other platforms that have common issues or drawbacks — such as Magento’s requirement for expensive hosting infrastructure — and set out to solve those issues from the very inception of the platform. As a result, they have built a clean and modern ecommerce solution fit for today.
What was so exciting about speaking to the Aero team was the passion they all have for the project; almost every decision they make as they expand and improve Aero’s capabilities is made with the end user in mind, be that the developer or the merchant, and frequently both. New features planned for 2023 will make it even quicker to deploy an Aero site for a client and for the client to manage more of that site themselves without needing to know or understand code — so we can’t wait to see where it goes next.
What Opportunities Does Aero Commerce Present to Business Owners?
Aero is blazingly fast, and as such is ideally suited to merchants with large product catalogues that might cause other platforms to struggle as they deal with large databases — or increase the cost per month.
Aero works just as well on smaller catalogues but it does have higher development costs than say Shopify or WooCommerce. In considering it for a smaller store selling just a few products you would need to weigh up costs at the outset against the possibility of expansion in the future. Pound for pound, we still feel it is a better investment than other competing large-scale platforms such as Magento.
It is also completely customisable with relative ease — custom development may be required but any features that your business needs can be added, and the support from Aero themselves for merchants and developers is excellent.
Who Is The Best Fit For An Aero Commerce Website?
The best fit for Aero are clients with decent-sized product catalogues of around 1,000 items or more and who are likely already active with ecommerce but seeking a modern solution for their business. Business to Consumer clients will probably find the most benefits “out of the box”, but it works very well for Business to Business too, with the addition of some modules (Aero’s versions of apps/plugins).
For example, Castors Online has found huge success with the migration to Aero Commerce as a B2B client, with 2022 set to be a record year for online sales. With the launch of their Aero Commerce site, the business almost instantly reaped the benefits of the future-proof solution, seeing an 81% increase in revenue and a 143% increase in conversion rates within the first three months of launching.
As the pricing model for Aero is a monthly fee based on your site’s turnover, having a ready-built customer base in place will enable you to hit the ground running but Aero’s speed benefits should help your site climb search rankings quite quickly if it was brand new.
What Other Platforms Could Be The Right Fit For Your Business?
If you are just looking to dip your toes into ecommerce for your business, Shopify or WooCommerce both offer great starting points with lower costs of entry. Our team has years of experience working with these platforms and producing excellent results for our clients.
Here at teclan, we have successfully migrated many of our client’s websites to new and improved responsive platforms with state-of-the-art features. We can help you find the right ecommerce solution for your business, whether it be Aero’s new powerful platform, or a more established solution. Contact us to find out how we can get your ecommerce website up and running, or smoothly migrate your content to a progressive platform.
