Our Process
We use industry standard web design and development best practices to ensure your ecommerce marketplace will be fast, safe, and secure.
Building the tool is often the easy part. The real value is ensuring the tool adequately addresses and fits customer needs. i4 Marketplace has a customer-centric approach to managing projects and measuring results. This keeps you focused on managing the business rather than the project. We deal with the technology, so you don't have to.
We offer professional project management services to ensure your business objectives are achieved, through the utilization of proven methodologies. We're with you every step of the way throughout the entire lifecycle of the digital tool, from launch to steady state. This lowers your risk and increases your rewards. Because on-time, at-cost, and error-free is just the beginning. In the end, it's all about the customer.
Because we have decades of experience in both IT and digital marketing, i4 Marketplace is able to leverage standard industry best practices to ensure we deliver a solution that makes sense for both you and your customers.
Our assessment practice includes the following:
- Opportunity analysis and client on-boarding
- Product information and line card review
- Solution architecture design
- Initial implementation and migration plan
- Ongoing operational and management plan
- User engagement plan (including training and support)
It's critical that the creative design of your marketplace accurately and adequately reflects your brand. More than each of the component manufacturers, your customers are loyal to you. This means that your marketplace must reflect the various brand elements (logo, verbiage, creative theme, etc.) of your existing corporate website and associated sales and marketing materials. We will work with you to adjust any elements as needed to fulfill your creative vision, and ensure a simple and straightforward customer experience.
But design is not just about generating creative. It’s also about the associated technical specifications and style guide that bring that creative vision to life, and serve as reference documents for the developers who will build the site. This helps the team to work in a systematic way—from abstract concepts in the vision/scope document down to specific technical details in the design process. It also helps to maintain the correlation between the requirements and the solution features.
i4 Marketplace writes all code according to the international guidelines to ensure utilization of latest, greatest best practices. Completion of each module results in preparation of test cases and unit level testing. This ensures that all code is readable, clean, semantic, and maintainable. When the final round of testing is complete, it will result in sign-off from the client accepting and acknowledging that the solution is ready to launch.
At the end of this phase, you will receive a set of test cases, in order to support all necessary user acceptance activities, as well as all associated configuration and process changes. This methodical approach to development and testing produces true risk mitigation, compliancy regulation, and reveals areas for cost savings.
The magic of any successful ecommerce marketplace is the bringing together of the product information from all manufacturers on your entire line card to a central location where your customers can self-serve their transactions. Delivering this experience requires integrating multiple systems from multiple companies on a single platform. i4 Marketplace will handle that entire process for you.
We will coordinate the various teams, systems, and information from all participating manufacturers, and host everything on our platform. We will manage and maintain the data flow and internal systems that support the easy purchase of your products, so your customers continue to receive the same great service from you that they’ve long enjoyed.
Seamlessly delivering any recommended combination of process and application changes is critical to the success of the project and your business. We combine a formal methodology with a prototyping approach that allows a flexible configuration, while ensuring expectations are being met along the way. This includes regular stage gates and decision points as well as a continuous project risk assessment ensuring that the teams stay perfectly aligned throughout the implementation project.
A successful implementation requires a committed team approach where participants take ownership for their part in the migration to a new software system. We will work with your team and guide the entire process to ensure a smooth transition. Some of the main functions of the implementation include a review of your project goals and objectives to ensure they are realistic and in line with the capabilities of the software, a detailed implementation plan that is customized to the unique needs of your business, and a set of project schedules and completion deadlines. Our team has experience in creating a final implementation and transition plan that will meet the resource and timing needs that you require.