We’re super excited to share with you our inaugural Agency Showcase post. In this series we’ll be focusing on the change-makers and innovators of the ecommerce agency world. We’ll be finding out what makes them tick and their view of the world! Get in touch if you want your agency featured.
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Codal
Date Founded: November 2009
Location: Chicago
Size: 125 People
Elevator pitch:
Codal is a UX design and development agency that specializes in eCommerce solutions. Based in the heart of Chicago, we have a knack for bringing out the best in every brand that we work with. Our clientele has ranged from small businesses to the Fortune 100, but our philosophy has always remained the same: to empower brand visibility and deliver the most elegant eCommerce solutions possible.
Why do business choose you over others?
Many of our clients choose Codal over other eCommerce agencies because we offer truly full-stack services from branding and customer experience to backend systems, middleware and ERP integrations. We’ve even had other eCommerce agencies outsource their ERP integrations to us, because they don’t have that talent in-house.
What’s your agency culture like?
We’re a group of designers, researchers, developers, and marketers, but above all, we are a group of hard-working, fun, and passionate individuals who have an awesome work-life balance.
We pride ourselves in open communication, transparency, and collaboration. We’re a team that not only works together, but plays on a softball team together, goes to happy hours together, brunches together, and even hits the gym together.
We’re also very involved in the Chicago technology community, and you can often find us mingling at networking events or conferences in the Chicagoland area.
What are your preferred eCommerce platforms to develop on, and why?
Ever since we became certified Shopify Plus partners in 2016, Shopify’s enterprise platform has been our go-to eCommerce platform, especially for our larger clientele.
With countless themes and apps in the Shopify Plus ecosystem, all of them easily customizable, our designers and developers never get tired of creating new and engaging online stores. Shopify Plus also allows our clients to easily sell just about everywhere, including Amazon, Google Shopping, Instagram, and anywhere else that you desire, simply by adding Shopify’s “Buy Button.”
Shopify Plus is also great for B2B and wholesale. Their wholesale channel makes high-volume selling seamless, and allows merchants to set custom pricing for specific customers.
Since Shopify Plus is a hosted platform (another aspect we like), Shopify carries the risk of securing your data from security breaches, not you. Shopify Plus is Level 1 PCI DSS Compliant, meaning that your data is protected by the same protocols used by banks.
Along with Shopify Plus, we also build on BigCommerce.
Which 3 sites are you most proud of, and why?
PEERLESS-AV LED MOUNT CONFIGUARATOR (http://ledconfigurator.peerless-av.com)
Peerless-AV manufactures and sells high-quality digital displays, mounts, kiosks, and other A/V accessories. Looking to position themselves as an innovator and offer a seamless customer experience, Peerless hired Codal to design and engineer an LED configurator for customers to easily find and purchase the correct mounts and digital displays for their wall. The configurator is effortless to use, aesthetically gorgeous, and even updates in real-time based on user-inputted criteria.
M&M MERCHANDISERS (https://mmwholesale.com/)
INSTANATURAL (https://instanatural.com/)
Offering 100% natural and organic beauty products, InstaNatural is an online skincare retailer dedicated to clean and healthy cosmetics. InstaNatural needed a website with a modern, beautiful aesthetic that reflected on their organic and natural brand, and that’s exactly what our design team crafted.
What do you think are the biggest eCommerce industry challenges?
In a rapidly modernizing digital landscape, we see customer expectations remaining a major challenge for online merchants. With new services like Amazon’s same-day delivery, customers expect quick shipping, stellar customer service, and fast answers. This goes hand-in-hand with market competition. Anyone can build and launch an eCommerce site, but in order for your website to succeed in a saturated digital space, it must distinguish itself with a strong value prop and an engaging customer experience.
Another increasingly significant challenge is the management and leveraging of big data. As more and more data is generated than ever before, collecting and analyzing that information gold mine is no longer optional. . Gathering data is relatively easy with the today’s software tools, but the analysis and decision-making that must stems from it remains complex. By partnering with a company like Codal, the data analysis can become less of a challenge, and more of a huge opportunity.
Ecommerce in 2025: what’s your prediction on the state of eCommerce? What’s going be hot, and what’s not?
By 2025, artificial intelligence will play a greater role in the sophistication of eCommerce solutions. eCommerce platforms already have thousands of high-quality applications and plugins that can be integrated, but AI will become much more commonplace on both the consumer and merchant side.
AI provides more personalized shopping experiences, and easily allows companies to test different variations of landing pages and even respond to chat messages from a customer.
Voice search is also quickly permeating the eCommerce industry, and it will absolutely start impacting online retail in 2025. You can already order products on Amazon through Alexa, and on Google Shopping through Google Home. But in the years to come, a lot more retailers will get on board and allow for voice search.
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There you have it folks. Big love ? to Codal for being our first Agency Showcase! Keep on rockin’! Find out more about Codal in our directory and at www.codal.com.
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