MerchantPro: EUR 400,000 investment in MerchantPro Next, a new storefront for online shops

After an investment of over 400,000 euros and 12 months development, MerchantPro, the local platform for SaaS solutions for eCommerce, launched MerchantPro Next, a new storefront dedicated to the stores on the platform. MerchantPro Next features an open system for editing HTML & CSS code and content rendering templates, a suite of preconfigured design themes and a module for creating and customizing pages based on no code design principles. It also significantly increases the loading speed of sites, with a direct impact on the performance of Google Web Core Vitals.

A user decides to stay  on or leave a site in 50 milliseconds, according to recent studies, putting increasing pressure on the quality of the online user experience. Moreover, the dynamics of online continues in 2022 on the same positive trend – with increases of almost 40% in the first four months of the year in the value of orders, at the level of over 1,500 stores operating through the MerchantPro platform.

Therefore, after two years of sustained growth in the entire e-commerce segment and increasing competition among vendors across all product categories, the trends show an urgent need to optimize the user experience.

Higher loading speed                                                            

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If in 2020 it was important just to be online, in 2022 it is essential that your online presence to be as efficient as possible. Site load speed, UX & SEO friendly structure and design with a direct impact on search engine performance metrics, smooth check-out process and online payment methods in as few steps as possible are among the elements that will differentiate players from a market with clear signs of maturity. Although the concepts are not new, they receive a new approach in the context in which the entire e-commerce is refined, the ranking in search engines being more dependent than ever on them, said Arthur Rădulescu, CEO of MerchantPro.

Among the advantages of MerchantPro Next are easy checkout process, with high performance in the area of ​​user experience, respectively direct impact on the decrease of the shopping cart dropout rate and the increase of the conversion rate. Merchant Pro Next also allows access to Hosted online payment methods, with data entry directly into the store, while the check out process can be set up in one-step or two-steps.

At the same time, in order to optimize the user experience, new features are added Visual Predictive Search and Search Facets, which provide instant access to the products that the client are looking for, with accuracy that the consumer expects.

The new storefront on the MerchantPro platform delivers faster loading speeds in the eCommerce marketplace, including content-rich pages, through the use of high-performance CDN solution, along with image compression optimization based on automatic compression. Websites load ultra-fast, in spite of the complexity of the design and the content delivered.

No code design, but also open source code editing system

In terms of site design, the MerchantPro Next system also provides platform users with a gallery of optimized design templates in terms of both UX&UI and SEO, which can be customized without code-level intervention.

Studies show that 94% of a user’s first impression is related to visual elements, and it is essential for a merchant to have access to configurable design elements without necessarily relying on the help of an external team. MerchantPro Next includes features and functionality that provide a high level of flexibility, and all of these developments have been designed with a higher ranking than Google Core Web Vitals indicators. We also took into account the demands of a new generation of buyers, with low tolerance in terms of unpleasant online experiences and more open than ever to the foreign market, where competition is fierce, said Arthur Rădulescu.

Giving each online merchant the ability to quickly customize the interface of their site, MerchantPro Next has developed Widget Studio, a system dedicated to visual page design. Therefore, the users have the possibility to create complex landing pages to maximize the performance of the campaigns and even to reconfigure the content and structure of the classic pages in the store.

For those seeking even more flexibility in customizing the online store, the MerchantPro Next suite of templates has an open source code editing system in HTML and CSS, which can be customized both by merchant’s own team,but alos with the help of MerchantPro technical support.

We know how important it is for merchants to have predictability in terms of costs and the duration of a development. Hence, our solutions provide the tools needed to achieve online performance, whether or not our customers have a dedicated team, said Arthur Rădulescu, CEO of MerchantPro.

All stores that access MerchantPro solutions, whether they are newly established or migrated online stores from other platforms, will automatically operate with the MerchantPro Next storefront. Regarding the over 1,500 stores active on the platform, the estimates show that by the end of the year, over 90% of the stores on the platform will make the transition to the new storefront.