Taming Distribution Complexity with a Modern Digital Platform

Jumping to Magento / Shopify / another SaaS

These platforms are powerful, but they also have powerful sales teams that will do their best to convince you that the platform can fit your processes - even if they can't. It's easy to hit their architectural limitations and find yourself shoehorning products and processes into a system that's ultimately not the right fit.

Outgrowing their offering puts your business at risk, with products, processes and sales held back for the sake of the right IT investment. You'll discover over the next few years whether it's truly a good fit, but it is very likely that you'll make trade-offs somewhere in your data or processes in order to fit with their system architecture. There are tools for integrating custom code with their platforms, but they're not simple or cheap and they still have limitations.

A custom solution build could be the tool that unlocks potential and removes frustrations for both business and customer.

Doubling down on your super custom software

(The sunk cost fallacy)

You've already invested millions in it over the last decade, so what's another few million?

Keeping custom software stacks running is expensive, and it only gets more expensive over time. Databases needed upgrading, operating systems go out of date, entire programming languages go out of fashion ... and you're left footing the bill for a team that's increasingly indispensable (and they know it!), or an agency that's increasingly indispensable (and they know it!), or a lot of consultants that are not only expensive, but take the system experience away with them when they're done.

Don't fall for the sunk cost fallacy. The money you've invested is gone, and you need to make a completely rational choice that factors in the ROI opportunity of a new system over five years, not just the build maintenance costs of the next two.

For a long time, expensive custom databases and web servers were the only way to make business happen at scale. Over time, though, many businesses have ended up left with awkward, barely-supported one-of-a-kind systems that become expensive to run and dangerous to change. 

The advent of SaaS products in the 2010s then transformed the landscape for so many business areas. A huge amount of common, shared functionality could be bought at a very attractive price per seat. A few years in, however, many are hitting the limits of what's possible and yearning for something more. The custom development potential with SaaS has rarely lived up to the hype, leaving many stuck with processes and data shoehorned into their SaaS platform's capabilities - and many still running older systems on the side.

In the present day, there are a number of powerful application building frameworks available that support building custom business tools quickly. Using an application building framework, rather than building from scratch, gives you bigger "building blocks" that help you avoid reinventing the wheel.

We specialise in rapid builds of complex systems, most frequently using Drupal as the foundation platform. Widely used internationally among high-scale and complex-needs organisations, Drupal helps us solves problems directly and quickly with its deep-rooted flexibility.

Our open-source platform has base integrations ready for hundreds of external applications, boosting development time and expanding the horizon for future development. Where there isn't an integration ready to go, we'll just build it!

Connect to anything and maximise your data's potential

CRM

• Microsoft Dynamics 365 / CRM
• Sage
• HubSpot
• MailChimp
• NetSuite
• Brevo

Data, Sales, e-commerce

• Custom databases in SQL, MongoDB, GraphQL, etc.
• Microsoft Dynamics 365
• Sage
• Xero
• Quickbooks

Payments

• Stripe
• PayPal
• Mastercard
• Visa

Expectations of online experiences are constantly growing - it's time to reimagine what a customer-facing portal can do for both customer and business and get ahead of the curve.

Slow, grey interfaces that provide the bare minimum experience will slowly bleed customers to those that can provide more streamlined processes and deeper data analytics.

Build with ComputerMinds to get:

• Fresh, clean, fast interfaces for both customers and sales
• Quick setup for new customer portals, at no extra cost, and add personal touches to the experience
• User journeys customised to your ideal process, not limited by an existing system
• Powerful data reporting and downloads

It's easy to spend hours working out and double-checking pricing agreements before they're finalised and distributed, yet a system that had the right information available could work it out in seconds.

Manual pricing arrangements can be time-consuming, complex and prone to mistakes.

Our technical team can work with you to identify pricing actions and processes that have scope for automation, and spec out exactly how that could work. With extensive experience working with multiple APIs and systems, we aim to make possible what was thought to be impossible!

We specialise in handling complex user flows and processes in online applications.

• Complex pricing and quoting
• Complex purchase flows
• Large or complex product catalogs
• Communication with additional services

Our pragmatic and friendly team are also available help review and reimagine your pipelines and processes, to invest effort where it's worthwhile or plan for plain rebuilds where things work well as they are.

See our case studies on complex commerce, enterprise marketing and international retail - complicated is our specialty!