In-House vs Freelance vs Offshore Team: Finding the Best Model to Build an Ecommerce Store

Ecommerce is one of the leading domains in modern trades and industries all over the world. The global volume of ecommerce revenue as well as the ecommerce software development market is growing at a very strong rate. New models of hiring software developers are emerging in the marketplace for managing offshore development teams under different customized models. Normally, all those models of building ecommerce stores are based on remote hiring, which offers great features, flexibilities, technological edge, financial benefits, and competitiveness in all major indicators of the modern online businesses.

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According to the Grand View Research projection, the global revenue of ecommerce business is expected to reach a whopping $27.15 trillion by 2027 from just $10.36 trillion in 2020 with a strong growth rate of over 14.7% CAGR during the project period. This gigantic and promising ecommerce market offers great opportunities for both startups and SMEs globally.
This article introduces businesses to numerous models of building ecommerce stores and helps find the best way to build a professional ecommerce store with great quality and affordable prices.

What will you find in this article?

Background of Modern Team Building Process
Popular Team Building Models for Creating Ecommerce Store
#1 In-House Team
#2 Freelance Team
#3 Offshore Team
What Team Is the Most Popular One Nowadays?
What Is the Best Way for Building an Ecommerce Store?
Final Takeaway

Sounds good? Let’s dive in!

Background of Modern Team Building Process

The change in human resource hiring started with the concept of contingent workers, which started getting traction many decades back. At that time, the worker was meant to work on the site or location of the work, which means that the workers were supposed to relocate from other cities, areas, countries.

After the advent of modern information and computer technologies ICT, the concept of on-premises workers changed and the concept of remote-work or work from home started taking shape. The concept of outsourcing processes, products, and parts of products started in the 1970s. In the early days, outsourcing was based-on the relocation of the entire process to a new destination by opening a dedicated center for outsourcing. This concept was limited to the large organizations and corporations in those days.

But, in the 1990s, the concept of outsourcing started taking numerous custom shapes and models suitable for all sizes of businesses without upfront investment in building dedicated centers and hiring dedicated staff in remote countries and locations. Different ways of hiring tech-talent to work from home or location workspace started emerging in the marketplace. A few of those types of hiring models are listed below.

• Fully managed service or process outsourcing
• Offshoring business processes or projects
• Onshoring projects and processes
• Nearshoring processes
• Outstaffing dedicated teams
• Freelance hiring
• Operations outsourcing
• Information technology outsourcing
• Customized hybrid team building
• And much more

Popular Team Building Models for Creating Ecommerce Store

Like all other business processes, the landscape of human resource (HR) management has also changed drastically during the past few decades due to the impact of modern communication technology and software tools. Software development, especially ecommerce store development, has become a game-changer in transforming the landscape of HR management.

According to Statista information, the total market size of ecommerce software applications was recorded at $5.32 billion in 2019. The total revenue is expected to increase by over $1.2 billion totaling $6.52 billion by 2023. This huge growth in software application development has increased the demand for software developers, engineers, and programmers whose availability has depleted in major markets of the world.

Building an offshore development team and managing offshore development teams remotely through multiple hiring models have become new trends in human resource management. A few very popular team-building models for creating ecommerce stores are mentioned below.

#1 In-House Team

This is the traditional way of building a team of developers on the company’s premises. An in-house team works at the designated workplace directly managed by the employer’s company management and CEO. This team shares and owns the mission, goals, and vision of the company and gets all benefits granted by the local laws, rules, and regulations related to social security and other rights and benefits.

The main pros of building an in-house team include:

• The in-house team is considered as the most reliable, trustworthy, and easily manageable.
• The employers have a direct and full control over the activities and functionality of the team
• In-house team offers great interactivity and face-to-face communication

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The major disadvantages of building an in-house team include:

• The development team salary is one of the major downsides of building an in-house team.
• Building an in-house team requires a professional team for hiring and managing the HR related processes, which incur additional charges
• You need upfront cost for providing infrastructure, equipment, and workspace
• It involves numerous social, legal, and industrial laws and norms to follow, which become cumbersome task to handle
• The availability of the tech-talent with the right skills for building an in-house team is also a big challenge, especially in the advanced economies where the gap between demand and supply of tech-talent is significant.
• In-house team adds recurring charges in the shape of electricity, air-conditioning, heating, water, and other utility charges, office pantry, and others

#2 Freelance Team

A freelance team is a combination of tech-talent hired individually for a certain period or a task to accomplish in a team of developers and programmers located at different geographical locations, with diverse cultures, capabilities, control. Normally, the entire team of freelance developers work from their respective homes and are controlled and coordinated by a focal person or a manager. This is a type of contingent hiring for a shorter period and task.

The typical benefits of building a freelance team include:

• The main advantage of building a freelance team is low-cost.
• You have access to a large number of freelancers to choose from.
• Building freelance ecommerce team is fast.
• Offers direct and full control over work activities of freelancer.
• No need of any upfront cost.

The downsides of building a freelance ecommerce team include:

• Building a freelance ecommerce team is a big gamble in terms of reliability, quality, delivery.
• A freelancer normally works on multiple projects of multiple clients for earning maximum money. In such circumstances, it is very difficult for a freelancer to pay full attention to a dedicated project.
• Any freelancer can leave your team without any intimation and prior notice.
• There is no guarantee of work-quality.
• Substantial risk for successful completion of project or task as per requirements.

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#3 Offshore Team

An offshore team is a type of outsourcing team hired at a remote location where third-party hires and manages the team and also provides the infrastructure to work on. Offshore outsourcing is one of the most popular types of hiring models in the present day. Numerous companies from major markets like the US, Canada, UK, Germany, France, Israel, Australia, and many others hire offshore dedicated teams in countries where the availability and quality of tech-talent are very high and the price is comparatively low.

The main advantages of building an offshore ecommerce team include:

• Offshore ecommerce team building offers reduced cost as compared to the in-house hiring
• It offers great quality of work guaranteed by the service provider company
• Offshore ecommerce team building offers a high level of reliability, availability, confidence, and peace of mind
• Access to a vast pool of tech-talent with the most desired skills, qualifications, and experience
• The offshore team building, especially outstaffing offers full control over the working and management processes of the team
• No upfront cost for establishing development infrastructure, office, and equipment
• A dedicated offshore team fully managed by third-party service providers is one of the great options for all types of businesses
• Very fast recruiting process with the help of domain experts in human resource management
• Offshore team building is highly suitable for all types and sizes of businesses

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The downsides of offshore team building for ecommerce store development include:

• A bit costlier than freelance hiring
• Difficult to find the right service provider

If we compare the benefits of offshoring with freelance hiring, and in-house hiring, we will come to a solid conclusion that offshoring is the most popular team building model for ecommerce store development. It offers reliability, cost-efficiency, quality, and peace of mind.

What Team Is the Most Popular One Nowadays?

Hiring a remote team consisting of offshore programmers, developers, and designers are the most popular model of team building in ecommerce store development. According to the Gartner research information, more than 22% of the CEOs feel that finding the right tech-talent with the right skills is a big challenge. Similarly, productivity and employee retention increase by over 50% if the option for remote work is available for the employee.

In such conditions, the dedicated offshore team building the most suitable option for all types and sizes of companies that want to build professional-level ecommerce stores to enhance their business prospects. The offshore team can be hired in multiple ways with the customized needs, terms and conditions, and service level agreement SLA.

The most common way of hiring an offshore team is outstaffing in which the service provider in an offshore country hires a professional team of ecommerce developers and engineers to work dedicatedly on the client’s project.

The main reasons for the popularity of the outstaffing model of hiring are listed below.

• Hiring process of building a outstaffing team is faster
• Outstaffing is a dedicated team to work on a particular project or task
• The outstaffing team is fully managed by the third-party
• The Outstaffing ecommerce team offers full control over the team in terms of technical work is handed over to the employer or client
• Fixed price is charged for an outstaffed ecommerce team, which helps you to set your budgets properly and effectively
• Offers greater efficiency, productivity, timely delivery, and reliability powered by the professional management team

What Is the Best Way for Building an Ecommerce Store?

Building an ecommerce store involves numerous phases and multiple steps in each phase.
The major phases of building an ecommerce store include the following:

• Conceiving a business idea for an ecommerce store, which is the core foundation for building a development team. The idea should be clear, and technically viable.
• Hiring a technical team of developers, designers, testers, and others. This is the most important phase in which you need professional-level accuracy and acumen to hire the right tech-talent at the right cost while fully focusing on the desired objectives.
• Purchasing an attractive domain name. An attractive domain name should be short, meaningful, attractive, and easy to write. A popular domain should be selected in the top-level domain TLD suffixes such as .com, .org, .net, etc.
• Registering for an online account for online hosting. Choose the professional web hosting service provider that can offer a great level of security, reliability, availability, and additional services.
• Building an ecommerce website by deciding many factors such as design, themes, logos, presentation, search engine optimization SEO, and much more. Availing the services of professional service providers and consultants will provide you an added advantage in this phase.
• Optimizing the ecommerce store for search engine and performance. Search engine optimization SEO and performance are very fundamental factors for a better conversion ratio, which helps you materialize your business ideas into results.
• Deploying the website and monitoring. This process is the operational phase, which helps increase customer satisfaction and user experience.

All those phases are completed with different steps that need technical expertise in those domains of technicalities. So, it is a very complex and professional work to develop a great ecommerce store and requires a great level of knowledge, expertise, experience, and skills. To best materialize the business ideas into an attractive and effective ecommerce store, you need to have a professional team of developers, programmers, and testers. This involves a high level of technicalities and professionalism, which you can avail of by hiring professional team building services.

The best way to build an ecommerce store is to hire a professional and dedicated team of offshore programmers that is fully managed by the professional providers of software development services. The dedicated ecommerce development team commonly referred to as the outstaffing outsourcing team is the most economical and effective way of building a professional-grade ecommerce website that is up to the modern standards and criteria of a successful ecommerce store.

The offshore outstaffing offers the following benefits.

• A dedicated team that works fully on a single project dedicatedly
• The fully managed team powered by professional services providers
• State-of-the-art development infrastructure without any capital investment
• No need for any upfront cost for hiring teams and infrastructure
• High-quality development and faster delivery
• Full control on the tech-talent team
• Highly cost-efficient form of outsourcing
• Minimum risk of project failure

An ecommerce store development project can be outsourced to numerous offshore destinations in the world like Ukraine, Lithuania, Poland, India, Russia, and others.

Final Takeaway

Outsourcing has become a new trend in all domains of software development, especially in building an ecommerce store. Different ways of outsourcing, like freelance, offshore, nearshore, outstaffing, and others are used for building an ecommerce store. Outstaffing is the most popular model in offshore outsourcing for building ecommerce websites. Offshore outstaffing offers great benefits as mentioned in this article.

Read more about how to get the most out of an ecommerce store without an in-house IT department here.

Author bio:

Kateryna Boiko is a Marketing Director at Mobilunity, Provider of Dedicated Development Teams with 9 years of hands-on experience in digital marketing. Kateryna managed to work with diverse industries and markets and now is keen on sharing unique cases with the world and coach on topics relevant to Web Analytics and Search Engine Optimization.

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