How to Hire an E-commerce Developer

The e-commerce developer plays a critical part in the development of apps and services for online sales. And here, the question arises: how to hire the right developer who can manage the technical development of your e-commerce project? We tried to give a comprehensive answer in this article.

Global sales on the Internet are growing inexorably year by year. Online trading currently counts for just over 14% of global trade. In connection with quarantine, the percentage of sales on the Internet has grown even more. This situation forces business owners to go online and use e-commerce.

What is e-commerce

E-commerce (electronic commerce) is the process of buying/selling either goods or services  online. It also manages the transfer of money and data to execute transactions. E-commerce is often used to sell products over the Internet, but it can also describe any kind of commercial transaction facilitated through the Internet.

Technical skills for e-commerce developer

Many technical skills fall under the mandatory label for an E-Commerce developer. This is why many companies are fighting for the developers who are well versed in e-commerce apps. 

A good developer must know how to manage his time well. Since most е-commerce development companies work on a tight schedule, programmers must stay ahead of the curve by getting things done effectively.

E-commerce developers should know everything about the front-end: HTML, CSS, and Javascript. In terms of back-end, developers should know one of such languages as Python, PHP, Ruby on Rails, and the related frameworks and tools. In addition to these skills, they should possess knowledge of e-commerce software platforms and API integration. All these skills are necessary for developing first-class e-commerce products to not repel users due to incorrect operation of the site or application.

It is also a competitive advantage to have SEO skills. Although this is a marketing skill, eCommerce SEO is highly technical. A highly optimized website or app will drive more traffic to the store and boost sales. But if you have an SEO specialist, then you may not need a candidate who has great knowledge in this area.

What to do before you hire an E-commerce Developer

Before choosing a developer, you should understand what tasks you need a developer to do. As a result, you will greatly simplify the process of hiring. It is important to know which problems the developer will solve because “e-commerce developer” is a very general description. For example, if you need to create an e-commerce platform, you don’t need a programmer who’s experienced in creating online stores on Magento. And to create an online store, you don’t need to develop a platform.  You can simply hire a programmer who will create a website on one of the popular platforms such as WordPress, Magento, or OpenCart.

E-commerce developer job description

Now it's the time to move on to writing the job description. To find the right developer you need to write down the demanded responsibilities, skills, and qualifications. For example, the below job description is written assuming we need an online store on the Magento platform which must cope with a high load, go through the SEO optimization stage, have a convenient user interface, and have a high level of security against hacking.

Responsibilities:

• - Create a mobile responsive online store

• - Provide high-quality and readable code with comments

• - Build reusable code and libraries for future use

• - Create an administrative panel with advanced functionality

• - Test for stability under high load

Skills and Qualifications:

• - 5+ years of development experience

• - Strong knowledge of front-end languages: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, jQuery

• - Strong knowledge of back-end languages: PHP, Cake PHP

• - Strong knowledge of databases: MYSQL, MongoDB

• - Have Magento 2 Certification, Magento SEO recommendation

• - Experience with tools like Putty, GIT, Tortoise SVN, FileZilla, Winscp, Puttygen, Pageant, Jing, etc.

• - Experience with a Third-Party Payment gateway like – Paypal, Authorize.net, HDFC, AXIS BANK, Payu (IN), eWay(AUS), etc.

• - Familiarity with Photoshop and Adobe Creative Cloud

• - English level: Intermediate B1

• - Understanding various caching techniques like – APC, Varnish, Memcached, Redis Session, etc.

• - Ability to integrate Google, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Amazon S3, and Dropbox APIs

• - Experience with Bitbucket and SVN

Q&A to Hire a E-commerce Developer

The last step of hiring a developer is an interview. Therefore, we have prepared questions that will weed out unacceptable candidates so you can hire the best e-commerce developer:

Question 1. Please, tell us about the most interesting projects you've worked on.

The answer tells you: This is a basic question that helps you understand how many projects were completed by the candidate, how long it took, and what tasks were set. Moreover, it will give an understanding of whether the developer worked on large or small projects, and most importantly, see the result of the programmer's work.

Question 2. Ask questions about the technologies specified in the resume.

The answer tells you: It is important to find out where and what technologies the developer used and how deeply he understands them. This answer allows you to understand whether the developer knows all the technologies that are indicated in his or her resume.

Question 3. What are OLTP and OLAP? What is the difference between them?

Answer: OLTP (Online Transaction Processing) is involved in the operation of a particular system. OLTP is characterized by a large number of short online transactions (INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE). The main advantage of OLTP systems is the ability to put on very fast query processing, maintaining data integrity in multi-access environments. In the OLTP database, there is detailed and current data, and the schema used to store transactional databases is the entity model (usually 3NF). It involves Queries accessing individual records like Update your Email in Company database.

Different databases have different usage:

If we need analytics (ex. aggregating historical data) we should use OLAP. But if we need transactions (ex. adding/removing orders on an e-commerce cart) it's better to use OLTP.

Question 4. Explain the electronic payment procedure.

Answer: At first, the merchant submits a credit card transaction to the Payment Gateway on behalf of a customer via secure connection from a desktop, notebook, tablet, or mobile device. Then the payment gateway receives the secure transaction information and passes it via a secure connection.

The next step is to submit the transaction to the Credit Card Interchange - a network of financial entities that communicate to manage the processing, clearing, and settlement of credit card transactions. Credit card exchange transfers transaction results and relays the transaction results to Payment Gateway which stores the transaction results and sends them to the customer and/or the merchant. This communication process averages three seconds or less.

The last step is when the Credit Card Interchange passes the appropriate funds for the transaction to the Merchant’s Bank. Then deposited funds transfer into the merchant’s bank account. The funds are typically deposited into the primary bank account within two to four business days.

Question 5. How would you protect a website from bots?

Answer: If you notice successive comments too quickly or something else that triggers an alarm, you should make a human authentication form. It will pop up if there are constant reloads of the same page, following every link on a page quickly, or filling in an order form too fast to be human.

If the user fails authentication x times in a row (say, 2 or 3), we should give that IP a timeout or other such measure. Then at the end of the timeout, dump them back to the authentication check again.

Other ways of releasing the block aren't as effective: a timeout (but they'd get to slam site again after), a long timeout (maybe a person wanted to buy a product and was choosing it for a long time), email (easily done by bots), or snail mail (takes too long).

Question 6. What is MVC Architecture? 

Answer: MVC is the Model-View-Controller architecture that divides an application into three components- model, view, and controller. The model is responsible for the data structure and logic of the application. The view is a data representation in the application's interface (charts, diagrams, spreadsheets). The controller processes the business logic of the app. There are two types of MVC: convention- and configuration based. Magento uses the second version. Thus, you have to specify the data if you have to get a module config file to work.

Question 7. What are the different types of software testing?

Answer: The basic types of software testing are:

• - Unit testing

• - Integration and regression testing

• - Shakeout testing

• - Smoke testing

• - Functional testing

• - Performance testing

• - White box and Black box testing

• - Alpha and Beta testing

• - Load and stress testing

• - System testing

Question 8. What RSA key length should be used for SSL certificates?

Answer: As of 2020, RSA keys should be 2048 bits. 1024 bits RSA certificates are obsolete and not accepted by browsers.RSA certificates with 2048 bits are the accepted standard.

The default baseline delivered by CA and used by the software will eventually be cracked too but could take decades.Doubling the size takes many orders of magnitude more compute power to crack. 

4096 bits RSA certificates are the next step. Widely available and supported. All major Certificate Authorities (CA) can provide both 2048 and 4096 bits RSA, including "Let's Encrypt". Computational cost is not linear with the key size. 4096 is not twice as slow as 2048, it is 10 times slower to process. The "web" is largely remaining on 2048 bits certificates because it cannot support the hardware cost for 4096 bits. 

Question 9. In you opinion, how to improve the performance of Magento 2? 

Answer:

• - Optimizing image size

• - MySQL Query Caching

• - Enable Magento caching

• - Enable Gzip caching

• - Disable modules that aren’t in use

• - Write clean code

Question 10. While creating a schema in MongoDB, what do you need to pay attention to?

Answer: 

• - Design the schema according to the user requirements

• - Combine objects into one document if we want to use them together; otherwise, separate them

• - Do joins while on write, and not when it is on reading

• - For most frequent use cases, optimize the schema

• - Do complex aggregation in the schema

Summing Up

Finding the best or top e-commerce developers can be like looking for a needle in a haystack, but it is possible. After all, you now know all the subtleties and secrets of hiring the most talented e-commerce developers. We hope this article will help you in your search. Good luck!