Redstage was ranked among the top 3 Magento B2B Developers in the world, earning us a place in the Clutch 1000 for 2018. We were also awarded the titles of Top Magento Developers, Top Shopify Developers, and Top Ecommerce Developers in New York, trophies and plaques that now hang proudly in our office.

We helped create the Mobile Optimization Initiative with PayPal, HiConversion, and Magento with the aim of closing the mobile conversion gap, and created new partner initiatives. The Redstage team continued to develop relationships with clients in the US, Brazil, Australia, India and the UK; opportunities nowpoised to blossom in the year ahead. Additionally, the team worked on 90 different sites for the year, a new annual high for our organization. Lastly, we achieved Elite BigCommerce Partner status, and look forward to working with their team in 2019.

The Year Ahead:

For 2019, we’ve planned to make customer experience, employee experience, delivery quality, and research & development our foremost focus areas. I’ll dive into our goals for developing and innovating on each below:

Increasing Quality & Expanding Practice Areas:

We’re enhancing code quality with code review automation and better processes for manual overview. Additionally, continuous integration tools will speed up the deployment process. These new tools are all part of  Redstage’s Dev Ops practice, which is critical for our workflow and project success.

Innovation Lab:

Together with our parent company Fulcrum Digital, we’ve also built an innovation lab in our Jersey City office, bringing in leading edge technologies to continue our pursuit of data-driven ecommerce experimentation. The tech we’re implementing in the lab will help us provide advanced client work for the next wave of new experiences. We’ve already begun experimenting with virtual reality, voice-shopping, IoT, and hope to expand to AR, and eye-tracking.

Customer Experience:

Our team is hard at work refining our processes to enhance our customer experience. This year we will be releasing a variety of new offerings, relaunching our support plans with the goal of better tailoring our products to the needs of the market. These product bundles include baked-in tools for conversion optimization, business uptime, security, site monitoring, and more. As a result of our collaboration the past year, we’ve been named a the #1 Top Magento agency in both New York and Chicago for 2019!

Research & Development:

The innovation team is hard at work, striving to increase the amount of “Accelerators” — home-grown, reusable components that help clients get where they want to go faster at reduced costs. We are in the process of developing a partner portal, as well as additional middleware tools online retailers can use on top of their platforms.

Employee Experience:

We’ve put renewed focus on career development, learning & development skills, and implementing a learning management system to help scale up, train new employees, and grow each team’s capabilities, furthering our mission: To be a world-class B2B agency by cultivating top talent in the industry.

Industry Focus

Our increasing knowledgebase of B2B systems and operations continues to drive the company further into the manufacturing, wholesale, and distribution segments. Additionally, we’re getting more and more attention from the aerospace industry and related government agencies, creating new opportunities in the government sector.

Big Initiatives:

Transformative B2B Ecommerce: The dramatic B2B transformation in the market is our top focus, helping companies not only to develop their online presence, but redevelop the teams and skills necessary to go digital. More and more, we’re doing our best to inform B2B business about millennials’ views on B2B ordering, and the new paradigm of customer experience as a whole (Get our free Digital Sales Handbook here).

Magento 1 End of Life: With Magento ending support for the Magento 1 platform in June of 2020, we’ve started a massive awareness initiative to keep retailers informed of the opportunities of migrating to the latest ecommerce platforms and revamp their customer experience. Many retailers don’t understand that moving from Magento 1 to Magento 2 isn’t a simple upgrade, but more of a full-replatforming process. Redstage and our partners are working diligently to inform the market of the impending dangers of migrating too late (Learn more here).

Mobile Optimization Initiative: Redstage continues to lead the way in mobile optimization, working with a community of system integrators and merchants as we expand the initiative around the world. So far, the initiative has increased revenue per visitor by an average of 8.56% for customers who have already made it to the checkout page. With new data coming out each week from a variety of different tests, merchants now have the info they need to justify starting tests of their own. The initiative has already yielded $22 million in additional revenue across all merchants involved in the initiative. As a result of our collaborative work, it’s clearer than ever that these testing methods help merchants to capture more mobile revenue (Learn more here).

Events: We’ve put our heads together and nailed down a list of industry and platform events we’ll be attending and speaking at this year. We hope to see you there!

• Northeast Ecommerce Summit (April 3-4; Atlantic City, NJ)
• Design Thinking (April 16-17: Austin, TX)
• Magento Imagine – (May 13-15; Las Vegas, NV)
• Shopify Unite: (June 18-20; Toronto, CAN)
• B2B Online: Digital Marketing Conference for Manufacturers & Distributors (April 29 – May 1; Chicago, IL)
• IRCE – (Jun. 25-26; Chicago, IL)
• BigCommerce: Make It Big (Aug. 6-10; Austin, TX)

As a Final Note…

I’d like to thank all of our clients, partners, and employees for your trust, dedication, and continued support of our vision. Here’s to a wonderful 2019!