Shopping the traditional way might not have become obsolete, but the frequency has definitely reduced. With the increase of eCommerce stores, and our willingness to scroll and add products to the wishlist, eCommerce stores are going to rule the consumer market in the future. Naturally, the competition is going to increase. As an eCommerce store owner, one has to always be on their toes to bring in new leads and retain existing customers.
It neither begins at marketing your products, nor does it end. You have to create them to perfection (or near perfection) , market it, sell it, make note of the payments,and also look after the after sales services.
There are some digital tools that will make the whole eCommerce process easier. Even if you have just started your eCommerce store, these digital tools will simplify operations for you and help maintain transparency.
From a variety of top-notch inventory management systems to the best free SEO tools, you have ample of options to choose from when it comes to optimising tools to increase your sales. You just need to make a list of the features and choose the right tool for your business. To make it more convenient for you, we have a checklist of all the tools you should have before you start building your ecommerce store.
1. Google Pagespeed Insights
How is your e-commerce store functioning? Would it be better for the business if the page loads faster? Usually if your website takes time to load users will bounce off. So, you need to analyze your website to see how it works on both desktop and mobile devices. Users may leave pages that load slowly.
The Google PageSpeed Insight tool will come in handy for determining your page’s loading speed. Then provide users with insights into the problem and suggestions for resolving it. It has a speed rating system that rates the page as slow, normal, or fast. The tool analyzes the most important factors to understand the optimization factors.
The first factor it considers is the time the half of your website home page takes to load from the moment your customer visits your website. Then it analyzes the load speed of the entire page.
If a page search takes too long, most visitors will close your page and search for a competitor.
The Google Page Speed Insight tool will correctly measure your business’s performance and see if you’re heading in the right direction. It also provides website optimization tips for beginners. You’ll learn the best practices for improving website performance.
2. Inventory Management Tool
A good inventory management tool is the foundation for a successful retail business.
Inventories fluctuate within seconds once the business grows. At such a time, relying on manual inventory management processes can prove reckless.
Therefore, it is desirable to invest in an inventory management system that can be easily integrated with the platform. Inventory management tools usually come with many features. For example, if the last item in the warehouse is sold, you will see an out-of-stock message until it is restocked. They also have options to synchronize offline and online modes of business. This provides you with more flexibility in trying out omni-channel sales. Primaseller is a highly used and appreciated inventory management tool with all the above features.
3. Mail Chimp
Email marketing and automation systems help eCommerce businesses in many ways., including increasing sales, bringing good leads, providing higher conversions and other predetermined goals. Mailchimp has several e-commerce automation ways that you can set to automatically target your previous customers with new offers.
Add your eCommerce store to Mailchimp and you’ll find more ways to reach your marketing goals and grow your business. It uses the data from your store to personalize your email so you can recommend the right offers to the right audience.
Mail Chimp states that it sends 10,800 emails per second.
Adding automation to your email marketing campaign allows you to set conversion goals and automate certain aspects of your campaign, like sending thank you emails after a sale or sending abandoned cart notifications, or exclusive deal coupons, etc.
They also have a free starter plan that allows you to send up to 10,000 emails to 2,000 subscribers a month. Small business owners can use this marketing strategy to bring in new leads. Once you increase traction to your website with Mail Chimp, you will want to invest in it and reap returns. As you incorporate more tools into your marketing strategy, they monitor your financial interests so you can see what’s working and what’s not.
4. Google Ads
Google Ads is a very important advertising platform for many e-commerce companies. To use Google Ads successfully you need to first understand the platform and its functioning and then combine everything you need to know about Google Ads to create an optimized marketing campaign that will generate targeted traffic to your ecommerce store.
Google Ads benefits your e-commerce store in two ways. First, it can increase brand awareness, and second, it can drive legitimate traffic to your website.
Customers will get a more tailored search result with Google Ads. Incorporating specific sale offers into your ads can also help your customers determine why your business is better than competing ads.
Google Ads accounts for up to 18% of all e-commerce sales.One of the most important benefits of Google Ads is its price flexibility. You can either set an average daily budget or a shared budget or an average daily budget for your campaign based on your average daily spending. When using Google Ads, it’s important to understand how to get the most out of your ads. This is a great way to encourage online consumers to click and buy products they sell. Focus on creating ads that appeal to customers looking for items in stock.
5. BigCommerce
BigCommerce is the ideal option if you are looking for offsite hosting and flexible drag and drop editor options. In addition, it can solve technical problems faster. It can also solve problems that lead to website crashes. No technical knowledge is required to set your website backup because it is packed with features. Monthly charges might be a concern for some users.
6. Other Digital Marketing Tools
When starting an e-commerce store, the best way to monetize your store is to digitize your marketing efforts. No matter what service you provide or where your business is on the web, you can find your audience.
There is no shortage of free digital marketing tools to promote your business to the correct audience. From keyword optimization to problem resolving approaches, to free backlink checker tools to improve SEO to social media planning tools, digital marketing makes all of these a little more convenient.
It helps make your brand stand out from the crowd. In the world of e-commerce, competition is overcrowded. You will meet competitors at every step, and it might get overwhelming as well. To keep up with the race, you have to use digital marketing tools. These tools are consistent and ensure that you always do your best when it comes to implementing marketing strategies. You can create content, schedule posts, and understand which SEO practices rank your website better with the help of these tools.
There are also social media listening tools available that help you interact with your viewers in real time. No matter where you post your content on your social media platform, it will help you find and fight negative feedback. Some popular digital marketing tools you can choose from are Hootsuite, Canva, Google Analytics, Buffer, etc.
7. Shippo
Shippo makes it easy for e-commerce companies to manage their shipping operations. It imports orders from the e-commerce shop into the user interface and displays various delivery options and prices to its customers. Customers can filter these options by price and pace to determine the option that suits them the best.
To simplify the shipping process for online retailers, they partner with freight carriers, suppliers, e-commerce platforms, and more. Shippo is now partnered with over 50 carriers worldwide, including FedEx, the United States Postal Service, and UPS.
You can use Shippo to create automation rules to completely automate repetitive tasks such as mapping boxes according to their order sizes. In addition, you can print labels continuously with fully automated label creation and all the logistics documents needed for international shipping. Shippo offers its services at a discounted price, so you can save a lot of money while using it. It also has enterprise pricing that represents logistics and simpler solutions for small businesses.
8. SEMrush
It’s a unique SEO marketing tool that helps you compare your competitors and improve your website’s position. It’s a major SEO tool with a variety of features such as advertising, keyword competition, content marketing and more. It helps businesses in the following ways:
Content Marketing: Content marketing is the collection of content that viewers want to read. And in order to know what your audience is attracted to, you first need to know what your audience likes. It helps ecommerce website owners with the content that attracts the most traffic to their website. You can easily find out what content isn’t working and what needs to be improved. You can also track backlinks to see what’s working.
SEO: The content quality definitely takes precedence over ranking and keyword targeting in SEO tools. Before writing content, think about your target keywords. This way, you don’t have to overcrowd your data later. SEMrush helps to rank your website by performing a series of actions called search engine optimization (SEO). This tool helps you create a link-building strategy, select the right keywords, and track your overall website optimization.
Ads: This tool shows your competitors activity and tells you how you can improve. Advertising allows you to see how the competition is taking place with clear graphic elements.
Social Networks: Helps you program social media ads and monitor their progress. This tool is also useful for comparing your ad’s performance compared to your competitors. SEMrush is also available in multiple languages.
9. Live Chat
Live chat is an essential e-commerce tool that can increase your online sales to a great extent. Direct contact with a customer means a lot while making a sale. Customers usually prefer assurance before making a purchase. Live chat to answer customer questions right away can help you grow your sales considerably. Providing interpersonal services round the clock can be expensive, so many companies also offer some form of conversational AI, to resolve the commonly asked questions of customers. .
There are several live chat tools you can use for your ecommerce store. Ideally a live chat platform, where you can actively communicate live and with new visitors can be very beneficial. Some of the best chat tools enable calls, which enhance the customer experience,and therefore the sales.
Some of these live chat platforms provide the ability to continue conversations on social media sites such as Facebook. This site allows you to continue targeting after your visitors leave the site and building customer relationships for future sales.
10. LoyaltyLion
Keep in mind that attracting new customers is more expensive than selling to existing customers. This shows why building a loyal customer base is very important for your business. Not only can you generate more sales faster, but you can do that without spending more money. One way to win loyal customers is to set up a points program app in your e-commerce store. You can integrate apps such as LoyaltyLion into your e-commerce shop to customize reward programs that can “reward” your customers for specific purchase decisions.
As soon as you install the app in your e-commerce shop and your customers click the Earn Points button, they will see the information for redeeming points, making purchases, etc. You can customize your loyalty program and set the appropriate points that your customers can collect for each interaction step they take.For example, signing up for newsletters, instagram follows, etc. This tool can display loyal customer percentages, sales, revenue, and customer spending from your e-commerce store.
LoyaltyLion also provides details about customer purchasing activities such as frequency of purchase and its total cost. If you want to expand your loyalty program to reach more customers, choose the best marketing channel, such as your social media account of your ecommerce store, or your personal social media account, and create content to promote your loyalty program.
With the Loyalty Lion and similar reward apps, you can increase the engagement of your e-commerce shop visitors and retain your existing customers for a longer time. You can also create a purchase cycle that encourages customers to continue purchasing from drop shipping stores by rewarding their customers for their purchases.
11. Omnisend
With a high open rate of 98% for SMS campaigns, SMS marketing, like email marketing, is a great way to reach your desired customer group. It’s cheap, you can get in touch quickly, and you have a small budget. SMS marketing offers endless profits, which really helps to increase your sales.
Omnisend is a popular SMS marketing and automation tool especially for e-commerce. This enables automated workflows such as SMS and push notifications and email communications based on customer data and their shopping behavior. It is very easy to use and provides great support to the team.
12. Payment Gateways
If you have an e-commerce website, it means that the products available on your website are for sale. Unlike offline stores, in online ecommerce stores, the payment options for your products and services can be either offline by Cash on delivery (COD) option, or online payment, UPI, Bank transfer,or payment through cards. Online payments are a matter of discussion or concern for many people.
As an online ecommerce shop, you need to face challenges such as security, credibility, and reliability. Thankfully, you can now choose from several trusted third-party payment tools. These tools make it easier for ecommerce store owners to manage their payments. Additionally, most of these platforms are trusted by consumers.
The most commonly used payment gateways are PayPal, Google pAy, BHIM, Razorpay etc. With PayPal your customers can easily make payments with cards. PayPal also facilitates refunds. This is an important aspect that should not be overlooked because you can confidently bring your customers back with a simple refund, regardless of their previous experiences.
13. Zapier
Zapier allows you to integrate your web apps and optimize your workflow. It can connect over 171 e-commerce apps such as Magento, Amazon Seller Central, Zoho Inventory, PayKickstart and more.
By integrating all web apps, you can automate day-to-day tasks such as customer contact, product management, and refunds. You can spend your time focusing on more important tasks that cannot be automated, such as creating marketing campaigns.
Conclusion
Contrary to what many believe, running an e-commerce store is not easy. However, the introduction of digital tools into our lives has eased the burden of manually processing various processes. However, with digital tools ecommerce store owners can easily optimize everything from inventory to shipping, payment to marketing. All you have to do is find the best fit in the crowd.
