The ecommerce landscape is constantly evolving to meet the challenges thrown at it. Changing customer preferences, latest technology trends and stiff competition keep you occupied, as you strive to drive your business forward and stay ahead of the competition.
On top of the efforts that need to be made for growing your ecommerce business, you must also ensure your online store is visible to its target audience. You will have to create a search engine friendly store to gain higher rankings on SERPs, drive more targeted traffic to your store, and engage with your customers on social media.
So how will you manage all this? How do you ensure you do everything needed to make the most of your online presence? No prizes for guessing you cannot accomplish all this alone. You need help. This help comes in the form of great tools that help you realize the true potential of your ecommerce business.
Here are five great ecommerce tools that you will really love to use for your business.
ShopIntegrator is a great tool that helps you build a full-featured ecommerce store with minimal efforts. An easy to install tool, you just need to copy paste a piece of HTML code into your webpage, and you’re good to go.
SI is compatible with multiple devices because of its web responsiveness. With a centralized administration panel, you can control multiple ecommerce websites from a single source, giving you absolute control of all your online businesses.
Features like multi-lingual, multi-currency, Facebook App store and third-party payment make ShopIntegrator quite effective in capturing global leads and converting them into buyers.
Further, it is a PCI compliant and McAfee SECURE ecommerce solution so that your customers do not have to worry about the safety of their transactions or integrity of private information.
This is a remarkable email and marketing tool that gets under the skin of your business and analyzes historic data. Based on its crawl findings, Remarkety recommends specific marketing activities to increase sales amongst existing customers.
Further, it microscopically analyzes “inactive customer” history and suggests “wake-up-calls” to re-engage users who abandoned your shopping cart for unknown reasons. Use this tool to create an effective rewards program that helps lure back these lost customers and increase sales.
Since automation is the heart of Remarkety, you can speed up client engagement with minimal efforts and achieve better outcomes.
With this tool, you can optimize your marketing campaign based on captured data and bring about more new as well as repeat conversions without bothering about mathematical or advanced calculations.
Available in customizable templates, Remarkety adjusts to your ecommerce website and helps you optimize your marketing campaign with continuous feedback like click rates, open rates and RO; this way, you always remain in control of your business and increase sales with minimal effort.
Personalization is the buzzword for the year 2015 in the customer relationship domain. Zopim gives you a nitro boost in this direction. Zopim helps you give your customers the best possible shopping experience by giving voice to your data.
When people come to your ecommerce store, its product catalog or products listings might not be enough to convince them to become your buyers.
There are plenty of aspects that act as a barrier to conversions.
Your content might lack the human voice necessary to build emotional connect with your brand; your customers might not be entirely convinced about the benefits of the products. In this scenario, leverage the live chat facility offered by Zopim to connect with and impress your customers across the barriers of time and distance.
You can even personally engage with your prospective clients in their own language through the Google Translate feature and bring about the much needed personalization in your interaction. Convince better and convert faster with Zopim and ramp up your domestic or international ecommerce sales without having to spend through the nose.
The Screaming Frog SEO Spider is an effective software program that analyzes your ecommerce website’s links, images, CSS, script and apps from the SEO angle. Get a clear view of your SEO deficiencies, filtered out in easily consumable form, in various tabs. You can also export the data into Excel for a close examination, later, as per your convenience.
Crawl data is continuously accumulated in the user interface and you can get day-to-day crucial insights about your ecommerce store’s optimization.
Screaming Frog is good for medium to large websites, where manually checking each web page would be laborious and time consuming affair. In such cases, you might even overlook problems like redirect, meta fresh or duplicate page issues, which ultimately hurts your rankings in search results.
Export your critical data like URL, page titles, meta descriptions, headings, etc. to a spreadsheet for a deep SEO-drill down of your website whenever you want. Uncover the culprit pages of your store that are dragging your website down in the abysmal depths of search results.
Screaming Frog helps you spring back and leapfrog over obvious SEO obstacles and achieve greater visibility in search results.
A hassle-free, safe and secure payment gateway peps up the conversion rate and Stripe is one of them.
Since Stripe requires all your website pages (including payment form) to have an SSL certificate and be prefixed with https:// instead of http://, your “Stripe-integrated” website is security compliant. Google will also reward your website with higher rankings because it factors in website security in search results.
Stripe has complete support for recurring payment extension; you can speedily process recurring subscriptions from your customers. Also, with a Stripe payment gateway, your buyers never have to leave your website. All this increases user satisfaction and makes payment processing quick and easy. Take the benefit of features like powerful online store checkouts, encrypted card details storage, money transfer, and a speedy billing process to improve customers’ shopping experience.
Parting Words
The above mentioned tools may or may not have been specifically built for ecommerce, but they augment your web store’s visibility, performance and usability in their own unique ways. In the end, all you want from a tool is to automate and speed up the customer’s journey through your conversion funnel.
Lori Wagoner is an independent content strategist who gives online marketing advice to small businesses. Lori has blogged at Tweak Your Biz, The Social Media Hat and many other business and tech blogs. You can reach her @LoriDWagoner on Twitter.