If you want to stand a chance in the ecommerce world you’re going to need to some help. No one grows manually.
Tools and technology have become an integral part in shaping the success of many (if not all) of today’s ecommerce brands.
However, choosing the right tools for your eCommerce business can be challenging.
The landscape is overrun by thousands of options, and narrowing the field is a difficult process, especially if you don’t know where to start.
Fortunately, we’ve drafted this list of tools for eCommerce stores in order to help you decide which tools you need for what purpose.
Before we dive into the actual tools, we need to talk about why tools are so important, and how to choose the tools that are best for your business.
Let’s get into it.
Aside from the obvious (like having an eCommerce store platform to sell your products from, hello Shopify, BigCommerce, or X-Cart), most companies benefit from having a plethora of useful tools in their belt to help drive awareness for their products, promote their business and streamline business processes.
The fact is, tools and technology help make processes go faster and they take away some of the guesswork when trying to figure out what’s working and what isn’t.
When you invest in the right tools, you are essentially trading time for money. This allows you as the business owner to scale your operation, assuming that your costs are in-line with what your budget will allow.
This means that before you can invest in a tool, you need to decide which problems are eating at your margins the most, and how much you can afford to fix the issue.
Click to Tweet: “#eCommerceTips: Before investing in a new business tool, consider your problems and budget.”
If you are on a tight budget, finding and vetting free tools to help automate your daily workflow is the best idea, however, you get what you pay for in most cases. If you have a larger budget to play around with, you can afford more robust solutions.
Either way, it is wise to be cognizant of which problems are slowing you down the most so that you can tackle them with tools.
For this section, I’ve broken down the main types of tools you would need for your eCommerce business. The following categories describe each type of tool and how it can help.
These tools are available to help you learn about your competitors or identify new opportunities in your niche. In order to win at eCommerce, you need to understand your competitors and their strategies. You also have to have a handle on what’s going on in your industry.
I’m sure you’ve heard it before, but knowledge is power.
You can’t stay two steps ahead of the game if you don’t know what your opponents know.
This category of tool helps you to manage the day-to-day activities inside your company. These tools also include financial and logistical solutions to help you keep track of your team members, remote workers, budget and inventory.
If your biggest business problem falls into the operations or financial sector, you should look for tools that streamline your internal processes.
Marketing tools come in handy when you need to promote your business, drive awareness for your products and indoctrinate people into your brand. While this category is filled with thousands of apps, platforms and technologies, the daunting task is finding the ones that are best suited for your specific needs.
Look for options that allow you to save time on tasks related to social media, email marketing, content distribution and / or campaign tracking to start.
CRM stands for customer relationship management, which refers to the practices used by companies to monitor, manage and analyze customer interactions. The main goal of having a CRM is to be able to improve your relationships with customers which incentivizes customer retention, and understand your buyer personas in order to drive more future sales.
The old saying goes, “if you can’t track it, it didn’t happen.”
Ok, I’m not sure if that’s actually a thing, but it is still very true.
Having proper tracking installed on your website and in all of your promotional efforts will help you develop the best understand of your customer’s journey.
Analytics and tracking tools help you understand what your customers are looking for, why they came to your website, and how you can attract more people like them.
Knowing these stats can make or break your business.
Now that you have an idea about the different types of tools for eCommerce, let’s dive in to the best in class tools for each category.
Jungle Scout – If you’re an Amazon seller or just looking for profitable products, Jungle Scout should be a tool you utilize. Their chrome extension analyses products in real time to understand their sales volume, revenue, reviews, and more.
When all of this stacks up, you can actually see if this product is profitable on Amazon. Their Chrome Extension has a one time fee of $197 or $97, depending on the version you get.
SEMRush – This tool is beneficial for eCommerce business owners who want to keep track of how their website is performing, the main keywords in their industry, and insight into their competitors.
SEMRush allows you to get insights into your competitors’ strategies in display advertising, organic and paid search, and link building. Their pricing is similar to Ahrefs and starts at $99 per month, going up to $399 per month for the most advanced users.
iSpionage – iSpionage helps you steal your competitor’s traffic by uncovering their conversion strategy. This tool allows you to analyze the pay per click strategies and budgets of your direct competitors. It is a great tool if you are running paid ad campaigns for your company.
Prices range from $29 per month up to $299 per month.
Skubana – Skubana manages all back-end e-commerce operations in one place, including order processing, shipping, inventory management, fulfillment by Amazon (FBA), vendor management and cross channel analytics.
It is truly everything a seller would need to build a successful and profitable business, no matter if you’re selling on one channel or several. No longer will you be consumed with chasing after errors and overselling/underselling.
Better Coupon Box – This Shopify app allows you to convert visitors into sales and subscribers with powerful coupon pop-ups. Visitors can easily be converted into email subscribers and social followers to increase online sales.
With nearly 2,300 reviews, Better Coupon Box is being used by more than 70,000 Shopify stores. Better Coupon Box is free to download and try.
TradeGecko – TradeGecko is designed to make the backend of retail easy. They help your ecommerce store with things like inventory management, order syncing, product bundling, and running reports.
TradeGecko makes sure you stay away from oversells and allows you to keep track of inventory without the need for spreadsheets and headaches.
Zapier – Zapier is an automation tool that integrates with many other tools to help manage workflow efficiencies. One of the best integrations is being able to set up Zaps that automatically populate tasks to Asana for your team (or yourself) based on certain triggers you set up.
Zapier can also help automate things like social media, productivity, and communication. As for pricing, you can get away with a free account if you don’t plan on building multi-step zaps. For the first tier of pricing, Zapier starts at $20 per month and goes up to $115 per month for the most robust plan.
AfterShip – Free app for shipping tracking that operates globally. It imports all shipment data to a single interface and both you and your customers can view order status. It also automates delivery notifications (email and SMS).
Aftership allows you to Increase customer satisfaction by offering effortless tracking and proactive delivery updates. Pricing is $10/month for premium members.
eManaged – eManaged helps you manage all things ecommerce. For multichannel ecommerce sellers utilizing eBay, Amazon, Sears, Tesco and more, this can be a life-saver. eManaged streamlines your online store’s shipping, operations, strategy, and growth.
From strategic consultation to best practice and planning, eManaged helps you optimize your current operations and forecast future projects.
StoreYa – This tool allows you to convert your online store’s visitors, helping you drive thousands of shoppers to your store. You can easily create on-site promotions that will increase your online store’s conversion rate.
StoreYa also allows you to sell directly on Facebook incentivizing your fans to drive their friends to your Facebook Shop. Pricing ranges from free to $79.99/month.
AdHawk – AdHawk makes advertising easy with frictionless optimization & cross-platform reporting. AdHawk links together your advertising for platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Youtube and more allowing for a more streamlined and optimized process.
Klaviyo – Klaviyo is the world’s smartest marketing automation platform. With Klaviyo for Shopify you can automatically add your customers to mailing lists, target email campaigns based on buying behavior, and easily promote your store with email marketing.
From small e-commerce shops to big online retailers, Klaviyo helps you find your audience, engage your customers, and build your brand. Klaviyo is free for new businesses up to 250 subscribers.
Yotpo – Yotpo lets your customers quickly leave reviews after their purchases, from both on-site and signature in-mail review. What better way to optimize Shopify store’s SEO than user-generated content?
With Yopto, you can easily share to Facebook and Twitter profiles to drive new traffic and sales. Yotpo is free and helps you leverage the power of social proof to increase trust and sell more.
Conversio – Conversio is an automated marketing platform that enables you to supercharge all of your customer interactions. Conversio enables you to increase Customer Lifetime Value by sending marketing campaigns, automated emails using data-driven features and powerful segmentation.
Pricing for Conversio depends on how many orders you process monthly. 50 orders and below is $19/month while orders of around 500 are $109/month.
Product Reviews – Shopify Product reviews allows you to add a customer review feature to your products. This provides a way for your customers to engage with you, as well as each other to encourage sales.
It’s a free app that allows you to increase the sales of reviewed products, add SEO-friendly review scores to your Google search results and create a fully customizable design.
Shippo – Shippo integrates your Shopify orders and allows you to print labels with one click. Simply get Shippo for your Shopify store and import your orders. You can then access discounted USPS and DHL rates to print labels. Tracking numbers will be synced back to your store and your customers notified
Pricing for Shippo is 5¢ per shipment plus carrier costs.
xSellco – xSellco offers connected support, feedback and pricing in one e‑commerce platform. Their helpdesk and effective feedback allows you to centralize all your customer queries and order details from every sales channel into one connected dashboard.
Google Analytics – Google Analytics is a free tool that allows you to see your website data in a clean manner. It is a powerful platform if you know how to use it, and can help you determine things like content performance, purchasing information, where your traffic is coming from and how long people are staying on your site.
Setting up goal tracking is a must, but once you have your goals defined, you will be able to gather a lot of information about your customers so that you can optimize your PPC campaigns, develop a strong organic content strategy, optimize your product descriptions, and track visitor behavior.
Plug in SEO – Plug in SEO gives you a single verdict: does your site have issues with search engine performance that will be worthwhile to fix? Once signed up (for free), Plug in SEO checks your site, determines the verdict and displays details.
Rebrandly – Rebrandly is a free URL shortening tool that helps you customize your links with your brand name while also allowing you to add UTM parameters and / or retargeting pixels to the links you share around the internet.
These links increase brand awareness and help you track where your traffic is coming from. This tool also offers an easy to use chrome extension to make creating links on the fly very convenient.
When it comes down to it, every business is going to require different solutions at different stages.
Vetting and choosing the right tools for your eCommerce operation can be the difference between ultimate success and potential failure.
One thing is for sure though, if you have your manufacturing figured out [Link to Using Sourcify VS Going It Alone], you’ll have a lot more time to develop the perfect eCommerce toolbelt.
What tools for eCommerce can’t you live without? Tweet us at @sourcifyinc to let us know.
Happy selling!
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