E-commerce tools are different kinds of B2B solutions that offer a variety of services needed to make e-commerce, meaning buying and selling online, convenient, trouble-free, and cost-effective for the buyer, and drawing the most revenue for the seller. Here is the list of the most essential ones:
1. Ecommerce Platforms
When you decide to start an online shop, you have two options, you can buy your own domain and space from a hosting company, build a fully independent website, and then spend money, time, and effort to SEO-optimize it so your ranking in search engines is high enough to be seen. Or you can rent an e-store space from a B2B site that is a mass digital store and lets you use their domain, hosting, and SEO to open your own store there. It’s like a digital mall, you can rent a shop and decorate it however you want, and it’s called an e-commerce platform, the most famous one being Shopify.
2. Website Building Tools
If you decide against using an e-commerce tool, and in favor of going fully independent, you need to design and build a website from scratch, there are two ways you can go about that. You can either hire professional developers to design you one, which is obviously going to cost you quite a bit, or you can do what many up-and-coming start-ups do, and use a drag-and-drop website building tool like WordPress to do it yourself. With a ton of help and equipment they provide, which may not always be a hundred percent free, it’s definitely very much affordable.
3. Marketing Tools
There are a semi-wide variety of tools that not only help you both strategize and put together a marketing package, but also help you find the people, resources, and paths to get it all done. For example, you go on a marketing tool website and fill out a form, specifying your industry, niche, budget, goal, and timeline. Then it suggests a social media marketing package, and also help you find the influencers that correspond to your brand’s persona, marketing style, and budget. Called an influencer marketing platform, which is a true godsend in terms of digital marketing.
4. Conversion Optimization Tools
After spending precious time and money on building your website and marketing your brand, you can expect a decent amount of traffic from potential customers to visit your e-store. You strive to turn every single one of them into paying customers, right? But that rarely happens. In fact, most of them don’t buy anything before leaving, so you need three types of e-commerce tools to give you statistics, user behavior analysis, and optimization solutions to turn up your conversion rate. Here are what these three are called and what they do exactly.
4.1 Analytics Tools
There are many tools that give you some crisp stats on how your current website is doing with the traffic you have brought in through your marketing effort. For example, they tell you how many people were on your site, how many left early and unconverted, when they left, how long they stayed, what time of day, week, or month they visited, and much more. They are called analytics tools, and the most famous one of them is Google Analytics.
4.2 User Behavior Monitoring Tools
A mix of heatmapping tools and session replay tools, these B2B e-commerce tools track and record what your visitors exactly did, where they clicked, how far down and up they scrolled, what they used their mouse on, what they typed, what pages and elements they looked at and used. They not only show you their exact behavior in videos through session replay tools, but they also segment these raw data into tables called a website heatmap and conversion funnels. They give you a clear idea of what encouraged them to make a purchase and what left them unimpressed and opting against buying something.
4.3 UX Optimization Tools
When you know exactly what parts are underperforming and what is driving your users to not convert and leave, you can use tools that help you optimize that part of your website’s user experience that is costing you hard-earned potential customers. For example, they can change where a call to action element is and take it to a place where most of the users stop scrolling, do A/B testing and see if the new place gets you more conversions.
5. Communication And Internal Organization Tools
There are several tools that make communicating and staying organized possible for an eCommerce website and boost productivity. Here are the three most crucial ones:
5.1. Real-Time Chat Platforms
Tools like Discord, Trello, and Slack facilitate vital communication between remote workers, foster organization by keeping teams in sync, and boost productivity by making consistent give and take accessible in group chats.
5.2. Productivity Tracking And Boosting Tools
Click-up, Asana, and Coda provide customizable time-tracking, roster calendars, and trackable docs that not only keep teams in order and productive, but they coordinate job division and team progress by their deadline reminder tools, done and undone task management columns, and drag and drop assignment management.
5.3. Project Management Tools
The likes of Monday.com, Rocketlane, and Jira are must-have tools that do a great simultaneous job of keeping track of, centralizing, and automating the workflow. They offer inventory management, metrics segmentation and analysis, and real-time collaboration.
6. Sales Process And Supply Chain Management Tools
One of the most critical parts of an e-commerce website is after the sale has been finalized, and now it’s time to make the deliveries. Tools like Shipwire, Veeqo, and GTZship provide order, inventory, and warehouse management, in addition to shipment and logistical support.
7. Customer Service Tools
Tools like Sprout Social, Zendesk, and Freshdesk provide smooth ticket management features, by organizing the support tickets received from all social media platforms in one place for you to respond to while giving you a live chat channel and access to relevant customer data all in real-time. You can see why you can’t run a smooth e-commerce business without such customer service tools.