Online retail sales are continuing to boom with more and more shoppers preferring to browse and purchase on the Internet rather than head to the high street shops.
Awesome Tools Every E-Commerce Seller
Running an e-commerce business or simply finding a new outlet for your products can be lucrative if your shops are set up accurately and attractively. Researching which of the thousands of e-commerce tools available are suitable for your sales and marketing plans is also a good first step for many online sellers.
You can easily get your hands on a whole range of e-commerce tools with just a few clicks. The functions of the tools vary to assist you with setting up a shop, processing orders, marketing and production. Below is a low down of four practical e-commerce tools that are important for every e-commerce seller to know about.
Shopify
This popular and reputable all-in-one e-commerce solution includes all the tools you need to create your own stylized website with built-in integrations including for Amazon stores.
Linking your Shopify page to an Amazon shop only takes a few steps. However, if you produce something yourself and wish to build a brand it may be worth reading up more about Amazon’s Brand Registry Program and its tools available to help brands increase their reach and sales. This program opens up new groundbreaking tools to drive more traffic to a store with trademarked products.
Shopify can also connect with most other online platforms and tools including those for social media sites such as Facebook and Instagram. Where carefully designed and placed adverts can direct consumers to your Shopify store.
The one great advantage of using Shopify is that it offers heaps of apps that will help you in increasing your website visitors as well as sales of your products and services. Apps like Tada are some of the great examples that are designed to help store owners to turn their website visitors into buyers reduce the rate of shopping cart abandonment.
There are several other e-commerce store platforms that are worth looking into as they offer similar functionality to Shopify, these include BigCommerce and Wix.
Olark Live Chat Software
Often when customers are checking out a store and browsing products they will see something they like but are unsure about it. Most customers want to know more about products before buying, some customers will be after an immediate response to a query and the best way to be as responsive as possible is by using live chat software.
Engaging with your customers in real-time to answer questions, get feedback and make sales immediately makes live chat software a real asset to your site.
A responsive chat function on your site is a useful tool to help you increase sales, build trust and customer loyalty and gain knowledge and understanding of your customers’ needs and wants. Thankfully, the Olark widget is easy to add to your site and can integrate with the majority of e-commerce platforms.
Buffer: Social Media Management Tool
A cornerstone of every e-commerce business is engaging with customers through social media whether it’s informing them of a product update or a promotion, or providing them with the opportunity to give feedback.
Buffer can help e-commerce sellers to reach their target audience regularly by providing a comprehensive suite of tools that allow for content to be posted automatically and repeated regularly according to a schedule that can be set up weeks or months in advance.
As well as being convenient, Buffer also enables the seller to test the market precisely by scheduling posts with similar content at different times to gain insights on when their target audience is most likely to view content and engage with it.
The posting schedule on Buffer is fully customizable so you can choose the specific time-zone, days, and dates which will open up your time to work on other parts of your business.
Canva
Before you go and spend money on a graphic designer to jazz up your store banners, adverts, posters, newsletters, and announcements consider using a design tool such as Canva.
This app doesn’t require any particular design skills rather just an eye for the right style and look. With over 8000 templates, infographics, fonts, stock images, and elements, it is quite easy to create all your marketing and sales designs on Canva.
There are two versions available, free and pro. Canva Pro can be well worth the $10.99 per month subscription as it provides complete access to the photo and video library, custom and premium fonts, a branding kit with over 100 colour palettes, and unlimited folders in which to store your uploads and designs.
With the online shopping sector growing strongly year on year and brick-and-mortar stores closing in large numbers, now is a better time than ever to consider setting up shop on the Internet.
The benefits it can bring are wide-ranging such as saving money on rent and reaching more customers. That being said, every e-commerce seller should arm themselves with a whole host of tools to avoid headaches and really push their business forward.