Ecommerce is quickly changing the world as we know it. We now have more options when buying something online and have little to no impediments in where we want to buy and what we want to buy.
It has moved the needle in entrepreneurship as more small players become big-time winners with online brands, stores, and ventures.
In 2020, over 2 billion people purchased something online. For anyone looking to maximize on this growing market, you must understand eCommerce needs and trends that point towards growth.
So if you have an eCommerce business or are planning to start one, it’s time to beef up your knowledge base of tools you can use.
Here are 7 eCommerce tools you should use to help you scale your online store.
1. Shopify
Shopify is a tool that helps you create a website, add products or services, offer and market it to others, and collect payment. Shopify is currently one of the biggest online shop builders available.
If you want to create a Shopify store but are worrying about not having the right connections, manpower or budget to build a website, you can customize the shop’s settings and designs with no coding required. Moreover, there are a bunch of website templates offered on Shopify that should make it more than easy for you to launch a fully-functional online store.
2. Taggshop
The next tool on this list is called Taggshop, a user-generated content software that helps business owners promote their brands, products, and services online. Given that building trust and rapport with a client is one of the hardest parts of the eCommerce ecosystem, Taggshop solves a social commerce need. It takes user-created content and uses that to promote a product or service on social or on your own accounts.
3. HubSpot
CRM or customer relationship management software has become more popular over the years. It provides business owners with a suite of lead generation, marketing, and customer service tools to create more long-term revenue from each customer acquired. HubSpot is one of the biggest leaders in providing this kind of service. With HubSpot, you can:
- Build a simple website
- Create chatbots
- Store email templates
- Send out emails in batches
- Chat with customers through embeddable chatbots
- And so on!
HubSpot also has a free inbound marketing school that will help businesses learn how to market their services or offerings digitally.
4. PayPal
PayPal is a software needed for an eCommerce business and arguably one of the most popular payment gateway software. Through PayPal, you can receive payments from customers through debit or credit cards.On top of being a powerful eCommerce tool, PayPal can also be used to pay for products or even disburse payroll to staff. It’s a highly-used payroll software amongst virtual professionals and teams. The fees on PayPal, however, can be quite steep. So if you’re looking for other alternatives to PayPal, check out these best payroll software reviews.
5. Customer.io
Outbound marketing and sales are highly crucial aspects of any eCommerce business. With a tool like Customer.io, eCommerce companies can market to potential customers. You can do a lot with this tool, including:
- Send email and SMS notifications to leads and existing customers about sales, promos, and special offers
- Re-target abandoned carts and lost sales
- Create email marketing automations and funnels to nurture leads
- And so much more.
You can also integrate a Customer.io account with other marketing and eCommerce tools so you can automate the sales and marketing process. That way, your store generates income even when you aren’t doing anything when you deploy the right messaging and strategies to your email marketing efforts.
6. SEMrush
One of the other popular ecommerce SaaS tools is SEMrush, a service that helps you improve your search engine marketing game by giving you access to insights and analyses that will show you opportunities to reach more audiences through SEO and search engine advertising.
With SEMRush, business owners can search for relevant keywords that will help boost their visibility on organic searches. Search engine optimization is one of the most sustainable business development strategies today. Investing in a tool that will help you tap into that power will be a worthy investment.
7. ShippingEasy
On top of the eCommerce business equipment and tools you should have for marketing, you should also pay attention to fulfillment. A business that effectively delivers and ships out products will inadvertently get repeat customers. That’s where tools like ShippingEasy come in handy. With ShippingEasy, you’re able to track and fulfill orders with ease. It brings your online stores from all marketplaces into one dashboard and helps you manage your product shipping schedules and progress. You can use Shipping Easy to create a shipping workflow that will get your products out to clients as soon as possible.
8. ScrapingBee
Are you an ecommerce business owner looking to gain a competitive advantage? Do you find yourself spending too much time manually collecting product information from other websites? If so, ScrapingBee is the tool for you.
ScrapingBee offers a simple API that can scrape any website and deliver the data in a structured format, all without the technical headaches typically associated with web scraping. Forget endless copy and pasting sessions — this powerful tool can help your business collect crucial product information, including pricing, availability, and descriptions, from other ecommerce websites automatically, giving you a vital edge over your competition.
Better yet, ScrapingBee’s rotating proxies and rate-limiting avoidance features ensure that your scraping efforts aren’t blocked, allowing you to access vast amounts of data without worrying about being cut off.
Digital Business Will Keep Growing
Given all the trends today, it’s safe to say that digital and eCommerce business opportunities will continue to grow. Retail and online stores among small businesses are now almost identical in volume. Ecommerce is here to stay, and the sooner you can jump on the bandwagon, the more you’ll benefit from it.
