7 Tips to Choose the Right Platform for Your Ecommerce Business
Ecommerce technologies continue to improve and become more advanced. Building an eCommerce business website on a platform seems quite reasonable. Especially, if you want to have a functional website with relevant features without hiring a web developer. The eCommerce platform market is huge with many different options for anyone who wants to have an online store.
If you feel like you have some difficulties deciding about the right platform for you among a large number of options – these are 7 tips that will help you step in the right direction when choosing the eCommerce platform.
Choose the platform that meets your goals
Not everyone thinks about that and it results in failure, but this is a very important aspect of starting an eCommerce business – writing down eCommerce business goals and expectations from the platform you’re choosing. When you have a plan and a certain list of requirements that will fit best for your needs, it will help you to make a better choice. Here are some of the factors you need to take into consideration when choosing the eCommerce platform: your budget, features you’re interested in, customer support.
You can use some tools, for example, Webappmeister that can help you to compare different eCommerce platforms based on pricing, designs, features, statistics, security, support. This tool will help you to find a platform that meets your eCommerce business goals.
Make the platform’s security your priority
There is research that showed that in 2019 online stores experienced an increased number of attacks. To prevent any cyber-attacks you need to choose a highly-secured platform for your store. And your customers should be guaranteed that the information they left on your website will not be stolen or used by any third parties. You need to ensure that our customers’ payment information is secured. Some eCommerce platforms offer standard security measures, but still, you need to check that information.
Choose platform based on your shipping needs
Shipping is not as easy as it may seem. Your platform must support certain shipping requirements to make the customer experience as good as possible. These requirements include real-time communication, integration with a third-party Warehouse Management Software.
Most businesses choose carriers such as UPS, FedEx, USPS to ship the products. Make sure your platform can be integrated with the software of these carriers. And the great feature to have is automated messages when an order is placed and shipped.
Make sure your eCommerce platform has an SEO feature
SEO features will help your eCommerce website get found in search engines, which will result in more traffic on your site. SEO-friendly features include the ability to add a blog to your online store, using a short domain name that suits your store best (without the name of a platform in it), and option for your future customers to leave comments and reviews. This will make your eCommerce website more trustworthy and more customers will want to buy your products. SEO optimization will boost the online visibility of your eCommerce website, which allows you to generate organic traffic, that’s why you need to make sure the platform you chose has those features.
A lot of traffic results in more sales, which increases your profitability, so SEO features are extremely important for your business.
Try to make your eCommerce website as simple and accessible as possible
Before creating an eCommerce website, you need to make sure the platform is very easy to use. How do you manage your orders? How are the products displayed on the website? Is it hard to make payments? These are the questions you need to ask yourself before launching your eCommerce website by using a certain platform. Great thing is that some eCommerce platforms offer demo versions to test their admin panels and dashboards. This will help you to see how accessible and user-friendly these platforms are.
Another thing to check on your future eCommerce platform is the time it takes to upload products, generate online invoices, etc. Also, it is good to check if you can monitor your store in real-time.
And, most importantly, put yourself in your customer’s shoes. Would you personally buy something on your website? Is it easy for you to find products and make payments on your website? These are the most important questions to check the accessibility of the website.
Customer support is essential
Your brand reputation is very important, as you need to build a good place where people would want to shop. Customer experience should become your priority because this affects your online reputation. Customers will leave reviews and you need to do your best to make your customers happy with your products and services. You need to make sure the platform you are using will not have a lot of technical issues, which can potentially influence the customer experience.
Check what customer support your eCommerce platform offers. You need to be ready that sometimes you may encounter some technical issues with your online store and it’s okay, but it is important that the platform’s customer support is quick to resolve any issue. Also, it is good if the eCommerce platform has community-based support, which helps you to ask for advice from users that have had similar experiences.
Scalability is very important for your online business
When you choose a platform for your online store, thinking ahead is a great advantage. If your online store is successful, you will need to add more and more products, handle more clients, process many more orders. That’s why scalability is important for those who want to grow without any limits. You need to check if the platform you chose is scalable and you will not face any problems when expanding your store.
It is good to know that some eCommerce platforms offer subscription packages that allow you to change your plan once you are willing to expand your store. With this feature, you will not have any limits to make your online store more advanced.
Ecommerce is the industry, which grows faster and faster each year and due to the pandemic the world is experiencing right now, more businesses will move to online selling. This is good, but at the same time competition is huge, which makes it quite difficult to run a successful online store. If you are offering products that are high demand and your brand can stand out from the crowd, then with consistent work, your online business will only grow and grow bigger.
Tali is a results-driven digital marketer with a track record of growing her clients’ businesses and driving revenue.
As the business owner at WSI Digital Path, Vaughan, she takes great pride in delivering powerful but cost-effective solutions for her clients.
Innovative and revolutionary digital marketing trends set the pace for the digital marketing industry. Don’t make the mistake of falling behind! Contact WSI Digital Path today and trust your digital marketing to the industry’s leading professionals.
