Choosing the right platform for your business can be overwhelming. There are hundreds, if not thousands, on the market, and each of them has its advantages, disadvantages, and value proposition. So how do you choose the most suitable one?
Regardless of your company’s size or stage, the first step is to do an internal evaluation. This will allow you to identify short, medium, and long-term needs. However, there are eight essential features that the eCommerce platform you choose must have regardless of the particularities of your company or niche.
Content management means that you can load, edit, and delete content easily and quickly. If you are thinking of hiring a third party to do it, it matters anyway! Imagine that you send 20, 30, or 40 new products to add to your store and do not have the facility to manage that content. Do you know what will happen? It will take too long.
In e-commerce, being fast and efficient is vital to keep your catalog and inventory up-to-date and stay relevant in the market.
1.Variety of Integrations
The integrations give your e-commerce platform the ability to communicate with other platforms and software to expand its functionalities.
Among the most common integrations, we can find tools for specialized promotions, cross-selling and up-selling, emergency notifications.
As your online store evolves, you will identify what integrations you need. So make sure you choose a platform that has the possible combinations. You can look at the user reviews to get an idea of its relevance.
2.Analytics:
including the ability to generate reports that measure traffic and its sources, the best keywords, and how visitors interact with your page. This will allow you to understand and optimize the customer journey and communication channels.
Additionally, you will need monetary analysis to understand sales volume, average purchase value, and customer lifetime value (CLV). With this data, you will identify opportunities to increase income and identify your star clients.
3.Marketing:
This includes email marketing, social remarketing, personalization, automation, among others. Allowing your customers to choose the payment method they feel most comfortable with definitely makes the difference between a purchase and an abandoned cart. Make sure that the platform you select integrates with various payment methods.
4.Opinion Manager:
We know how essential opinions are. We have all skipped the product description to go straight to the reviews and decide whether or not to buy that item.
Having functional opinion management integration is one of the most powerful tools in an online store. This tool should be verified as a Google Review Partner to ensure it meets all requirements and better positions your store in search engines.
5.SEO friendly
Put, SEO is all it takes to ensure that your online store is visible to search engines like Google.
Almost all of our searches and investigations start on Google. How your store is optimized for search engines will determine whether or not people find your eCommerce to satisfy a need they have at the moment.
6.Design and Optimized Code
Another statistic to consider is that 40% of users will leave the competition if they have a bad mobile experience. Worse still, 84% have experienced difficulty completing a transaction over the mobile phone.
So take responsive design and fast, seamless loading into account when choosing your ideal eCommerce platform.
7.Easy to Use Checkout
It should be simple, easy to understand, and transparent. The checkout is where most dropouts are obtained, and although there are several causes, a confusing and complicated checkout is one of them.
Ideally, it should be a single-page or guided with few steps to complete. It would be best to avoid distractions to focus on the only action that matters: completing the payment.
8.Payment methods
We mentioned it before, and we never tire of repeating it. The most critical part of the online shopping process is payment. It would help if you offered a reasonable variety of payment methods so that your clients can choose the most comfortable for them.
Think of it this way: How many times has it happened to you that you want to buy food and you keep craving just because you don’t have cash? If you only accept a few types of payments on your e-commerce site, you will reject leads without realizing it.
Whichever methods you choose, be sure to offer at least one credit card option and one other instant payment method like PayPal.
9.Security
How many times have you been insecure about whether or not they will clone your card when you buy online? This is a thought that we all have had, especially in our first online purchases.
Security is one of the most important things that an e-commerce platform should offer you. You must be able to install an SSL certificate or include it in your offer. To be clear, the SSL certificate is what makes the winged green padlock of the URL appear in the search engines. It indicates to the user that the page where they are browsing is secure and that the data is encrypted.
If the platform you choose is the one that will process the payments, you must ensure that they comply with the PCI – DSS.
10.Scalability
All companies aim to grow and earn more money unless yours is a hobby. In e-commerce, growth translates to more traffic, multiple simultaneous purchases, more products, and more inventory.
Do you remember what I mentioned at the beginning of this article about determining your online store’s short, medium, and long-term needs? Doing so will give you a reasonably clear idea of the characteristics you must have to sustain your electronic business’s growth.
One of the most common setbacks when an online store grows is the inability to withstand spikes in traffic. Sooner or later, the page goes down, and you automatically lose customers, and trust and perception of security can be affected.
Dilip Tiwari is an SEO Expert at Universal Stream Solution. Universal Stream Solution is a web development company in Atlanta. That helps startups to enterprise companies in mobile & web technology.
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