The number of businesses going online has been increasing for years, and this trend is expected to continue in the foreseeable future. This presents both opportunities and challenges for eCommerce entrepreneurs who want to grow their businesses sustainably.
To thrive in the competitive world of eCommerce, entrepreneurs need to know the right tools to use. That's why we've created this article to help shed light on the 6 most important tools you need to start, grow, and manage your eCommerce business with ease. Our aim is to provide practical information that is easy to understand and implement.
Google Analytics
It is absolutely true that data is the lifeblood of modern businesses, particularly for those in the eCommerce industry. To survive and succeed, eCommerce businesses must be able to understand the data they collect from their customers, leads, and competitors.
Google Analytics is a crucial tool for eCommerce business owners and managers who want to gather and analyze important data from their website's interactions with customers, leads, and prospects.
Google Analytics is a powerful tool that can help you understand how visitors interact with your website. With this tool, you can easily see which pages on your website are most popular, where visitors tend to drop off, and which pages are most effective at converting visitors into customers. This information is crucial for making informed decisions and optimizing your website for higher conversion rates.
There are two versions of Google Analytics: a free version and a paid version. For solopreneurs and small businesses, the free version may be sufficient. However, larger businesses and enterprises will likely benefit from the advanced website integrations and unlimited data collection that the paid version offers, among other functional benefits.
Hotjar
Although Hotjar is sometimes seen as an alternative to Google Analytics, it's actually a complementary tool. While Google Analytics is great for gathering data on how leads and customers behave on your E-commerce website, it's also helpful to understand their motives for taking certain actions.
Ideally, you'd like to get inside the heads of your site visitors to understand what they like and dislike about your website, which pages frustrated them, and why. You'd also want to know why they spent a long time on a particular page and whether it was due to difficulty finding information or because they enjoyed the content.
By answering these and similar questions, you can optimize the browsing experience for your site visitors and encourage them to make mutually beneficial purchase decisions. Hotjar is a tool that can help with this by providing under-the-hood information using technologies such as heatmap analytics. This empowers you to make informed decisions about how to improve your E-commerce website for better results.
SeerBit
As online security challenges continue to rise, it's essential to have a secure payment gateway solution for your E-commerce store. Buyers expect their payments to be made securely, but there are also other customer convenience concerns to consider.
Unfortunately, when it comes to payment gateways for businesses in Africa, most products on the market take a one-size-fits-all approach, offering customers a wide range of features that may not be relevant to their businesses.
This means that customers may be overwhelmed with unnecessary features that don't impact their businesses. To address this, it's important for businesses to consider payment gateway solutions that are tailored to their specific needs and requirements, rather than settling for a generic solution.
SeerBit is a payment gateway that offers flexible payment solutions tailored to different categories of customers. Unlike other payment gateways that simply provide a box of features, SeerBit's solutions are customized to provide the best options for businesses.
One key advantage of SeerBit is its ability to accept payments both online and offline, which provides customers with more flexibility and can boost revenue for businesses. But SeerBit's flexibility extends beyond just the payment experience for customers. The platform also allows businesses to split invoices and collect recurring payments, providing even more options for businesses to manage their payments.
BigCommerce
The importance of flexibility in choosing an eCommerce platform cannot be overstated, especially for businesses focused on growth. BigCommerce is an eCommerce platform that offers entrepreneurs a high degree of flexibility. For example, with its headless commerce feature, you can continue using your custom or CMS-based front-end website while it powers your back-end. Additionally, you can manage multiple stores using a single BigCommerce account.
When selecting an eCommerce platform, it's essential to consider the needs and growth potential of your business. You don't want to choose a platform that's ill-suited to your business's current or future needs. BigCommerce allows your business to start small and grow as large as you want.
It's not practical to use a platform like Magento to build a small lifestyle e-shop with no plans for growth beyond selling a few products to a handful of customers. In this case, a platform like Shopify would be a better option.
ActiveCampaign
Email sequences have become a popular way to guide customers from initial interest to final purchase. However, with so many businesses now using this approach, it can be difficult to stand out in your customers' inboxes. To make an impact, it's essential to have effective marketing automation tools at your disposal.
While many email marketing platforms only offer basic features like targeting and segmentation, ActiveCampaign offers more advanced capabilities. In addition to personalizing campaigns, it also enables you to send reminders to customers who have abandoned their carts, win back previous customers, and create loyalty programs. It can even integrate with your E-commerce website to pull product information into your email campaigns, and track fulfillment records.
By using ActiveCampaign, you can take your email marketing to the next level and create campaigns that truly engage your customers and lead to more conversions.
SEMRush
It's not enough to have a great E-commerce store with fantastic products and prices if nobody knows about it. Online visibility is crucial, and that's where SEMRush comes in. This tool can help you attract potential customers to your website by using search engine optimization (SEO) tools to target relevant keywords that potential customers might be using in their online searches.
By optimizing your website content using the right keywords, you can increase the likelihood of your website appearing at the top of relevant search results, which can lead to more visitors and potential customers.
SEMRush is more than just an SEO tool, however. It also offers features like competitor research, social media marketing, and pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns, allowing you to get a more comprehensive understanding of your market and better target your marketing efforts.
It is essential to keep in mind that the tools mentioned in this article are not exhaustive, there are numerous other useful tools that can contribute to your E-commerce success. However, you have to carefully consider the specific needs of their businesses and growth prospects when selecting the right tools and strategies to adopt. Flexibility is also key, as it allows you to start small and scale up as you grow.
E-commerce is continually evolving, and with the right tools and strategies, you can keep up with these changes and stay ahead of the competition.