For all the ecommerce enthusiasts out there, the good news is that ecommerce is not as complicated now, as it was earlier. But, that’s for sure that ecommerce is complex in the nature of business conduction. To sell your products and services via your ecommerce store, you not only update the product from backend, but have to manage inventory, shipping, taxation, customer interaction, marketing, and much more. To simplify it further, businesses seek ways to make it happen. And, ecommerce platforms are serving as a tool to reduce complexity.
What is the Ecommerce platform?
To those of you unaware of the ecommerce business conduction, let us brief you about ecommerce platforms. Ecommerce platform is the online platform that has the integration of all the tools which are essential for the conduction of a web store. Right from the website designing to web hosting to management of customers, inventory, and marketing, every goal can be accomplished using the platform. All those tools are provided as a feature of the ecommerce platform, leveraging which you can streamline the business.
How to choose an ecommerce platform?
Though there are numerous ecommerce platforms out there, you must seek for the one with intuitive user interface and less complex user dashboard. The selection of ecommerce platform depends on a lot of factors, like:
- Number of products you like to list
- Type of products you want to sell (i.e., digital, physical, service)
- Level of the creative control you want
- Budget
- Time constraints
- Scalability of your business
Is an ecommerce platform beneficial for your business?
Yes, that’s for sure that the ecommerce platform will help you manage all of your business activities. It is undoubtedly a blessing for all the businesses, and it’s more effective for startups and small scale businesses. One of the best things about the ecommerce platform is, you can use them to build your ecommerce store on your own without any knowledge of the coding.
When you set up an ecommerce store, you can check for cloud-based hosting as well as in-premise hosting. When cloud-based is one of the features of the ecommerce platform, you can count on in-premise hosting or external server-based hosting if you have huge traffic flow. The choice of the hosting of the website entirely depends on the traffic, investment budget, and reliability of the platform or web hosting server that you are choosing for your business. An ecommerce platform includes:
- Product management and inventory management suite
- Merchandising
- Personalization of store
- Pricing and promotion
- Customer management suite
In order to select the best ecommerce platform for your business, you must consider below-listed ecommerce factors:
- The website features: One of the vital ecommerce website features is a secure checkout page. Additionally, you must count on inventory management, content management, order management, and order fulfillment to improve the functionality of your business. Your website must be mobile compatible, scalable to reach the next level, and acquire more traffic.
- Design functionality: When we are talking about the designing related features for an ecommerce store, it’s not only about how good is the look of the store, rather its more about how effective it is in the backend. An easy-to-use platform will not only improve the front-end design of the store but also help you in managing the backend of your store with utter ease.
- Marketing & Sales features: An attractive design of your web store is of no use if you aren’t able to sell your products. When you just have an ecommerce store designed separately, you have to look for all of these tools distinctly, or maybe you will try for plugins. Plugins are nothing but the small software additions to the ecommerce store to improve the functionality of the store. In the ecommerce platform, you will have them integrated at your store as the features of the platform. Such features can be discount offers, gift card options, marketing features like campaign designing, email marketing, social media integration, etc. The usage of such features varies from business to business. You can check for the basic features made available.
- Customer support: Customer support is vital for you as a business, and it is the same case for your customers. When you are selectin the ecommerce platform that can be suitable for your business, you must check with their support team as well as the resources they have available for you. You must also look for the tools or features they have integrated at their store to ease your customer interaction. The feature of CRM integration can be helpful for your marketing and sales team, whereas the offer of live chat can be fruitful for you to serve your customers.
Though there are several options available in the market, it is better to jot down the features and compare them accordingly. One of such significant ecommerce platforms is Builderfly; you can count on it, to build your ecommerce website as well as to strategize your business. The ginny points that you can add to your pocket are, it’s a DIY ecommerce platform that not only helps in building your web store but also in designing and launching your native mobile app. Our AI-integrated mobile app opens new dimensions for you to look at the business and flourish it to the next level.
