Every successful business starts from an idea, and that idea becomes something more. In some cases, the idea becomes a website and eventually a successful e-commerce store. Successful in terms of reach, customers, growth, and most importantly revenue. Do you have a business idea too but don't know where to start? We've got you covered!
The e-commerce industry is estimated to have a net revenue of 6.3 trillion dollars in 2023, and you have an ample 30% of the market share to target, so take this ripe opportunity to start your store. In this blog, we aim to help you set up an e-commerce without any setbacks. We discuss what to look for in an e-commerce platform and the best practices that will help you reach the right people, reach higher status in the e-commerce food chain, and ultimately help you become successful.
The ecommerce platform checklist
Product management: A good ecommerce platform should help you set up your storefront catalog and manage your inventory with ease. This includes adding product titles, descriptions, and setting up prices for products. One of the primary goals of product management is to ensure a good customer experience is achieved.
Order management system: This system helps you organize your products, the purchasing process, and the order fulfillment process. It requires integrations for shipping carriers, payment portals, and an accounting software.The entire process is automated and is triggered immediately after an order is placed by a customer. Some order management systems also support real time order tracking.
Robots and SEO analytics: Robots are essential to running a e-commerce store. They can be added in the form of chat bots to ensure your customer has a virtual assistant guiding them through a particularly challenging section. As an e-commerce, you can set priority to pages that have to be crawled by bots, that way you can highlight your core business to the search engines and drive more organic traffic to your store.
Marketing: Setting up multiple facets of content ensures organic traffic to your website. One such content initiative can be blogs. Blogs that are written to upskill a potential customer in case they are unaware of the full capabilities of your product. B2B e-commerce stores indispensably have a blog page that appeals to their serious customer base. B2C on the other hand sends out targeted, inbound email campaigns based on a data-driven strategy.
If your marketing objective encompasses ROI and not just brand awareness, you can integrate your business with the social media platforms and run paid advertising campaigns. However, the most effective way to get returns is to benefit most from SEO. This results in prolonged success and quantifiable brand visibility.
Personalization: It is vital to set up your e-commerce store and recommendations based on customer behavior and product relevance in the market. That way, you can prolong the interest of your customer, allowing only real-time, targeted content to reach your customer. With personalization, you can also cross-sell, upsell, and apply promotional offers to entice the customer.
Analytics and reporting tool: A robust analytics and reporting tool helps to obtain insights like sales performance and marketing effectiveness. It also enables you to uncover insights on consumer behavior for better targeting and nurturing. Ideally, the analytics should have capabilities ranging from providing key metrics to making dashboards for maximum e-commerce initiatives optimization.
Scalability and reliability: A scalable and secure e-commerce platform is 'indispensable'. In times of unexpected high-volume traffic day, a secure e-commerce platform proves capable of handling traffic and ensures customers have a safe and reliable shopping experience.
Tools to look for in a unified ecommerce platform
Commerce site builder: To easily and efficiently build your store
CRM: To store customer data in a central repository
Inventory system: To manage orders and control your stock
Analytics: To gain insights through reports and dashboards
Help desk: To maintain a customer support portal for better transparency
Accounting system: To manage finances and payments
Campaign management: To ensure a marketing campaign reaches the right audience
Project management: To ensure internal projects are executed successfully
That is a roundup of eight products, but here are some other additional functionalities that you will need to manually adopt into your ecosystem to make it a unified ecommerce platform:
Middleware management
Platform scalability and security
Order fulfillment optimization
Mobile responsiveness
Personalization and customization
Adopting expensive ERP solutions
Recruiting IT admins dedicated to setting up shop
Spending hours training new recruits with the different interfaces (or)
Only onboarding talent familiar with all the tools
Phew! That is a lot, isn't it? Well, it may sound like a lot to keep track of, but fortunately, there is a solution that can help you save time, so you can focus on catering to the needs of your customers.
Zoho One is the unified platform to run your ecommerce platform
Zoho One is the most responsive and inclusive platform for running an e-commerce business, it is thoroughly powered by Zoho. A comprehensive platform with 45+ solutions that will benefit your business in 450+ ways. As Zoho One is seamlessly integrated you can reduce time spent on making middleware work with your solutions. Instead, you can spend time establishing a reliable customer experience. You can also streamline processes and automate cross-application workflows without infrastructure complexities.
Zoho One is entirely cloud-based, you can start from building a website to handling your accounts and clients all in One virtual space. Zoho One has great uptime and it accommodates heavy traffic. It also has the most responsive database that creates profiles and journey maps as soon as a visitor lands on your website.
Take this opportunity to make the most of your business by using Zoho One!
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