Many of the world’s successful businesses are e-commerce sites. However, setting up your eCommerce website and becoming successful does not happen overnight. If you’re serious about starting an eCommerce store, there’s many things to consider and goals to work towards, from mobile optimising your site to finding your niche and target audience. 87 percent of the UK households made online purchases within the preceding 12 months, making the UK the most advances eCommerce market in Europe.
So, with the right tools it is easy for any small business to start selling online and here are some eCommerce website tools your new site needs to help you support your way to eCommerce business success.
1. Shopify – For Your eCommerce Website
In order to set up an eCommerce business, you need a platform to support it. Shopify has made it easy to get your site up and running.
The eCommerce platform has a lot of significant features – page templates, so you can build out your own website pages, secure payment options with different additional features to receive orders.
You can easily track everything – site visitors, new orders and who has spent the most. Shopify is a brilliant solution for any size eCommerce business. In this way, you can reach out to customers who have abandoned their carts or haven’t purchased for a long time, set up discount links and codes for them.
The pricing starts from $29 and comes with a 14 day free trial.
2. WooCommerce – For Your eCommerce Website
If you already have a WordPress website and are interested in starting an eCommerce store with it, you can install the WooCommerce plugin and start selling. The plugin is fully customisable, integrates with popular payment platforms like Stripe, PayPal, Google Pay, Apple Pay and more.
WooCommerce is one of the best ways to sell. It is open-source, integrated with unique features like MailChimp, HubSpot, Square, Google listing and gives you so much more. You can also download the WooCommerce App on your phone and create products and monitor the statistics on your site.
WooCommerce is completely free to install on your WordPress site.
3. SEMRush – For SEO & Competitors Analysis
You have set up your website and products to sell. It’s looking nice and you are excited to get started. You now need to ensure your website is tracking its performance and your competitors. SEMRush is one of the best tools for researching your keywords, website auditing, analysing your competitors, tracking SEO and so much more.
You can find out how your website is doing – what you’re doing right or wrong and have an in-depth analysis of the traffic, keywords as well as site errors. You can also discover what keywords your competitors are not ranking for, so you can take advantage of those keywords.
As stated before, there’s a lot you can do with SEMRush and it is one of the best marketing and SEO tools your eCommerce website needs. You can also find a lot of help from their blog section – help with keyword research, marketing, content, SEO and how to use SEMRush.
The sign up for SEMRush is free. And if you do not want to pay $119.95 for your Pro subscription you can also use their free account where you get daily competitor and keyword research with up to 10 queries per day and the ability to create and manage one project – track 10 keywords and audit 100 pages of your site.
4. Mailchimp – For Email Marketing
Once you have started to build up your email list, one of the best ways to keep in touch with your customers is email marketing.
Ecommerce email marketing is used for notifying subscribers of new products, promotions and deals. It also allows you to soft sell by educating your audience of the value of your brand – staying top of mind of your subscribers and keeping them engaged.
There are many email marketing campaigns your business can run; from welcome email, discount email, abandoned cart email to thank you email and so much more.
There are many email marketing sites out there, but Mailchimp remains one of the most popular and easy-to-use email marketing tools.
You can easily set up automated campaigns to re-target your customers, see who has engaged with your content. Mailchimp easily integrates with your website to make it even more easy to see what customers view certain areas of your website to market them accordingly.
Mailchimp is available to use for free with limited features, and the paid plans start at £8.25 per month.
5. TidioChat – For Live Chat With Your Customers
Customer service is a crucial part of any business, but especially if you have you set up an eCommerce website, the way you deal with your customers determines whether they would recommend your business to anyone or start talking negatively about you online.
As an eCommerce business owner, you face certain problems you would not have if you were present in a high street store, therefore having a live chat tool is crucial. This makes it easy for your customers to reach out to you if they need any help. You can also upsell your product if the time is right.
Tidio is easy to use, and it integrates with a great number of eCommerce platforms such as Shopify, eCommerce and more.
You can set up Tidio in minutes, have up to three operators and start using it for free.
6. Canva or Adobe Creative Cloud Express – For Social Media Graphics
Once you have set up your website, it is crucial for your business to have a social media presence and include graphics and images to your social media strategy. . You can find out where your target audience spends their time by doing audience and competitor research and create your business a profile.
If you’re not a creative person and do not know how to use Adobe products, Canva or Adobe Spark are both great for a beginner to create stunning social media graphics to grab the attention of your community. You’re not only limited to social media, you’re free to use these platforms to create your eCommerce store logo as well as newsletters to use in Mailchimp and so much more.
Creative Cloud Express
Adobe’s Creative Cloud Express is a cloud based creative platform that adopts basic image and video tools from across Adobe’s suite of apps and integrates them to an easy-to-use interface that benefits from Adobe Stock and Adobe Fonts. It enables you to make stunning content for social media or even business logos while using different templates or creating it from scratch. Adobe’s Creative Cloud Express is really handy tool for your eCommerce website.
You can start using CCE for free – this includes the core content or you can use the premium for $9.99 per month with unlimited stock photos, fonts and so much more.
Canva
Canva is very similar to Adobe’s CCE. it is easy to use, comes with templates and has great pre-made templates for you to use or redesign for your eCommerce business. You can keep all of your brand assets at one place, animate your design and set up a content calendar straight from Canva.
Canva also has a Free version where you can use it with limited templates, but no stock images. Canva’s pro version starts from £10.99 per month.
Need help with your eCommerce business?
If you are a company that wants to redesign their eCommerce website or create a new one, then we at Web Design Portsmouth are happy to help.
Contact Us today and let’s get your business seen!
Share this post?
We would love to find out what you thought about this post and if you found it useful, please press the share button. This helps us understand what really interests you and helps us deliver the best content for you.
