There are a number of different high quality platforms available for your ecommerce website, choosing the right one is the difficult part. The truth is that it all depends on your business and the goals you have for your online store. That being said, there are some crucial pieces of an ecommerce website that you’ll need to make sure are included in your platform. Make sure that you’re building your website on a platform with the essential features outlined below. You might not think you need them at first, but you’ll thank yourself later.
Here is our list of suggested essentials for your online business-
- Local Delivery & In-Store Pick Up – One of the best ways to compete for sales online is by paying attention to your local market. When you have a brick and mortar location as well as an established web presence, Google will already recognize you in your local market. The traffic coming to your website initially will be local leads with some level of brand awareness regarding your business and products. Capitalize on your local opportunity first by offering them the convenience of buying from your business without, without even having to drive to the store!
- Minimum Orders – At the core of this feature is the need to operate profitably online. It will be important for your business to try and minimize the sales that are not profitable for you. Minimum order requirements can be a great way to sell additional products too.
- International Shipping & Currency – Sure, you may not be ready now. But what if your products catch on? What if you want to sell to customers in Canada? Is your platform ready for international sales?
- Discount Codes – You will find that discount codes have a huge impact on your ability to sell products online. The ability to generate discount codes and for them to be processed by your customers on your website will have a number of different applications. Make sure that you not only have this feature, but that you can also customize the discounts depending on your promotion (ie, free shipping, Percent discount, $ off).
- Abandoned Cart Reminders – There are many reasons that a customer might abandon their cart on your website. Don’t let them off the hook that easy! Make sure that you have them authorize their email to receive promotional information and then send them a reminder about their cart with a link to complete their purchase.
- SEO Tools – Leads to your website through SEO have the highest closing rates of any form of inbound lead. Make sure that your website offers SEO tools like editing Title Tags and Description Tags. From the outset, you will need direct control over your site’s SEO in order to build a successful site.
- Email Marketing Integration – Don’t get into a situation where you have created an overload of work for yourself. Your ecommerce platform should have an integration built with your email service provider such as MailChimp or Constant Contact. At some point, you will find that email marketing is a crucial component to your online sales efforts.
We hope these tips will help when trying to figure out the ecommerce platform that is right for your business!