Tips to choose an ecommerce platform for your business in 2019

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To grow a successful e-commerce business, you need to seek the help of third-party e-commerce platforms such as Magento, Shopify, BigCommerce, Shopysuite, WooCommerce, etc. Even though you can grow your business independently with a custom-built website, for scaling your online business, you will need any of the above platforms.

When you step into your first e-commerce platform to work, you have to face many difficulties. Given below are a few questions that you need to ask yourself:

• Self-hosted or hosted

If you are confident enough to modify the infrastructure of your ecommerce platform and totally changing the look of the store regularly, find the platforms which can enable you to have a self-hosted version of your store. Almost every ecommerce platform allows you to modify your ecommerce store in the live environment.

• Payment method

If you have an unresolved issue while using PayPal which is one of the easiest and popular payment processes, you have to make arrangements as all ecommerce platforms do not favor the payment processes of a 3rd party.

• Payment plan

Always remember to select the best platform under your budget. Try finding opportunities that provide you monthly payment instead of depending on the small percentage of sale given to the company which hosts your platform.

Therefore, before making any mistakes in choosing an ecommerce platform for your store, given below are four points you should be aware of to have while selecting an ideal ecommerce platform for your e-commerce business.

If you have only a few products, don’t need to select worldwide ecommerce platforms like Magento but instead, you will need one type payment ecommerce platform like shopysuite.com

1. Calculate the budget

Every e-commerce platforms have fixed costs. So if you are coming up with a new business venture, be sure that you can afford the cost of any e-commerce platform before you spend money on it. You should have a proper calculation on budget. Within that budget, you may work from the beginning and pack it heavily. The platform is a factor that you should not spare on. It is a significant investment for your e-commerce business venture. Yet another important thing you have to aware of is that is whether you will have to pay money monthly or if you are expected to pay more for transaction processes. All these things should be discussed and considered to fit them well in your business model before you select an e-commerce platform.

2. Finding a suitable company to host

Selecting your hosting company needs immense observation and research. The server problems are the worst part out of all efforts for selecting an ideal e-commerce platform. Inefficient web hosting platforms will create a bad influence on increasing the search ranking as it slows down the site loading time, makes the site down etc. making a clear study on the hosting options is significant as switching to different hosting companies are a tedious task. At some instance, you will need the assistance of a web developer in order to back up the complete site and trigger you to transfer the site to another site that requires several days.

Few points you may ask before signing a contract with them

  • Make sure they provide a shared server for your site and if so, ask the number of sites which are shared at a time.
  • Make sure whether they provide daily backup for your site.
  • Make sure you are provided proper security when you share your server with many companies and ask what the precautions are needed to be taken.
  • Make sure 24/7 customer support
  • Make sure whether the shared server has any influence on your emails to your customers.

3. Do proper research instead of running behind the trends

For an effective smooth business, make sure that the purchase is not based on the marketing associated with the brand. You should ensure enough time to research per platform which you shortlists. Ask guidance from a sales rep and clarify your queries. Ensure that you paid for functionalities needed for your business operations before signing up for the service. You should make sure that the chosen platform serves your business needs and understand the basic things like automated emails to customers and order editing.

To avoid fraudsters, you may conduct proper research and analysis before signing up for a contract to any platforms. As the e-commerce platforms have a wide range of marketing strategy, they will be presented most genuinely with positive reviews, ratings, and testimonials which may mislead you. Hence make sure you do proper homework to choose the best out of it.

4. Be sure about the usability

Make sure you decide who all are there in your team, who is managing it and find out their interested interface just before you sign in to an interested platform. You should remember that you need to spend a lot of time managing your business. Hence the interface will be shown complex and confusing which result in problems and become inefficient. The ecommerce platforms are used to simplify the business especially in selling products and customer services. The customer service can be enhanced by restructuring the transaction process as well. Make sure such primary goals are accomplished first.

Other than the basic essentials like money, effort, time of the company designated to design the site for increasing traffic, ensuring the proper functioning of the site on time is the most important thing. The service of a host should be most reliable and efficient as your website will be included in it.

Shaju Devessy
Shaju Devessy Director, Business Development and Marketing for Intellect Outsource, a complete BPO & ecommerce service provider has been supporting worldwide clients since last 12 years. We offer professional ecommerce product data entry, bulk product uploading service for all worldwide shopping carts, order & inventory management, chat & email support, product description writing etc. We also complete web designing & development for all business and ecommerce store designing & development service among others.

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