5 Tools that Hold the Promise of E-commerce Success

As more and more traditional entrepreneurs are heading online, getting e-commerce success is becoming a major challenge. There are around 12-24 million online stores in the world, and naturally, few are successful. Of all these e-commerce businesses, a paltry 650,000 generate over $1,000 annually.

It is therefore crucial to create the right business strategy, keeping the latest online retail trends in mind. This includes incorporating the right tools and ensuring that they flawlessly integrate with your existing e-commerce framework.

Here are five tools that will help you secure the success of your e-commerce business.

1. MailChimp

Email marketing is an essential component of any e-commerce business. A number of online stores, including most of the big players continue to invest in this marketing channel to drive sales. And with an unbeatable ROI of 4300%, it is no surprise that email marketing is here to stay.

If you’re looking for some quality email marketing software, MailChimp is the best option. Over 7 million people are using MailChimp to design and send around 500 million emails daily. In fact, most online retailers use this tool to send bulk emails to their customers. According to the company’s Holiday Survey 2014, 73% of their clients were from the e-commerce industry.

MailChimp is intuitive easy to use. You can track orders generated by a particular email campaign. There are detailed insights and analytics to help you better segment newsletters and create or modify your existing content strategy to reach targeted customers and influence their purchase decisions.

You can integrate MailChimp with other applications and services such as Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, and PayPal.

2. Unbxd

Product recommendations are a must-have for online stores these days. A report from Econsultancy indicates that 94% of businesses now understand that personalization is key to their success, as shoppers are more prone to buy from online stores providing a personalized experience..

In fact, personalization and recommendation tools are no longer viewed just as a means to push immediate sales, but also to help build customer loyalty and retention. In other words, such tools help you motivate customers to come back for more. One personalization and recommendation tool worth mentioning here is Unbxd, which is used by online stores of all sizes to increase conversions.

This tool uses a self-learning algorithm, to offer relevant cross-sell and upsell widgets, and tracks user-behavior and location data to create a “truly personalized” experience. Leveraging Unbxd’s personalization technology, you can even suggest products in real-time to first time visitors.

With a tool like Unbxd, you can now offer Amazon-like shopping experiences without breaking the bank. It makes product recommendations and personalization more precise by capturing and interpreting big data. Better yet, everything is tailor-made to meet customers’ needs. Unbxd can also auto-optimize delivery as it has the ability to display the best performing product combinations in real time.

Its intuitive analytics dashboard allows you to track click-through rates, conversions and revenue so you’re always on top of your performance.

3. ZopIM

Providing the best possible customer service is crucial to e-commerce success. The better your shoppers’ experience gets, the more likely they are to come back and keep purchasing from you. In such a scenario, personalizing customer support via trained sales people who are always ready to answer customers’ queries will help you gain mileage over your competitors.

Buyers usually have a lot of questions that affect their purchase decisions. These range from the features of the product and after-sales services to payment and cancellation policies. Now you might be thinking that you already have product catalogs and a FAQ section to answer product related issues and everything else; so why you do you need to hire sales people to answer the same odl questions?

Although very useful up to an extent, FAQ sections and product catalogs are simply not enough at times. Reason? They don’t have a human touch.

The good news is you don’t have to hire a team of trained sales people in order to personalize your customer service. Live chats can save your day here; your online customer service person can provide personalized assistance to potential buyers

As a matter of fact, online retailers have been leveraging live chat features for quite some time now to drive sales. SupplyGeeks.com, for instance, improved its conversion rates by 17 percent in June 2012 only by adding a live chat service.

When it comes to live chats, ZopIM is one of the best tools available. Just install it and start chatting with your customers from all across the world (ZopIM is integrated with Google Translate). ZopIM has loads of customer testimonials, how-tos and case studies on their site to assuage all your concerns.

4. DataCrops

Data processing is a crucial aspect of e-commerce. You need data to understand trends, consumer behavior, and to predict future opportunities and challenges. Here, we are concerned with an e-commerce tool that allows you to check out your competitors’ prices for various products.

Comparing prices is a common trait amongst shoppers. It is only natural for customers to try and understand where you stand in the pricing order. A competitive price analysis will help you to decide the best value for your products; you can aim to sell at a price low enough for your customers and high enough to merit reasonable profit. Building an evolving pricing strategy is strongly recommended for businesses with a huge product catalog.

DataCrops from Aruhat is a popular pricing intelligence tool that performs accurate competitive pricing analysis. This is an award winning, customized solution with multiple modules. DataCrops generates reports like product price comparison, site-wise product price comparison, data research, competitive analysis, and re-pricing.

5. MobiCart

Mobile commerce is no more an option for online stores. It is now mandatory for businesses to provide omnichannel experiences to customers and mobile devices play the central role in shopping. MobiCart is a brilliant choice to take your online store mobile.

MobiCart allows you to create and manage your business as a website or a native app. In other words, you can turn your online store into a more dynamic m-commerce app using this tool. More than 10,000 companies are taking advantage of its feature-rich add-ons. With MobiCart, you can send location-based push notifications to keep your customers updated about your latest offers and events.

In Conclusion

Customer retention is the secret to e-commerce success. With increasing numbers of online stores popping up every day, customer acquisition is getting more expensive and challenging. All the tools described here are geared to help you retain existing customers as well as attract new ones – a sure shot to be more profitable with your e-commerce efforts.