By 2023, e-commerce sales will reach an estimated 6.5 trillion dollars worldwide. Compared to 1.3 trillion in 2014, the growth rate is enormous. With the rise in this sales channel, the resources, tools, and services to support e-commerce businesses have also grown exponentially.
The first half of 2020 boasted a 30.1% increase in e-commerce sales compared to the same period in 2019. That, coupled with the fact that retail sales only increased by 4% in total, shows that e-commerce is booming during COVID times.
It begs the question: which tools are essential to running your e-commerce business seamlessly. We’ll take a look at essential e-commerce tools in five different categories:
Website Tools
Shopify
Shopify’s strength lies in providing a platform to bring your business online. It is purpose-built for e-commerce, with powerful features for inventory management, marketing, and analytics.
Technically, Shopify is easy to set up with no coding knowledge required to set up your website from start to finish. Visual website editors and easily customizable checkout and payment options provide the perfect platform for starting to generate online sales.
As well as simply selling through your website, Shopify offers alternative sales channels that you can connect right into your website, such as point of sales and social channels.
See how you can integrate your Shopify store with AgencyAnalytics to take your analysis and business insights to the next level.
WooCommerce
WooCommerce is a dream for those who are loyal to WordPress. If your website is built on WordPress, you can simply install the WooCommerce plug-in and transform your website into an online store.
WooCommerce also has a lot of extensions that you can connect to gain more functionality - MailChimp, PayPal, and Google Ads are just some of the great extensions available. WooCommerce is unique in that it doesn’t offer an out-of-the-box e-commerce website builder. Rather it relies on the user having WordPress knowledge and is a powerful option for those already familiar with the platform.
You can even integrate WooCommerce with AgencyAnalytics to display all of your e-commerce data in one place!
Research Tools
SEMRush
SEMRush is a great all-in-one marketing toolkit, designed to enable you to grow your online presence. Its main focus is research and optimization, meaning that it allows you to act on market and competitor insights.
SEMRush provides you with the platform to grow your online store, from competitor research to social reputation management. Keyword and content ideas will give you insights into what angle you can promote your store and products from, allowing you to niche down and hit those consumers that actually matter to you.
And guess what? SEMRush integrates right into your AgencyAnalytics dashboard.
Ahrefs
Ahrefs gives you powerful content insights and is really focused on growing the SEO of your website. With its keyword, content, and competitor analysis tools, you can gain an in-depth understanding of your content niche, and clean ideas on valuable content that will rank highly.
Conducting keyword and content research around the products that you sell will help you to see what others in the space are writing about, and where there are content gaps that you can fill. This tool is really about getting organic visibility and tends to pay off in the long-run.
Yep, it integrates with AgencyAnalytics.
Answer The Public
Answer The Public is a unique content and keyword research tool. You simply need to enter a keyword related to your business, and Answer The Public will provide with real Google searches that people are looking for.
The uniqueness comes from the keyword grouping. The tools will combine similar keywords into groups such as 'prepositions', 'comparisons', 'questions', and 'alphabetic'.
Business Tools
Clickup
A good task management system is vital to the seamless running of any business. Clickup provides just that.
With integrations, automation, views, and boards, Clickup lets you organize and prioritize the tasks that you identify as having the biggest impact on your business.
Inventory Source
Depending on your e-commerce business model, you may hold stock yourself or get other suppliers to fulfil orders for you. The latter is known as dropshipping.
Inventory Source is a dropship automation software that connects you with suppliers of your product. This platform syncs with your sales channels and automatically updates inventory and orders as necessary.
Marketing Tools
MailChimp
Mailchimp's power lies in e-mail campaigns and automation. It provides you with the platform to engage with current and potential customers with customizable e-mail templates.
While Mailchimp do offer general marketing tools, their bread and butter is e-mail marketing. Integrate Mailchimp right into your AgencyAnalytics dashboard to start analyzing and actioning on the results of your e-mail marketing campaigns!
Buffer
Buffer allows you to schedule posts to your various social media accounts. It's a great tool for staying on top of regular posting, as well as scheduling important product release posts.
Analytics Tools
AgencyAnalytics
As we've seen in this post, most tools for running a smooth e-commerce operation actually integrate right into AgencyAnalytics' dashboard.
For a true, all-in-one analytics dashboard, AgencyAnalytics offers the option to pull multiple data sources into one dashboard. On top of that, the easy drag & drop dashboard editor and automated report options make this a powerful data reporting tool, allowing you to easily visualize all of your important data.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics offers in-depth tracking of your website, with sections, segments, demographics and user behaviour reports. They also offer e-commerce goals and metrics.
All of the metrics you could need for e-commerce can also be integrated straight into AgencyAnalytics from Google Analytics. This gives you the opportunity to keep all of your valuable data in one place!
Conclusion
With the number of e-commerce tools out there, it's important to break down each use case as we have done in this blog. Evaluate which platforms will work for you, and opt for any free trials that are offered. This way, you'll be able to build your e-commerce store into a well-oiled machine that suits you!
Remember, most of what you need will integrate right into AgencyAnalytics' dashboard for seamless, visual reporting of your important metrics.
And if you don't see what you need there, you can always request it from us!
Written by
Alex is in product marketing, pushing the great work from the engineering team out into the world. When he's not marketing, he's probably rock climbing or researching the latest eCommerce trends!
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