Whether it's an all-in-one website builder, analytics plugin, or shopping cart software, e-commerce tools are essential to the success of online stores around the world.
These tools do more than just help your store run smoothly. It also helps businesses grow, meet consumer demand, and stay ahead of competitors.
What are e-commerce tools?
Ecommerce tools are software such as apps, platforms, and plugins that help business owners manage their online stores.
There are many different types of e-commerce tools, but they share a common goal: to streamline, organize, and automate the process of running and growing your e-commerce store. Examples include drag-and-drop website builders, inventory management software, and analytics tools.
Why are e-commerce tools important?
Building software like mobile apps or shopping carts from scratch can be time-consuming and expensive. But with a powerful set of e-commerce tools, you can efficiently create and manage your online store, lower costs, and earn more.
A good e-commerce toolkit allows you to:
- Reach more customers online
- Create an exciting shopping experience
- Collect data directly for campaigns
- Integrate all your tools
- 24/7 support for your store sales
E-commerce tools are literally the building blocks of your online store. If you're running an online store, there are a lot of moving parts to keep track of, including customer support, marketing, and logistics.
Some of the best tools available to e-commerce business owners include tools that help organize the day-to-day business operations of your store, including ensuring that internal business operations are tailored to your organization's needs.
7 types of e-commerce tools
- e-commerce platform
- Content production
- Communication and internal organization
- Sales and logistics
- marketing
- analysis
- customer service
There are many ways to create, manage, and enhance your e-commerce website. Below are the seven most commonly used e-commerce tools for online businesses.
1. E-commerce platform
The first step to building an online store is choosing the right e-commerce platform. E-commerce platforms are essentially software that e-commerce stores use to address their core needs, from product pages to order fulfillment.
Platforms influence the customer shopping experience. To ensure a smooth shopping experience, it must be user-friendly, fast and reliable, which can directly impact customer satisfaction and return rates.
Shopify is an all-in-one e-commerce platform that helps you launch and run your online business. The product includes a website builder with paid and free themes, built-in marketing tools to help you build, run, and analyze your digital marketing campaigns, a shopping cart with 100 payment gateways, and powerful e-commerce features such as multichannel sales. Contains a set of commerce tools.
Compare e-commerce platforms
2. Create content
Creating content for your e-commerce website can be a powerful way to increase your visibility. And thanks to e-commerce tools like:
Kamba
Canva is an e-commerce tool that helps teams create beautiful designs, even those with little experience. Whether you're designing a brand identity or simply creating supporting images for your online store, Canva's drag-and-drop tools make it easy to create and share well-designed assets.
wordpress
Not every e-commerce website needs a dedicated blog. But for those who do, a content management system like WordPress may be helpful. WordPress helps you develop a blogging strategy to build and nurture customer relationships, establish your brand, and generate regular traffic.
3. Communication and internal organization
E-commerce tools are also beneficial to the inner workings of your online business. This can mean anything from having a dedicated space to communicate with employees to a platform to streamline project management tasks.
slack
A messaging platform designed with employees in mind, Slack lets you and your employees chat in real time. This can increase productivity for remote workers, especially since Slack allows teams to organize, manage each other, and communicate about daily to-dos.
coda
Coda is a powerful productivity tool that helps you manage many aspects of your business, including marketing calendars and document tracking. It's highly editable and customizable, making it a great tool for organizing projects within your company. As an added bonus, Coda offers a Shopify pack that integrates with your Shopify store.
Monday.com
Monday.com is a flexible, customizable project management tool that automates your workflow and centralizes your work processes in one place. Online stores can use Monday.com to stay on top of inventory management and track important metrics.
4.Sales/Logistics
Sales and logistics are an important part of running an online business. Some e-commerce platforms offer these tools as part of their overall service, but there are also some prominent standalone options.
shipbuilding wire
Shipwire is a global fulfillment platform that fulfills orders for direct-to-consumer, retail, and dropship channels. Shipwire provides logistics support by integrating with existing shopping carts and marketplaces, enabling both domestic and international shipping.
5. Marketing
A variety of marketing tools exist, from content marketing to paid advertising. Options include:
mail chimpanzee
Email newsletters are powerful e-commerce tools. Give your customers a direct channel and a dedicated space to share updates, promotions, and other information.
Email platforms like Mailchimp streamline the marketing process by helping you build, send, and track email marketing campaigns. Added bonus: Mailchimp integrates with Shopify. That means syncing her Shopify data, including customer, product, and purchase data, to Mailchimp.
buffer
Establishing a consistent social media presence is an easy way to increase your online store's visibility. Buffer is an easy-to-use social media management platform that makes it easy for online stores to pre-schedule social media content via Facebook, X, Instagram, and LinkedIn.
Ahrefs
Ahrefs is an SEO tool that helps you optimize your website and get found online. You can use it to do keyword research for your e-commerce store, so you can see how many people are searching for products related to your business. You can incorporate these keywords into category pages, product pages, blog posts, and other site assets to improve search visibility.
6. Analysis
Ecommerce analytics measures user behavior, performance trends, and return on investment (ROI). The right tools make it easier to make informed decisions, increasing sales and reducing costs.
google analytics
Ecommerce tools like Google Analytics allow you to collect data on insights about returning visitors and real-time statistics such as: Where is your traffic coming from? How are your visitors interested in your products?
optimization
Optimizely is a digital experience platform that lets you experiment with comparative research, known as A/B testing, to deliver personalized and targeted messages to your e-commerce site visitors. In practice, this means you can gain insight into the effectiveness of your experiments and use that data to reveal what content converts (or doesn't).
7. Customer Service
E-commerce tools that support the customer journey of online shoppers are critical. Ideally, you want a customer support platform that helps you both retain repeat customers and acquire new ones.
get
Acquire's platform helps online stores provide high-quality customer support and streamline customer service agent workflow and customer information. Think of this as a unified experience. Customer service representatives can see queries across all digital channels in her one place and resolve issues more efficiently.
zendesk
Zendesk is a popular customer support platform and e-commerce tool that brings together support tickets from various channels such as social media, email, and chat all in one place. Zendesk lets you embed live chat on your Shopify-powered site, easily access relevant customer data, and quickly troubleshoot support tickets.
Make the most of your e-commerce tools
E-commerce tools are essential to the success of your online store. The right ecommerce tools can help you build an attractive ecommerce store, automate workflows, improve marketing efforts, and provide great customer support.
If you want one tool that does it all, create a Shopify store today and join millions of entrepreneurs who are launching their own online stores.
Frequently asked questions about e-commerce tools
What are the four types of e-commerce?
There are four types of e-commerce:
- Business-to-business (B2B): Where businesses sell products to other businesses
- Business-to-consumer (B2C): Where businesses sell directly to consumers
- Consumer-to-consumer (C2C): When individuals sell to other individuals, it is often facilitated by third-party platforms
- Consumer to Business (C2B): Where individuals provide products and services to businesses
What are the three services used in e-commerce?
The three most common e-commerce services are:
- Payment gateway to facilitate online transactions
- Shopping cart software that allows customers to collect a list of items to purchase
- Customer relationship management (CRM) software. Track your customers and help manage them.
What are the four areas of e-commerce?
There are four main areas of e-commerce:
- Online retail businesses that sell goods and services directly to consumers
- A marketplace that connects buyers and sellers
- Online auction where products and services are sold to the highest bidder
- B2B trading. Transactions that businesses do with each other, such as wholesale and supply chain management.
