This is a very unusual time of year for e-commerce retailers. The holidays are long gone and the next holidays that affect online purchasing seem an eternity away. Now can be a great time to sit down and take stock of your, well…stock. A quick refresher on your processes, advertising and inventory can be a breath of fresh air at any time of year.
To help you move onwards and upwards, we’ve scoured the internet and found 6 nifty e-commerce tools that can help shake up the way you do business!
6 E-Commerce Tools to Respond to your Daily Problems:
Dlvr.it
If you’re a good online seller (which you surely are), writing a blog is a part of your daily checklist. But once you hit publish, your job is far from done. So far from done. You now have to get it on to every social media channel you’re on and start promoting it. SIgh, what a grind that is.
Why is Dlvr.it the solution?
Content marketing can be a grind, even for professional content marketers. Tools like Buffer and Hootsuite are great at sharing your work on social media, but these need to be maintained and updated almost daily.
Dlvr.it takes your blog content via it’s RSS feed and shares it to your connected social media channels non stop, around the clock. You can customise the way that each post is shared and set the specific time that posts are shared. No need to login every few days and rewrite what you want to be shared.
You also get a snapshot of your engagement stats and full integration with Google Analytics.
The basic platform is free to use but the Pro Package is just $10USD per month, competitively priced against Buffer.
Woorank
SEO is always a problem for everyone. Even when you are the first result of a Google search, you still need to improve your SEO.
Perhaps you don’t know the difference between your metadata and your H2 headings, but you want to learn. Simply paying someone to take care of your SEO won’t teach you anything. So what do you do?
Enter your URL into Woorank’s search function, and a plethora of information hits you. A little overwhelming at first, but very helpful to improving the back end of your site. The tool will trawl your site for every piece of information regarding SEO and present the findings in an overall score out of 100. Users are then shown which elements of their site need to be improved to increase SEO performance. Each element has a simple description of what it is and why it needs to be improved.
Diving a little deeper, Woorank goes on to explain (in glorious detail) information about your mobile site, usability and my favourite part, the promotional area.
Here we see a rundown of every backlink to your store and your social media analysis. Perfect to see which social media channels are and are not working for you.
SEO can be confusing at best. Woorank does an extremely good job at explaining to you what needs to be done. Their 14-day free trial is a great way to improve the biggest SEO problem with your site. Monthly subscriptions aren’t cheap though – the entry level pack starts at €50 and quickly heads north. This price is validated by an educational blog that is regularly updated and speedy customer support. Still cheaper than hiring an SEO professional!
Whoop!
Google is to e-commerce what design is to Apple. Everything. One avenue of Google that is left relatively untalked about is Google Shopping. Using your product feed to automate your marketing on there can be quite a difficult process. Once it’s set up, maintenance and optimization isn’t the easiest either. Bidding on products to be placed high on Google shopping search results can be an overwhelming concept to most.
Whoop! helps you automatically build, manage and optimize your Google Shopping campaigns. Whoop! automatically looks at the sales history of other products with features similar to yours and predicts the sales value of your items. With this data, it then automatically adjusts the ideal bid for your Google Shopping product bids based on that value.
Whoop! Scores extra points with its dashboard. It gives you an overall view of your Google Shopping stats, bid changes as well as a look at revenue, CPC and your ROAS. The €490 per month price tag is hefty, but the product is aimed towards sellers with a huge inventory with massive amounts of turnover. If you’re a smaller venture, or simply want to learn more about Google Shopping, Whoop!’s blog will be of interest to you.
PureChat
You lack that face-to-face engagement at the point of sale with your customers. You’re constantly getting emailed the same old questions and you’re worrying that it’s started to affect your conversion rates.
Case studies have shown that a live chat option can really have a positive effect on your conversion rate. It’s convenient for customers and sellers alike.
Chat isn’t a new thing but it has evolved since the days of ICQ in the early 00’s. Chat between a sales rep and potential customer isn’t new either, but until recently, it’s been reserved for only big brands and similar budgets.
Purechat do chat and they do it well. A lot of chat apps are bold, ugly and stand out way too much. Purechat buttons are fully customisable and can be subtle or eye catching. Got the same question that keeps coming up? Templates, or canned responses, save you time and their convenient mobile apps also mean you aren’t chained to a desk.
This tool goes one step further, though – a comprehensive analytics suite follows around users to see their habits and patterns. You can see their purchase history, location and their chat history.
Bonus points here – once your leads are qualified, they can easily be imported to CRM and Email solutions like HubSpot, MailChimp etc.
The free version is very generous but the ‘everything’ package at $19USD per month is what will give you access to the visitor tracking and realtime analysis that we really like.
VE Interactive
Conversion is down, nothing is working, it’s all too hard, and you’re at your wits end.
Why is VE Interactive the solution?
In their own words, VE Interactive is ‘Conversion enhancing technology and advertising, in one integrated platform’. They do this in 4 main ways:
- Onsite engagement – in the form of discounts for social sharing, opt in forms, recommended products
- Programmatic Display – creative ads placed on multiple websites, personalized for your ideal customer.
- Programmatic Video – video advertisements made to spread your brand’s image targetted at the relevant audience
- Cart recovery – an effective way of recovering abandoned carts using opt-in forms early in the process and sending well-timed emails.
One other positive about this software is that the self-service plan is on a ‘pay as you earn’ basis. 5% per sale is the total cost to set the software up and use it yourself. However, setting it up yourself means that you need a good understanding of the technical side of things.
Trusted Shops
A little bit of trust goes a long long way. When you’re asking someone to put their credit card details into a computer, it doesn’t take much to set someone’s alarm bells ringing and ultimately turn away a sale.
Why is Trusted shop the solution?
Because a little trust goes a long way! This little logo hovering in the bottom corner can solve all of that.
The integration process is simple. The agency does an audit of your web page. They check things like your identity, checkout security, your processes and what happens when an order is cancelled. Once you have your certification, that’s not the end of it. A certain quality must be maintained to ensure that you keep the certification.
A change is as good as a holiday. Mixing up the way you currently do things can be a great way at shaking things up a little. We think these are some simple e-commerce tools to do just that, or even solve some problems that you’re currently having.
Any e-commerce tools we forgot from the list?