So you’ve just set up an amazing E-commerce store. You’ve created a stunning website, your inventory is all set, and you are ready for sales to roll in. However, so far, your results have been quite underwhelming.
We’re not surprised.
Getting an E-commerce store up and running is only half the battle won. You need to efficiently manage it to improve sales and profitability. And that’s where E-commerce Tools come in.
It doesn’t matter whether you’ve set up a small online store selling a single product or a massive E-commerce marketplace selling almost everything under the roof, you need the help of these tools to drive growth and revenue.
In this article, we will go through some of the top E-commerce tools and plug-ins that you can adopt to improve your sales and profitability.
E-commerce Tools are softwares like apps, plug-ins and platforms that you can use to manage and automate your online store operations. These tools can handle anything from inventory management to customer relationships, enabling you and your team to focus on more strategic and mission-critical tasks. By improving the overall efficiency of your store and keeping operational costs down, these tools considerably improve your margins.
An E-commerce tool is used by businesses because it –
With that basic introduction, let us go through some of the best tools you can use to manage different aspects of your online store.
Here’s the harsh reality – If you do not streamline your store operations, you may never be able to scale your business. You will not be able to handle increasing order volumes, manage a growing product catalog, or expand into new markets. Most importantly, non-streamlined operations can result in inconsistencies and delays in various aspects of your business, all of which can impact the customer experience.
And this is why you need a dedicated tool for streamlining your online store operations. It forms the backbone of your digital processes and profoundly impacts your sales and profitability.
Kartify is an end-to-end E-commerce platform that offers everything you need to run your online store. Essentials such as website building, product listing, sales and inventory tracking, payment processing, marketing & analytics are built into the Kartify platform. It means you don’t have to juggle multiple platforms to manage your store and can handle it all with one centralized hub. With its ability to handle over 1 Million concurrent users, Kartify is highly scalable, making it a great choice for large E-commerce brands launching and expanding in India.
Some of the key features of Kartify include:
The Kartify E-commerce platform is highly secure, adhering to ISO/IEC 27001:2013 security standards. It is carefully designed to the taste of the Indian audience and offers many India-specific features like login with OTP, automatic pincode & city detection, GST Invoicing, and more.
Wondering how to choose the right E-commerce platform for your business? We have created a comprehensive checklist for you. Download the checklist here.
Inventory management is crucial for E-commerce businesses. It typically comprises tracking inventory levels, ensuring adequate stock counts, managing fulfillment, and coordinating with suppliers. If not done right, it can present several hassles for your business. For instance, the risk of stockouts or overstocking is quite common in inventory management.
To counter those issues, you need a robust inventory management platform that can perform accurate demand forecasting and offer real-time visibility into your stock levels. These platforms also ensure that your inventory is synchronized across different channels.
Here are two popular inventory management platforms for E-commerce businesses:
Unicommerce is a cloud-based inventory management software that offers real-time visibility into your stock levels. Besides inventory management, it optimizes and automates your order fulfillment processes and warehouse management activities. Some of the key features offered by this tool includes SKU-level product bundling, order routing, and easy stock routing.
This home-grown inventory management software from the tech giant Zoho offers a rich feature set to take care of your every inventory need. Right from handling your GST billing to overseeing your warehouses, it is the only tool you need to efficiently manage your inventory operations. Some of the noteworthy features of this platform includes:
Must Read: 11 Smart Ways To Reduce Shipping Cost
These E-commerce applications play an important role in simplifying and streamlining the payment process for your online store. They are the digital payment software that helps you accept online payments from your customers. Since customers have different payment preferences, using a payment service provider allows you to offer a variety of payment options to your customers. Here are a few payment services widely used in India.
PayTM is arguably one of the biggest names in the Indian financial space. It is also an able partner for E-commerce businesses looking for a convenient and secure payment solution. By integrating with PayTM, your customers can pay you through various methods like credit cards, debit cards, net banking, and their proprietary wallet. Paytm’s extensive user base and brand recognition contribute to increased customer trust and higher conversion rates for your store.
Razorpay payment gateway is built specifically for E-commerce businesses. It facilitates online payments for both online and offline businesses. With Razorpay, you can receive payments through credit cards, debit cards, net banking, wallets, and UPI payments, all through the E-Commerce plug-in. The best part is the application allows customers to make payments directly on your website without being redirected elsewhere.
Lengthy and complicated checkout processes can lead to cart abandonment. Customers may get frustrated or lose interest if they encounter multiple form fields, mandatory account creation, or a complex payment process. By optimizing the checkout flow for speed and simplicity, you can reduce cart abandonment rates and increase conversion rates. Here are the E-commerce apps and plug-ins you can use for faster checkout.
Nimbbl brings together all the popular payment gateways under one unified dashboard so that you can manage your payment operations more efficiently. The tool supports popular payment options such as Buy Now Pay Later and UPI through a single API. Nimbbl is also known for its one-click checkout option that drastically reduces checkout abandonment.
Juspay is a fully customizable end-to-end solution that takes care of all the payment needs of your E-commerce store. It connects you with over 100 payment aggregators /payment gateways to process your online payments. With Juspay, you can also create Express Checkout functionality for your store. It uses an intelligent routing system that efficiently routes transactions based on success rates, the health of the payment gateway, and business logic.
Gokwik is a platform for solving problems related to shopping experiences with a slant toward reducing the RTO rate for your E-commerce business. It also improves your order delivery rates with the help of smart features like automated address correction, intelligent order confirmation, and communication optimizer. Gokwik also provides a 360° dashboard view with real-time order data for you to make quick decisions regarding order processing.
Order management, shipping, and RTO platform together form the backbone of your E-commerce operations. While order management tools take care of your entire order lifecycle, the shipping tools automate different shipping processes by integrating with shipping carriers. RTO (Return to Origin) platforms handle reverse logistics and returns.
These platforms are necessary for the proper functioning of an E-commerce store today. They ensure that the products reach the customers on time while ensuring great customer experience and complete transparency in all the operations involved after a customer places an order. Gokwik and Clickpost are the two most popular platforms that fall under this category.
Must Read: What is Return-to-Origin and How Can You Reduce It?
It is a logistics platform that specializes in providing end-to-end shipping solutions for E-commerce businesses. Some of the key services offered by Clickpost include multi-carrier shipping, returns management, and COD reconciliation. The platform is integrated with over 350+ shipping carriers so that you do not have to worry about the logistics and last-mile delivery of your orders.
EasyEcom is an AI-powered Order Management System that lets you manage and track your inventory in real time. As the platform integrates with popular E-commerce hosting providers, marketplaces, and ERPs, it is the preferred choice for growing brands. Apart from order management, EasyEcom App also allows payment, shipments and invoices in multiple currencies and locations.
Customer acquisition and retention are two important goals of any E-commerce business. However, the task of generating leads, converting them into customers, keeping them engaged, and nurturing long-term relationships is not easy.
With intense competition in the E-commerce space, customers are always on the lookout for alternatives and will jump at the first chance to switch to your competitors. That’s why you need E-commerce Tools that specializes in customer acquisition and retention activities.
Unlike traditional marketing, performance marketing focuses on measurable outcomes and tangible results. You need to measure the impact of your paid ad campaigns and clearly understand which campaign to scale at what cost. Constant experimentation and thorough analysis are essential to identify the strategies that work for you. At the same time, performance marketing can be costly, and that’s why using an E-commerce tool like Kartapult is essential.
Kartapult is a leading performance marketing platform that maximizes your revenue and improves your ROAS by optimizing your online advertising efforts. It integrates all the advertising channels such as Facebook ads, Instagram Ads and Google ads into one platform so that you have a unified view of your marketing activities. It also ensures that the entire Ad Management process is automated, be it targeting audiences or optimizing budgets.
With Kartapult you can
Having a consistent social media presence is important to increase your online store’s visibility. Buffer can simplify this process for you with its easy-to-use social media management platform. You can schedule social media content in advance for Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn, making it an ideal E-commerce tool.
Besides helping you automate your social media publishing, Buffer also helps you keep a close eye on impressions and engagement data of your social media posts.
Must Read: Best E-commerce Marketing Strategies (+ With Examples)
Email marketing enables E-commerce brands to directly communicate with their customers in a personalized way. Email Marketing platforms let you deliver targeted messages that can engage your audience and convert them to customers. From drip campaigns to new product launch emails or abandoned cart reminders you can build, send and track your marketing emails using these tools. Two of the most popular email marketing platforms for E-commerce businesses are Mailchimp, Netcore and MoEngage.
Mailchimp is a popular email marketing and automation platform that keeps your customers and prospects engaged through relevant emails. Apart from offering a variety of templates to create your email campaigns, the tool also gives you suggestions for improving your content based on top-performing emails in your industry. It even suggests the best time to send your emails for maximum engagement.
Netcore is another popular email automation platform that helps organizations better engage with their customers via personalized emails. It is one of the few email marketing platforms to offer a drag & drop Email Builder and AI- powered insights specifically tailored for E-commerce businesses.
MoEngage is a customer engagement platform that also offers email automation services. You can use this platform to create compelling, contextually relevant emails that align with your customer’s behavior and preferences to boost open rates. You can also engage your customers with interactive emails such as surveys, ratings, feedback requests, and more with Moengage. MoEngage can also trigger emails based on customer lifecycle and send timely alerts such as delivery status, reward points, invoices, etc.
Also Read: What is Conversational Commerce and How To Use It For E-commerce
Partnership marketing campaigns like referral and affiliate marketing encourages and incentivizes your existing customers to attract new customers to your online store. Referral marketing is particularly beneficial for E-commerce brands because referrals from friends or family provide social proof and build trust. Similarly links from affiliates eases concerns and increases confidence among customers who are uncertain about buying particular products. They are two of the most cost-effective forms of marketing as you are paying only after you get results.
Referral marketing tools like Referralcandy automates your referral marketing efforts. With Referralcandy, you can send automatic invites and reward customers who have made successful referrals. You can even segment your audience and create a campaign that only enrolls people who sign up via a particular channel.
Affise is another tool that automates and scales your partnership management activities. You can quickly find affiliates and influencers with Affise and also nurture relationships with them. The platform helps you manage campaign budgets, handle payments, track conversion, and a lot more through a personalized dashboard.
Customer engagement is the process of building and nurturing relationships with customers through various interactions. Constant engagement is important to build trust, particularly in the E-commerce space.
Notify Visitors is a customer engagement platform that helps create automated campaigns across different channels. It nudges users with relevant messages based on their actions on your website. You can also use the platform to communicate with customers more personally through personalized messages like Push, E-mail, and SMS.
E-commerce is an intensely competitive space, with thousands of businesses vying for customer attention. Providing exceptional customer experiences is the only way to set yourself apart from your competitors. Since customers are spoilt for choices, they are more likely to choose businesses that prioritize their satisfaction and offer a seamless and enjoyable shopping experience.
There are tools aimed at enhancing various aspects of the customer journey in your store. From personalized recommendations to showcasing reviews for informed decision-making, these E-commerce Tools can create engaging shopping experiences for your customer, ultimately leading to increased customer satisfaction and loyalty. Two such tools are Nosto and Yotpo.
Additional Read: What Is Customer Lifetime Value & How To Calculate It (+ Free Calculator)
Wigzo by Shiprocket is a one-stop solution for creating a fully personalized experience for your customers. The platform helps you engage website visitors in real time with intent-based targeting and personalized pop-up messages. You can also create customized user journeys with the help of a simple drag-and-drop builder so that every customer has a different experience and feels that the store is built just for them.
Bazaarvoice is a retention marketing platform with a focus on User Generated Content. The platform lets you collect authentic customer reviews and display them where they can create maximum impact, such as your product details page (PDP). Apart from this, the platform also lets you showcase a wide variety of user-generated content, including social media posts, ratings, and questions & answers from customers on your website.
The above tools not only enhance your E-commerce operations but also empower you to tap into the immense potential of online selling. Hope this list will help you improve your E-commerce sales and drive profitability.
And in case you need an E-commerce partner to set up your operations and succeed, ANS Commerce can help. As a Filpkart Group Company, we are India’s leading E-commerce enabler.
From providing E-commerce technology solutions to implementing impactful marketing campaigns and seamless warehousing & order fulfillment services, we offer end-to-end support to E-commerce brands launching & expanding their presence in India.
To know more about ANS Commerce, book a demo now.
