The Types of Tools Transforming E-Commerce in 2021 and Beyond

The sale revolution has picked up pace during the last few years. Retail sale stores are making the shift from the high street to online stores. The UK alone saw a record number of sales in 2021 occurring online. With the shift online, most retailers face a common challenge, improving their e-commerce experience for consumers logging in from over the globe.

Improving the online digital experience requires more than just quality products. You need to improve your online touchpoints and make sure that customers get a seamless experience, void of any hindrances or delays.

The digital world has picked up the pace with the growing demand for online commerce. Consumers now have access to several essential e-commerce tools that simplify the experience and make inventory management easier.

In this article, we look at some of the tools that can help you revolutionize your e-commerce experience. All of these essential e-commerce tools will allow you to go for an omnichannel experience that helps bring you more revenue and recognition.

Ecommerce Website Platform

A website platform is necessary to make the website development process easier for you. Your online website plays the role of your brick-and-mortar stores now and should be designed with the same perfection. You should have an actionable homepage followed by relevant product pages.

A content management system or a website creation tool allows you to play with simple and customizable options to create a website of your liking. The best part about the experience is that you get to build your own brand and follow design elements that match up with it.

Additionally, you can find a CMS or e-commerce platform that helps you scale with time. Platforms like WordPress and Magento Commerce allow you to grow with time and experience success in the ecommerce world.

Digital Asset Management

Your ability to sell products online through your website comes down to the quality of your digital content. Digital asset management is necessary to manage your product images, logos, videos and other assets coming under your brand. Digital assets management software can help give you a central management repository to publish, store and manage all of your digital content under one roof.

DAM solutions include Widen Collective add ease of access for your internal and external customers. A DAM platform allows your team to monitor and find content through keywords, convert different files and publish them to stores and channels.

Management Software for Product Information Management

Your product information, like your marketing copy and product attributes, deserve a central repository to store them. With the use of product information management software, organizations can manage the entire lifecycle in one given place. Your product information management software can be integrated with your digital asset management software to streamline operations and help your products be more prominent online.

While there are multiple PIM tools, the more prominent ones include Akeneo and Salsify. The DIM solution provided by Widen can work concurrently with these solutions to prepare compelling product listings that are accurate in nature.

Email Marketing Tool

Regardless of the size of your audience, you need an email marketing tool to help you with email segmentation, support and automation. There are a number of other e-commerce tools that offer integration with email marketing tools. Look for such tools first before you spend your resources on a new tool.

When it comes to robust features and options, Mailchimp is the first that comes to mind. Both ActiveCampaign and HubSpot help provide you with scalable options to perform a wide range of integrations with your e-commerce stack.

Project Management Tools

Managing your e-commerce projects on a spreadsheet can only work for a limited time. As you grow over time, your project management will become messy and will lead to complications. A project management tool can come in handy here as it allows you to visualize tasks, customize workflows, and track your progress against your objectives and roadmaps.

Services like ServiceNow, Asana and JIRA are known to come in handy here. All of these solutions offer enterprise project management options in the long run. Once you meet the requirements and objectives, you won’t have to worry about the little details.

Inventory Tracking Tools

Growing your sales volume online and managing your inventory at the same time can be a bit challenging for most online businesses. An inventory management software comes in really handy here as it comes in two common types; it either comes as a warehouse and inventory management system or it comes as an all-in-one enterprise resource planning or ERP solution.

Some trusted ERP solutions here include Microsoft Dynamics, ERP Cloud and SAP Business One.

Customer Service Tools

Customer service is an important part of the e-commerce experience. If you want to provide solutions to customers online, you need to have a solid customer service strategy ready. Ideally, you should look to get a solution that provides you with an appropriate knowledge base of FAQs and gives you the ability to respond via mobile, phone, email, text, and social media.

Zendesk is one solution that delivers the appropriate customer service solution and is used both by Shopify and Uber. Zendesk can even be integrated with Facebook Messenger. If you want, you can also opt for Salesforce Service Cloud and Hubspot Service Hub. These are two other reliable service solutions for e-commerce stores that help streamline your sales operations and allow you to meet customer grievances and requirements.

Before you choose an e-commerce solution, you should be extremely clear on your requirements and what you expect from the solution. Integration within the technology stack should be preferred as it helps improve communication and integration across the board. All of your individual tools combine to become even more powerful when they are integrated together.