The E-commerce Toolkit. What Business Owners Need to Succeed in 2018

Does the thought of having your own online store warm your heart? Great! But do you know what it takes for an e-commerce site to be successful? An e-retail store is more than just beautiful product images and free shipping. You also have to think about the technology that goes into building a great online store. From finding a reliable drop shipper to partnering with a trusted payment processor, you will be taking plenty of decisions. There are, however, essential tools that every e-commerce business needs. Below we’ve highlighted the essential ones.

1. Robust Payment Gateway for Reducing Checkout Abandonment

Not all payment gateway services offer equal benefits to e-commerce merchants. Ideally, website owners should look for all-in-one payment platforms like BlueSnap – as these are built to minimize checkout abandonment and optimize approval rates. Also, such platforms are bank agonistic which enables to accept not only all major debit and credit cards but also alternative payments like SEPA and PayPal.

Moreover, advanced all-in-one payment platforms offer integrations for most renowned shopping cart software, including Shopify, BigCommerce, and PrestaShop. These enable online store owners to quickly and easily process all kinds of payments securely.

2. Customer Service Setup for Better Engagement

If you want people to remember your store, you need to be available for them and work to sort out their issues. The first approach requires collecting feedback from your visitors and the latter demands kick-ass support. Incredibly, you can make it a two-way street with the GetSiteControl plugin.

GetSiteControl is a multi-purpose tool that helps you connect with your visitors in the following ways:

• Via Contact Us: It creates a “contact us” form for visitors who prefer messaging the site owner.
• Via Live Chat: It also offers a live chat option.

Also, it offers a promotion widget that site owners can use to promote discounts and special offers. The best part? All this functionality can be executed through the same interface.

3. Backlink Checker for Search Engine Ranking

For any web-based shop, search engine optimization is an undeniable necessity. It results in a lot of organic traffic if executed correctly. However, with tons of websites getting hit by penalties, you need a tool that could be a panacea to your SEO needs. That’s where Linkody comes in.

Linkody informs site owners about the health status of their backlink profile and also if they need to make any changes. The benefit of using this tool is that you don’t need to check how links are performing manually. Also, Linkody offers high-level insight on broken links, and if there are anchor-text opportunities available in additional areas of your website.

4. Conversation Engine to Bring in More Visitors

You might already be aware that shoppers trust the recommendations of their friends and family when buying goods online. Why not bank on this behavior by using a social media engine? We suggest using LoopIt. It leverages the existing circle of social contacts among consumers to drive more sales.

The way it functions is that it enables site owners to integrate a button on the product page. And then LoopIt redirects visitors to their social contacts as soon as the button is clicked. After that, friends can give suggestions on the purchase. This leads to an increase in social sharing, which is one of the keys to higher visits and sales.

Whether you’re launching your first e-commerce store or are a veteran, the tools mentioned above are worth experimenting with. There are plenty of ecommerce toolkits on the market, when looking for a BigCommerce site-search capabilities for example you need to take into consideration the size of your website and the complexity of the site-structure navigation.