Ecommerce Tools for a Successful Online Business

Ecommerce tools are the software, apps, platforms and plug-ins that form the backbone of online shopping experiences. Today, about half (42%) of companies' revenue comes from digital channels. Over the next two years, commerce leaders expect that number to rise to 54%. As digital sales continue to increase, ecommerce tools are becoming increasingly important.

Here's everything you need to know about the tools and technology that will help your business stand out and increase digital sales.

Ecommerce tools are essential for businesses looking to launch and manage an online shop front. These tools allow you to build a website, populate product detail pages, keep track of inventory, and sell on other digital channels like social platforms and retail apps. The type and range of tools you need will depend on the complexity and scale of your business, but there are certain essentials that every company must have to get started.

Whether you sell t-shirts or wind turbines, ecommerce businesses in every industry and market share the same basic goals: They want to attract customers, sell products and fulfil orders.

The U.S. is home to more than 14 million ecommerce shops and the competition is fierce. In such a saturated space, ecommerce tools can help you to stand out. For example, certain tools can help you scale your efforts to reach more customers, customise your offerings to gain attention in your market or automate repetitive tasks to decrease operating costs.

An ecommerce business involves a lot of moving parts. The most successful online businesses use ecommerce tools that work together to create convenient, intuitive, shopping experiences. This means a website that's easy-to-navigate, a quick and easy checkout process, and product pages with the right level of content and detail. Here are some of the essential ecommerce tools that make it all possible:

• Ecommerce platforms: You can think of an ecommerce platform as the engine that powers every online purchase. Ecommerce platforms enable businesses to create and manage websites where they can host product pages, accept payment and manage most of the workflows involved in ecommerce.
• Ecommerce marketing: Businesses can use plug-ins, platforms or add-ons to their ecommerce platforms to help with marketing efforts. This includes tools for email marketing, automating marketing tasks at scale and advertising on various channels.
• Artificial intelligence: Most commerce leaders (84%) believe AI gives businesses a competitive advantage. With innovative generative AI tools like AI agents, companies can increase efficiency and automate tasks — from the tedious to the most complex. For example, generative AI enables teams to use conversational interfaces to write product descriptions for an entire catalogue, create landing pages for campaigns and gain insights from data from across your business.
• Content management systems (CMS): Consider all the content you need to create and host for a successful ecommerce experience: You need product images, videos, item descriptions, customer reviews, promotion and sales information and more. Your CMS is the ecommerce tool that enables you to create, store and govern all this information on your site. Content management systems also store written content (like blogs, guides and FAQs pages).
• Sales and customer service platforms: Your customers should be able to ask questions and interact with service agents on various channels, whether they prefer online chat, text messages, email or a phone call. Sales and customer service platforms make it easy to provide support no matter where customers want to engage. The best platforms will be integrated with your ecommerce platform, so your agents have a complete 360-degree view of customer data, including their purchase history, product preferences, profile information and more. This significantly enhances the quality of your sales and service.
• Data, analytics and insights: A complete ecommerce platform should provide access to data and insights to help you to monitor your business. This often comes in the form of a dashboard where business users can track sales, service and product trends over time, keep track of inventory and gauge the success of marketing campaigns. With access to this critical data, businesses can make informed decisions and decide how to fine-tune their ecommerce experiences to maximise sales.
• Internal communications: Whether you’re a small business operating with a handful of employees or you have a large organisation dispersed over different geographies, internal communications tools help keep your team connected and co-ordinated.
• Order management and logistics: Some ecommerce platforms come out-of-the-box with order management tools to help orchestrate the post-purchase phase of the customer experience. These tools can significantly cut fulfilment costs by ensuring routeing to customers from the nearest warehouse, sending automated tracking updates to shoppers and helping managing inventory.

These tools make it easier to run an ecommerce business and deliver memorable customer experiences at scale.

If you're adopting new ecommerce tools, you may have some hurdles to clear as you implement new systems into your tech stack. Here are two key areas that can be challenging as a business adds or changes tools:

Combining disparate systems into an existing ecommerce tech stack comes with challenges. One major hurdle? Data silos. This can happen if a commerce team relies on data from their ecommerce platform as a single source of truth, but a marketing team relies on a separate marketing platform. This can cause issues and discrepancies — especially if the data conflicts.

Let's say you run an online beauty shop. If sales are down, you might address this by increasing the amount you spend on ad campaigns to attract new customers. But what if the information you base this decision on is incomplete? The marketing team may see that sales are down, but the IT team sees the issue from a different vantage point: Upon investigation, they see a bug at the point of transaction causing errors in purchases. In this case, marketing made a decision based on incomplete data and the result was a burned budget.

This is a common issue. Only 31% of marketers are satisfied with their ability to unify customer data sources. Integrating your data is critical for streamlining your data processes and developing effective strategies.

Disparate systems can also disrupt a cohesive customer experience. For example, imagine that your beauty shop is running two ads: 20% off for new customers and 20% off for subscribing members. If a subscribing member's information is in your customer resource management system but not in your marketing platform, they will only receive the ad for new customers. Integrated ecommerce tools can help to prevent this from happening.

It isn't an uncommon situation. To avoid this, ensure that the systems you invest in are part of the same family of products or can be connected easily to your tech stack.

To ensure success with new ecommerce tools, you need to have a detailed implementation plan. This goes beyond the aspects of technical integration — it also involves training the teams that will use them. This is what’s known as change management. Here are a few tips for preparing teams for a new integration.

Define your change strategy: This includes forecasting how front-end employees will react, planning how you will approach and mitigate resistance and defining clear criteria for successful change.

Build a change management team: You’ll want the right people to help you drive change. Choose a team based on experience with change management, communication skills and flexibility.

Create a communication plan: Develop a strategic vision that explains the purpose of the change as well as the risks of not changing. Then, explain what this change means for specific roles and people to make your vision more concrete.

Coach and train change agents: The aim of coaching should be to drive change in your managers, who in turn will drive change in their teams.

Collect and analyse feedback: Define programme success metrics and ask for feedback in a systematic way (for example, in monthly emails). Evaluate effectiveness continuously and keep in mind that you will likely need to revise your approach more than once.

As you implement new ecommerce tools, keep customer needs front and centre and focus on retention and loyalty. Here are a few tips to consider as you add new tools to your ecommerce tech stack.

• Focus on experiences that foster loyalty: Shoppers have high expectations. In fact, 74% will tolerate no more than three bad experiences before abandoning a brand. Invest in experiences that foster loyalty, such as easy issue resolution.
• Present the right products to the right customer: Merchandising is crucial. Even the world's slickest website won't sell much if it doesn't offer what your target shopper wants or present it in an appealing way. Take time to optimise your offerings and nail down your website design. Also, identify which ecommerce metrics are important to your business so you can measure your success and improve your site and customer experience.
• Create a concrete customer loyalty strategy: Loyalty programmes are a major ecommerce trend, with 75% of retailers offering one. They take the form of subscription models, loyalty points or membership status. Choose one that aligns with your brand and invest in it. The right loyalty platform makes all the difference.
• Listen to your customers: Incorporating user review capabilities on your website can help you to determine which offerings are most popular with customers and boost sales of those products. The correlation between star ratings and sales was positive in 55 of 70 product categories, according to McKinsey & Company research. In fact, products with three- or four-star ratings had three times the sales of those with only one star in all categories.

Ecommerce isn’t one size fits all. Some companies will benefit greatly from off-the-shelf starter options, which are usually the most affordable and the quickest to launch. More mature businesses might benefit from more powerful, larger-scale tools that enable innovation and customisation.

Here's a guide for selecting the ecommerce tools that are best for you:

When implementing new ecommerce technology, it's important not to rush. Spend time reading analyst reports and customer reviews from neutral, third-party review sites to learn from other users' real-world experiences products. It's also critical to seek input from all internal stakeholders who may offer valuable perspectives.

Once you've identified a few options you're interested in, research to see which tools offer the features you need within your price range. For example, smaller ecommerce businesses list these capabilities as essentials: a website host, product page builder, payment processor and order fulfilment. Medium-sized ecommerce sites may look to invest in review analysis, connected marketing solutions and content management storage. Enterprise organisations will need all the above, plus an AI-powered customer service chatbot, generative AI for product content and data and enterprise-grade communications channel to ensure all operations run smoothly.

It’s important to recognise that you’re not just choosing ecommerce tools to help you to meet current needs. You also need tools that will grow with your business. For example, if your long-term growth plan involves selling in new markets and geographies, it’s crucial to choose tools that enable cross-border sales.

Consider your shortlist, review case studies from each vendor's customers and demo each product thoroughly. Ensure the vendor can answer questions from your team and the internal stakeholders you've polled and confirm that the final number fits your budget. Research is not a quick process, but it is a critical one.

Whether you're looking to launch a new online business or you're an established online store looking for a leg up on the competition, ecommerce tools are essential to success. The right solution will offer a complete suite that helps you to build, manage and maintain your ecommerce presence on a wide range of channels, wherever you want to sell. Commerce Cloud is a complete platform that integrates seamlessly with your other business systems and enables your teams to build personalised customer experiences that keep shoppers engaged and coming back.