How To Choose An eCommerce Technology
As a leading eCommerce agency, we realize choosing an eCommerce platform to fit your business is no easy feat with all the options on the market today. However, choosing the right eCommerce technology for your business can simply not be ignored. In our increasingly digital world, it is important to be able to evolve with ease, but still, use the foundation you have built to maintain your core capabilities. One part of your core foundation moving forward should be your eCommerce platform.
Within our eCommerce agency, we work alongside clients to help them vet and choose eCommerce technology fit for their current and future business. What first got them to this stage of considering an eCommerce re-platform or the addition of eCommerce to their business? A variety of different challenges, gaps, or other reasons may be the leading causes to warrant a switch. Our clients have approached us with the following top concerns when it comes to choosing eCommerce technology.
Common eCommerce Technology Concerns:
- Low performance on the current platform
- The current eCommerce platform lacked the ability to handle various complex commerce business requirements, such as complex rules for Product Configurations, Product Options, Pricing, etc.
- Unable to manage quotes from the Customer online and it is manually driven
- Inability to easily automate Custom Shipping Charges for Various Product Types
- Lack of business users to have management control on the platform
- Performance issues
- Unresponsive mobile experience
- Inability to create custom rules for promotions
- Unfriendly content management system for both merchandisers and marketers disabling customer reach out
Any and all of these challenges can directly impact important growth goals and KPI’s such as conversion rates, transaction rates, returning user revenue, and overall revenue.
Keep reading to find out what to look for in an eCommerce platform or
Download the eCommerce Technology Report
Over the next couple of weeks, our eCommerce agency will give insight on the blog with requirements you should consider as you review eCommerce platforms. This is by no means a fully extensive list but should give you a head start when it comes to the review and analysis of choosing the right eCommerce platform.
What to Look for in an eCommerce Platform
- Unified Admin: Having a unified admin will keep things simple for business users who are managing the site(s) on a day-to-day basis. Having an eCommerce platform that unifies Admin tools in a single interface will simplify management and consolidate activities in a single location.
- Platform Architecture: Consider working with a platform that is built from the ground up on an API-first architecture, which is the latest and greatest technology available today. This helps to ensure your business will not outgrow the platform as it’s easily extensible and built to scale with your business.
- Responsive Storefront: It’s important to understand that not all systems were built as responsive first platforms. Many have been re-architected to adapt to modern design requirements. Make sure your eCommerce platform has a responsive first architecture. Bonus points if the platform offers a customizable, out of the box responsive storefront to allow you to go live quicker with fully-featured experiences.
- Guided Search: Having a robust search engine that has a guided search capability is critical to allow customers to find the right part or product with ease. Some capabilities to keep in mind for now and in the future include: autocorrect, keyword redirects, order search facets by statistical significance, international language support, and API support to control the order of navigation facets.
- Catalog Management: Make sure your business users can easily manage the catalog. This will ultimately help lower the total cost of ownership and giving merchants business users total control over their products, pricing, and inventory.
- Multisite Personalization: Although you may be a single site today, in the future you may wish to expand to both B2C and B2B or other multiple sites. Being able to deliver multiple websites on the same scalable infrastructure with a single subscription or service provider is an important consideration.
It takes a thorough review of your current and future eCommerce needs in order to decide upon a new eCommerce technology. This will play an integral part in the core foundation for your business- in both the customer experience and back-end business operations. The technology you choose should at a minimum provide superior scalability & offer the performance to continuously innovate into the future. Next week, we will continue providing insights into what to consider when choosing a new eCommerce platform.
Download the eCommerce Technology Report.
Contact Echidna to start a conversation or with your questions related to eCommerce technology.
