How To Choose An E-Commerce Technology: Part 2

As a leading e-commerce agency, we often times work with our clients to help them navigate the best e-commerce platform for their current and future state. The e-commerce platform you choose will play an integral part in the core functions of your business, from both a customer-side and backend business operations point of view.  Last week we starting discussing when and why companies start to consider an e-commerce re-platform and several requirements a brand should consider when reviewing e-commerce platforms. This week, we are continuing with Part 2 of our e-commerce agency tips to vet e-commerce platforms. This is by no means a complete list, but will give you a good idea of what to consider when you start reviewing e-commerce platforms for your company.

-A/B Testing Function: This is becoming an increasingly popular request among our clients. With an e-commerce platform that has A/B testing built in, a company  will be able to experiment with different ways to target your customers without the additional third party software that other vendors require. Native A/B testing gives merchants greater insight, more control over what can be tested, and the ability to immediately update sites to focus on high-value optimization. 

-Personalization Capabilities: Consider if your e-commerce platform has easy personalization capabilities. Popular requirements can include: ability to segment using certain profile attributes, create personalized promotions, being able to provide different relevant content to its different segments, having specific site branding, having personalization able to be done in a drag and drop environment for business-user ease of use.

-Product Recommendations: This is a proven way to increase average order value, increase customer loyalty and even keep customers engaged longer on your website. Having out-of-the-box product recommendations within an e-commerce platform can help to expose more products and remove the cost of having a third-party product recommendations engine (along with the integration costs).

In an age where margins are slimmer and slimmer every day and more competition enters the market daily, it’s important to create differentiators through your site experience, like uber-personalization and product recommendations to incentivize your shoppers to keep coming back. 

-Email Marketing: Being able to automate emails based on specific triggers go hand-in-hand with customer loyalty and satisfaction as you are creating actionable items to reach your customer base. Consider if your e-commerce platform offers the ability to send emails to shoppers based on site-related activities. 

-B2C/B2B/B2B2C in a Single Platform: Becoming increasingly important in today’s digital age, this is something worth considering for current or future state of your business. Does the e-commerce platforms you are reviewing offer the ability to deliver B2C, B2B and B2B2C on a single SaaS platform for a truly unified experience and simplify how your business manages all sites and operations?

-Reporting Tools: Having integrated reporting tools within your e-commerce platform will help your business users to make the most out of the information your site is able to collect about your customers and their buying behaviors.

This wraps up our two part series of our e-commerce agency tips to vet e-commerce platforms. When working with our clients on helping them navigate e-commerce technology we work through a variety of scenarios, roadmaps, and sessions in order to educate them on their options and choose the best e-commerce platform for their current and future state. What other tips do you have to share when choosing an e-commerce platform? We certainly didn’t hit them all in these two short blog posts!

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