Joseph Doohan — March 1, 2019 — March 1, 2019
One of the most important aspects for setting out a strategy for a new online retail business is to choose eCommerce software that would fit the requirements of your business. In this post we will look at the things you need to consider when choosing eCommerce software.
There are lots of options to choose from including:
- WooCommerce
- Shopify
- BigCommerce
- Magento
- Open Cart
- Prestoshop
This is far from an exhaustive list as there are lots of bespoke solutions built by talented developers around the world.
Most eCommerce solutions can be built by a developer on an owned hosting account while others like Shopify are available as a SaaS option where you get just pay a monthly fee for the software on its own hosting.
The information above should highlight the level of choices that are available, however, not all may suit the requirements of your business. We will now look at the things to consider when choosing an eCommerce solution for your business.
What To Consider When Choosing eCommerce Software
Does the solution have all the essential eCommerce features?
Most of the software solutions mentioned above are built to have all the essential eCommerce features that allow for a good customer experience, sales and order fulfilment. The problem that could happen with these solutions is that developers could forget to enable all features, or the theme used does not take advantage of those essential capabilities.
An eCommerce shop that would convert visitors into customers would need to have a clean design, have an accurate search bar and have a simple straight forward checkout for people to make a quick purchase.
StockSnap / Pixabay
Will the software link to your stock system?
If you hold an inventory of items in a warehouse, you will most likely have a stocking system to keep track of how much stock you actually have at any given time. Your online shop needs to connect seamlessly with your stocking system to update how much stock is available for buyers. If you do not have such a system, you risk obtaining bulk orders which you may not be able to fulfill within a reasonable time frame.
Will the solution allow you to scale your business?
This is probably one of the most important questions that you will have to ask yourself when choosing an eCommerce business. If you are planning on long term growth for your business, you will need to consider which eCommerce solution can allow you to scale up and achieve your revenue goals.
As your business grows, your product offering and the number of transactions will grow. In this case, you will need a solution that can handle this level of activity without compromising on speed and performance for your customers browsing the website and proceeding to complete a purchase.
200degrees / Pixabay
Is the solution search engine friendly?
A lot of online retailers depend on paid advertising to generate traffic and leads. If your website is search engine friendly, you can benefit from attracting clicks from organic traffic. If the eCommerce software allows you to optimise vital SEO information such as meta titles, descriptions, URL slugs, sitemaps and robots.txt files, it will index into Google. You can benefit from free traffic to your website which also lowers your acquisition costs.
If you end up choosing a solution that is not search engine friendly, you will have to resort to spending money to generate traffic which will likely cut your profit margins.
If you are looking at starting an eCommerce business or extending your physical shopfront business online, the most important decision for your strategy is to choose the software. In this post we have looked at some of the most important features to look before choosing a software solution. The eCommerce software that you choose will be the core tool for driving your business to customers online, so in depth research will be required.
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