Online Tools Used By Ecommerce Businesses To Improve Operational Efficiency

The changing consumer demands and continuous technological advancements put across a whole new set of opportunities and challenges for the ecommerce businesses, making it of prime importance for an ecommerce site to always be prepared to change, upgrade, or even revamp (if required), in order to experience continued success and to meet consumer expectations.

Following are some of the innumerable changes we’ve witnessed in the past few years, which redefined the ecommerce industry and affected the ecommerce marketing and sales:

• Google’s Hummingbird search algorithm update
• Growing number of shopping transactions from mobile devices
• The trend of Web rooming, and show rooming

It is very important for online retailers to pay attention to the latest trends in the consumer behavior and the sector, and adjust accordingly. This is best done by implementing tools that integrate effortlessly with your existing ecommerce framework and help you increase conversions and sales. Thankfully, there’s no shortage of online tools that help ecommerce businesses streamline and simplify their day-to-day tasks.

The rule is simple: Take advantage of the available resources and improve your workflow, get more done by spending less. Here are 10 essentials and best online tools required to steer your ecommerce business to the next level: –

1. Reports for key metrics

a. Google Analytics: A highly effective tool by Google that helps you view who is coming to your website from which sources. An integration of this Analytics tool on your ecommerce platform can really help you do wonders. A small integration is all you need to be ready to use it.

• Why do people leave your site?
• What is the demographic that you should be catering to?

And so on, are some of the analytics that it offers.

b. Kissmetrics: A wonderful tool designed by some of the world’s greatest modern marketers, Kissmetrics is built to optimize your marketing efforts. It delivers key insights and timely interactions to turn visitors into customers. This is done by doing an in-depth analysis of your website visitors, helping in targeting and re targeting customers, along with a host of other methods.

Also Read: 10 Questions You Should Ask Yourself Before Starting an Ecommerce Store

2. Social media monitoring + online reputation tracking

a. Social Mention: Use it to understand the sentiment of social media buzz around your ecommerce business, and monitor multiple websites at one place, or find out which keywords people use. The statistics include sentiments, top keywords, top users, top hashtags, last mention and more.

b. Brand Yourself: This ORM tool is used to control what people find when they Google your name, and offers a range of services from free do-it-yourself product, to managed services for both, individuals and businesses.

c. Naymz: This is a tool that helps you track and manage your social influence, and also offers a program called RepScore, that rates your online influence across different social networks in a relative comparison to other members.

3. Social media post scheduling

a. Buffer: With this tool you can schedule posts and interact with your audience across different social media accounts while tracking the performance and getting valuable analytics of the social media campaigns.

b. IFTTT (If This Then That): A free web-based tool, IFTTT connects to all the apps or accounts that you use and with the help of simple conditional statements, called “applets”, it triggers upon changes made to other web services such as Gmail, Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest. For instance: If: user tweets using “X” hashtag, then: email message.

c. Hootsuite: It helps you manage all social accounts at one place while   scheduling all of your posts for the future.

4. Image/Video/Slideshow creation

a. Canva: A highly remarkable platform, Canva helps you quickly edit and put together professional images for your blog, website and social media accounts, without having to hire a graphic designer.

b. Pixlr Editor: This is a web-based, lightweight and easily accessible tool, which provides free creation, editing, cropping, and design tools for digital photos and imagery, at par with professional design software.

c. YouTube Video Editor: This is a video editing tool that offers a host of features such as combining of multiple clips, trimming a clip, customization of a clip with special effects, addition of sounds and publishing the same on the YouTube channel.

5. Track website performance & optimization scope –

a. Google Webmasters: Similar to Google Analytics, Webmaster is a tool developed to help Google index your site, and sees what problems are floating around your online store. It is also used to check if you have any broken links, and to view commonly searched keywords and more.

b. Ruxit Web monitoring: Using this tool, you can understand your website performance and learn how to optimize it for user experience. You get to see how users actually experience your website and can test your website performance under certain situations from a multitude of locations. Some of the metrics that you receive include: JavaScript errors, 3rd party impacts, bounce rates, etc…