Running an online store can feel like a never-ending race. You constantly rush to meet customer demands, tech developments, and market trends. Fortunately, you don’t have to go it alone. The right ecommerce tools can lighten your workload and Ecommerce Competitor Analysishelp you tackle the toughest challenges. In this post, we’ll uncover the best ecommerce tools to help you boost your store’s productivity and get back to focusing on what matters, like growing your business.
One of the tools that can help you achieve your goals is Shophunter’s Shopify sales tracker. This handy tool helps you keep tabs on your competitors’ sales so you can figure out ways to outsell them.
What are Ecommerce Tools?
Ecommerce tools are software applications and platforms designed to help businesses manage their online stores, streamline operations, and drive growth. These tools improve various aspects of online selling, including (but not limited to) website creation, online payment processing, inventory management, and customer service. Some ecommerce tools are designed to solve a single problem, while others are all-in-one solutions.
Ecommerce Tools are Essential for Growth
The burgeoning growth in eCommerce sales is only speeding up, with the online market in the United States slated to grow to $1.4 trillion by 2027. In the sea of eCommerce, one doesn’t need to be the big fish to take a piece of that loot.
But doing so successfully requires a viable ecommerce strategy and a unique combination of tools to seamlessly engage customers, generate sales, fulfill orders, and generate customer loyalty. Fortunately, we made a list of the essential ecommerce tools for you to consider adding to your martech stack.
As your online store grows, so do the complexities of running an eCommerce business. Many efficient eCommerce tools, like:
CRMs
call centers
Chatbots, etc.
It is available in the market and allows businesses to streamline tasks like:
Inventory management
SMS verification service
Order processing
Customer service
These eCommerce platforms and tools are designed to be scalable, allowing businesses to easily adapt and expand their operations as demand grows, whether by adding new products, integrating new payment gateways, or entering new markets.
2. Improve Revenue with Ecommerce Tools
Ecommerce tools help businesses create a seamless and personalized shopping experience for customers, which can lead to increased customer satisfaction, loyalty, and repeat purchases. Email and SMS marketing tools are especially useful in improving the marketing efforts of eCommerce businesses, allowing them to build customer relationships and grow sales.
3. Keep Track of Business Operations with Ecommerce Tools
Ecommerce tools offer real-time analytics and reporting capabilities, allowing businesses to monitor key metrics such as:
Sales performance
Website Traffic
Customer behavior
Inventory levels
This real-time visibility enables businesses to identify trends, patterns, and areas for improvement quickly. By incorporating time-blocking apps, they can further streamline their operations and boost efficiency. By making data-driven decisions, businesses can make informed business decisions,
4. Automate Repetitive Tasks with Ecommerce Tools
Ecommerce tools automate repetitive and time-consuming tasks such as order processing, online invoicing, and customer support, freeing up valuable time for business owners and employees to focus on strategic activities and growth initiatives. Relying on eCommerce tools also reduces the risk of human error, ensuring an accurate execution of tasks.
5. Identify Gaps in Marketing with Ecommerce Tools
Many other eCommerce tools also provide valuable insights into competitors’ performance, allowing you to understand the gaps in your marketing efforts. These insights can help brands improve the overall functioning of their business, improving the customer experience for better results.
Elevate Your E-commerce Strategy with ShopHunter's Advanced Analytics
ShopHunter's Shopify sales tracker offers a unique tool for e-commerce founders, particularly those in the Shopify ecosystem. At its core, it is a custom algorithm that estimates sales for entire stores and specific products, helping users quickly validate product potential.
Tool for E-commerce Research
The platform goes beyond basic sales tracking, featuring an ad spy tool that monitors advertising activity across stores. This combination lets users spot trending products and successful marketing strategies early on.
ShopHunter for Dropshippers and Shopify Store Owners
Whether you're a dropshipper, a Shopify store owner, or someone looking to enter the e-commerce space, ShopHunter aims to streamline product research and reduce the risk of investing in low-performing items.
Sign up for a free trial (no credit card required) to our Shopify sales tracker tool to find your next eCom opportunity or to level up your current eCommerce store by learning from your competitors.
10 Types of Ecommerce Tools to Drive Business Growth
1. CMS for E-commerce Websites
Online marketplaces like Amazon and Walmart allow you to tap into a site that is already attracting e-commerce traffic easily. But it’s not the only way to sell online. Setting up your e-commerce site gives you control over branding, product presentation, design, and more. You’ve got a great product, but how you present it to the world is just as important as the product itself. Building an e-commerce website is the foundation upon which your product will stand before customers, and few foundations are better than a good content management system (CMS).
A good CMS provides a vast range of options for omnichannel content management for B2B and B2C spaces. It gives a central location to distribute content across every channel, automate workflows, and compose digital experiences that fit your goals. We’re partial to Drupal because of its flexibility. Drupal has its dedicated e-commerce flavor with 100+ integrations, all dedicated to e-commerce-specific tasks such as:
Credit card processing
Product filters
Search
Shopping carts
2. Marketing Automation Software
E-commerce is an intricate web of interconnected technologies that must play nicely together. For the marketing teams in charge of managing those websites, it’s nice to be able to automate what we can. Marketing automation software is a massive time saver, taking on menial:
Repetitive tasks
Crunching data
Iterating
Analyzing
Freeing up marketers
To do creative work. A prime example of marketing automation is email segmentation and personalization. Email is still one of the most powerful marketing channels, with more than 89% of marketers using it to communicate with customers and prospects. Marketing automation software helps your marketers speed up the process of cross-journey segmentation and messaging personalization, greatly increasing team efficiency. Marketing automation tools like Acquia Campaign Studio and Acquia Campaign Factory can integrate with your e-commerce platform so you can automate decisive, personalized actions on customer behavior.
3. Digital Asset Management Software
Selling online requires photos, videos, illustrations, and other digital assets representing your products and brand. A digital asset management (DAM) platform helps you organize and share this content. These assets are used to build your online store and support marketing efforts, like:
Ads
email campaigns
In-store promotions
DAM systems allow teams to search for content by keyword, convert file formats, publish to multiple channels, and share assets with agencies, distributors, retailers, and other collaborators.
4. Product Information Management Software
Product information is another core content required for selling online. Product information management (PIM) software helps brands prepare accurate, compelling product listings for their global e-commerce channels. PIM software helps in three key areas.
It aggregates technical information from engineering and product platforms.
Marketers can enhance product information with search-optimized descriptions, photos, and videos.
It helps transmit product listings to your e-commerce platform, digital marketplaces, and other marketing tools.
What’s more is that DAM and PIM systems can be connected and used together, giving your organization a comprehensive look at your product content. When digital assets and the connected product descriptions are connected, your go-to-market speed and accuracy are at their highest. No more fussing around by transferring information between tools.
5. Project Management Tools
Selling and promoting your products online involves numerous stakeholders, deadlines, and overlapping processes. Keep your projects on course with project management software. It allows teams to track and manage work from start to finish and provides visibility around project deadlines and milestones. Project management tools can help your team plan effectively and understand the scope and responsibilities. Tools like:
Asana
Jira
Monday.com
Trello
They are especially helpful for centralizing campaign tasks, organizing large-scale projects, and streamlining cross-functional team efforts.
6. Inventory Tracking Tools
Balancing growing sales while managing inventory levels can be difficult. Two types of software are commonly used to manage inventory: an all-in-one enterprise resource planning (ERP) platform or a dedicated inventory and warehouse management system. An ERP platform supports inventory tracking and day-to-day business activities like accounting, procurement, and risk management.
An inventory management system (IMS) is a specialized tool for integrating your fulfillment with major e-commerce systems. Whether using your ERP solution, an inventory tracking tool, or both, you’ll need a smart solution to sync orders with your inventory and e-commerce platform. Fortunately, you do not lack powerful inventory tracking tools from Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP.
7. Customer Service Tools
At the heart of every good business is its customers. That’s why being ready to support their questions and needs is so important. A customer service tool can help you engage them via:
Text
Mobile,
Phone
Email
Live chat
Social media
A knowledge base can help your customers quickly find the information they need to decide. Customer relationship management (CRM) tools like Zendesk, Help Scout, and Salesforce were created to help build and maintain the connection between customers and your brand. Whether that’s through:
Email communications
Website behavior
Phone calls
Chatbot conversations
Form submissions
Subscriptions
Unsubscriptions
Purchases
Returns, etc.
A CRM stores it all. This bridge between customer behavior and your sales, marketing, and support teams allows better customer-facing interactions and background strategizing. A CRM will bolster ongoing engagement and collect helpful insights into how your customers interact with your organization, fueling your team with the data you need to personalize customer experiences better.
8. Rewards and Referral Program for E-commerce
Reward your faithful customers and entice new shoppers to return with refer-a-friend promotions, point-based reward programs, and VIP status. Even if you're new to e-commerce website tools, setting up rewards points values and other promotions can be simple with the right rewards and referral tool.
Some popular tools are Referral Rock, Friendbuy, and InviteReferrals. You’ve likely interacted with tools like this without knowing. That 20% off popup on your favorite clothing site? They get $50 if a friend signs up button? It was probably built and tracked by a referral/rewards tool. They’re great tools because you can track all your referral and rewards campaigns from one place, and monitor and adjust as you see fit.
9. Customer Data Tools
Customer data is one of the most valuable resources in e-commerce, but collecting, organizing, and synthesizing it all can be quite a task. With the number of different locations and channels customer data is coming from (especially in e-commerce), taming a data tidal wave is important for success.
A customer data platform (CDP) is an essential e-commerce tool for centralizing customer data management, organization, and analysis. You can build a 360° view of each unique customer from this one hub. From there, your teams, aided by machine learning, can use that data to create hyper-personalized campaigns relevant to your customers’ wants and needs.
10. Analytics, Insights, and Data Strategy
Bringing everything together, you’ll have a fair amount of tools to keep track of. They’ll all have different types of data, but it’s up to you to identify what’s working and what can be improved upon in the grand scheme of things. Aside from tools in this article collecting their data, others like Google Analytics, Heap, and Conductor track day-to-day website traffic, performance, conversions, behaviors, etc. These tools are helpful for ongoing monitoring and can answer a ton of useful questions:
What pages are popular and unpopular?
Are there broken links?
Where is conversion traffic coming from?
How many people visit pages each day/week/month?
How much time do people spend on your site?
Where do people spend the most time on your site?
You get the picture. All of these things can help inform improvements and experiments. Regardless of the tools you use to collect analytics and insights, a solid data strategy is key to those insights being useful. Your organization's goals will help shape that strategy. The overarching goal of e-commerce is pretty straightforward:
Get people to buy what you’re selling. Those same potential customers have many options, so your data strategy is crucial to gaining that competitive edge and shaping the future of your business.
Use those tools to challenge the digital experiences you’ve built and construct something increasingly stronger.
30 Best Ecommerce Tools to Scale Your Business in 2024
Expanding your e-commerce business is no small feat. You'll face new operational challenges as you attract more traffic, convert more sales, and handle more orders. Scaling can be stressful. However, using the right tools can help ease the transition and automate processes so you can focus on growing your business. Here’s a list of the best ecommerce tools for scaling in 2024.
These solutions will help you manage sales, fulfill orders, improve customer service, and more to ensure your business can handle growth when the time comes. They’ll all help you create better customer experiences to ease the shifting demands of your ecommerce operations.
1. Shophunter: Shopify Sales Tracker
ShopHunter's Shopify sales tracker offers a unique tool for e-commerce founders, particularly those in the Shopify ecosystem. At its core, it is a custom algorithm that estimates sales for entire stores and specific products, helping users quickly validate product potential.
Uncover Trending Products and Marketing Strategies
The platform goes beyond basic sales tracking, featuring an ad spy tool that monitors advertising activity across stores. This combination lets users spot trending products and successful marketing strategies early on.
Optimize Your E-commerce Journey
Whether you're a dropshipper, a Shopify store owner, or someone looking to enter the e-commerce space, ShopHunter aims to streamline product research and reduce the risk of investing in low-performing items.
Sign up for a free trial (no credit card required) to our Shopify sales tracker tool to find your next eCom opportunity or to level up your current eCommerce store by learning from your competitors.
2. Sprout Social
Social media is ranked the No. 1 channel for connecting with customers, so there’s no better starting point for competitive analysis. Sprout Social enables you to understand competitor performance on social media from multiple angles and data points.
You can use Sprout’s suite of competitive reports to assess and optimize your social strategy with rich data points you can track across Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Whether you want to get a sneak peek at what your competitors are posting or benchmark your growth against the average of the profiles being compared, it’s all a click away, minus the tedious manual research and messy spreadsheets.
3. Phlanx
This Instagram engagement calculator clues you on how active any account’s followers are. This is an awesome resource to analyze your competitor’s Instagram presence. It doubles as a way to determine whether an influencer has a legitimate following.
Phlanx’s engagement ratio is calculated based on the number of followers an account has versus the rate at which followers interact with content (likes, comments, etc). For example, Trader Joe's has an engagement rate of 2.56%. This is a fair score for a larger brand that posts consistently.
4. Social Blade
Social Blade is a fun tool for checking out bigger brands. It assesses follower counts on Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube, among other services. Although often used to assess the popularity of celebrities and YouTubers, there are some interesting insights here for marketers.
For example, their Twitter competitor analysis applies a grade based on their average number of retweets and likes.
5. Kompyte
Kompyte is a competitive intelligence tool that automatically pulls competitor updates into a single, easy-to-monitor dashboard. This includes updates from their website, review sites, content, social media, ads, job openings, and more.
Easily monitor competitor updates to keep an eye on what other brands in your industry are doing online. Plus, Kompyte helps put together sales battle cards based on your competitive findings that your team can use to close sales.
6. Crayon
Crayon is an artificial intelligence tool that can help with competitor analysis and competitive intelligence. It helps users create a dashboard of automatically compiled and organized competitor updates so brands can always be in the know about what their competitors are doing.
Crayon also has collaboration features, ensuring teams can collaborate to manage and monitor competitive insights. It offers the ability to create sales battle cards and customizable reports and dashboards.
7. SEMRush
SEMRush is one of the market's most widely used SEO tools, but its competitor analysis features set it apart. For starters, you can use SEMRush to pull your competitor’s backlinks and monitor changes in their ranking.
This is an invaluable tool for understanding your competition from a strictly SEO perspective. Likewise, highlighting what keywords competitors target directly influences your content strategy.
8. Ahrefs
Another staple competitor analysis tool for SEO is Ahrefs’ site explorer, which allows you to check any URL’s top organic keywords. You get a rough estimate of how much traffic a competitor receives on those keywords.
It’s also easy to check out a site’s highest-performing content based on backlinks (as opposed to shares). This information teaches you what products or messaging works best for a brand.
9. MozBar
This browser extension from Moz provides a surface-level view of how authoritative a site is in the eyes of Google. Based on Moz’s domain authority (DA) metric, MozBar assigns sites a DA score based on their likelihood to rank in search engines (based on factors such as backlinks). The higher the DA score, the better.
Settled atop your browser, the MozBar is a useful tool to quickly determine a site’s search potential performance at a glance.MozBar allows you to conduct a passive competitive analysis as you examine competing sites to determine how long they’ve been around and whether or not they’re winning backlinks.
10. Buzzsumo
Buzzsumo allows you to examine the top-performing content on relevant topics for your brand and specific competitors. The tool measures a piece of content’s engagement on social sites and total shares across the web.
Not only does this clue you in on who’s killing it in terms of industry content but also it helps you identify potentially hot topics to explore yourself. Whether you’re looking for movers and shakers in your industry or a new idea for a blog post, Buzzsumo provides you with definitive answers.
11. Similarweb
Similarweb is an insanely comprehensive tool for both content and SEO. The tools help you dig deep into your competitor’s content and where their traffic comes from.
For example, you can determine a site’s referral traffic and where a site ends up sending its visitors. And more importantly, for content marketers you see what topics visitors search for and what other relevant sites they visit.
12. Feedly
If you’re looking for a way to keep an eye on a competitor’s content without checking up on their blog constantly, look no further than Feedly.
Feedly is a content aggregator that stores and organizes content as it’s published, including that of your competitors. This allows you to see hot topics covered by your competitors, all on one page.
13. Mailcharts
Email marketing is arguably one of the most tedious channels for competitive analysis. Recognizing this, Mailcharts aggregates emails from competing campaigns to help influence your own. In addition to grabbing subject lines, Mailcharts pulls data such as send frequency and compares it to your business’ campaigns to see where your emails stand.
The tool compares your campaigns to their own massive library of marketing emails to ensure you’re in tune with best practices (think: timing, frequency, subject line length, etc). Not only is Mailcharts a powerful competitor analysis tool, but its website offers a ton of email examples to draw inspiration. Pulling from some of the biggest campaigns out there, you get a better idea of what today’s top-performing emails look like.
14. Owletter
This tool automatically aggregates emails from competitors and organizes them into a simple, user-friendly dashboard. Owletter’s analytics spots changes in your competitors’ email frequency, and likewise picks up on trends to help you optimize when you should send your own emails.
This represents an efficient, data-driven alternative to keeping up a dummy email account to spy on your competitors.
15. iSpionage
If you’re interested in a competitor’s paid ads, iSpionage is definitely for you. This tool analyzes multiple aspects of PPC campaigns, including how many keywords a brand is targeting on AdWords:
You also see who else competes for PPC ads for a particular topic, in addition to how much they’re projected monthly budget is: For brands considering PPC, such a tool is essential for keeping realistic expectations for ad spend.
16. Owler
Last but not least, this industry analysis tool uses community data to curate data and content from startups relevant to your niche. Again another tool reserved for bigger brands, you input brands to create your own custom dashboard of industry names to watch.
17. Wiser
Ever wanted to compare the prices of your products with those of your competitors? We all know that staying on top of market prices will give you a competitive edge with making sales.
Wiser can help you report on your competitor’s pricing, enabling you to revise your own strategy and position yourself accordingly. You can then automate your price settings against your competitors, always staying ahead without having to manually gather reports and make the needed adjustments. Wiser isn’t just useful for your online store. For omni-channel retailers, you can automate your online and in-store data collection and analysis.
18. PriSync
Prisync is another competitor price tracking and monitoring software and an alternative to Wiser. Where Wiser is more suited to omnichannel retail, PriSync comes with direct Magento and Shopify integrations and is a simpler solution more suited for e-commerce stores.
PriSync can help cut the time you spend manually tracking and recording your competitors’ prices and stock availability. PriSync does this by monitoring approximately 4.5 billion price points automatically, meaning you can quickly optimise your prices by just looking at the data and gain an advantage over your competition.
19. Think with Google
Stay up-to-date with Think with Google. As a content platform, it will keep you informed on Marketing Research & Digital Trends with data, guides and articles. Understanding industry trends, consumer behavior and data analysis can be a key for quick growth and building a strong position in your market.
20. Qualtrics
Qualtrics is an experience management company that provides multiple services to run your market research. You can use Qualtrics as an advanced and sophisticated survey tool, analyse your survey data and highlight decisive insights about your market.
They provide services like concept testing services, market readiness research, brand equity research or advertising research and help you bring together all of the insights you have into actionable insights
21. Pricewatch
Pricewatch is a pricing database for retailers and brands from Omnia Retail. It provides you competitor pricing data on your market, scrapped directly from their website or comparison shopping engines. They match your products based on EAN code and notify you of price updates.
22. Dub InterViewer
Dub InterViewer is a data collection solution that provides users with face-2-face, telephone and internet market research using a single platform. This service can help you with; data collection, questionnaire design, fieldwork, sample and quota management, productivity, quality control, process automation, data integration and security.
Not only does it allow you to collect your data, in recent years they have added features to help process, analyse, and manage your data, with options to visualise your results in dashboards and interactive reports. This helps to keep both the collection and reporting of your research all in one centralised platform.
23. Algopix
If you’re looking to complete product research on more than just Amazon, Algopix is an alternative to Unicorn Smasher. Algopix is a product and market research platform for eBay, Amazon and Walmart Sellers.
It helps you research specific products to find out if they have a high demand or not, the profit you can get and the recommended market (country) to target. It also gives you an estimation on the expenses you should expect in order to sell this product, and your competitors on this specific product.
24. Google Analytics
It’s without a doubt that you’ve probably heard of Google Analytics. It is one of the most popular digital analytics software. As Google’s free web analytics service, it allows you to analyse in-depth detail about the visitors on your website and track the effect of your campaigns. These insights will help you to shape the success strategy of your business.
25. Metrilo
Metrilo is a combined growth platform for e-commerce brands. It tracks customer behaviour on site and delivers marketing and sales performance insights to be used for optimising marketing spend and ROI, CRO, and product management.
The customer database offers a comprehensive look into individual customer journeys and segmentation to identify particular customer groups. All this data is integrated with the email functionalities for relevant engagement and driving repeat sales.
26. Woopra
It’s undeniable that collecting and analysing massive amounts of data is essential to running an e-commerce website, and understanding what’s going on with your store gives the best opportunity to improve it. Woopra is a website analytics tool specifically designed for e-commerce websites.
The tool takes data across products, marketing, sales and support and does the hard work of analysing that data for you. You’ll be able to quickly understand the customer journey, retention stats, cart abandonment rates and more.
27. Segment
Segment is a customer data platform that helps you to collect, clean and control your customer data in one place. Segment is the ultimate data foundation, which is especially useful when you’re using multiple tools that all collect data. It allows you to transform and load user data and integrate web and mobile data in just one single API integration.
28. Kissmetrics
Kissmetrics is an analytics tool that helps you identify, understand, and improve the metrics on a user level. It makes it simple to get the information, connect data to each other and helps you to make better product and marketing decisions.
29. Mixpanel
Mixpanel is an alternative to Kissmetrics. Both are described as Funnel Analytics Tools but have a few distinct differences. Whereas Kissmetrics provides actionable metrics to help grow your business, Mixpanel is an advanced service that tracks how your customers interact and engage with your web and mobile applications, helping you make the needed improvements for better results.
30. Zeotap
Zeotap is a next-generation Customer Data Platform. Its Customer Intelligence Platform (CIP), enables brands to unify, enhance and activate customer data in a cookie-less future, all while putting consumer privacy and compliance front-and-centre. Recognized by Gartner as a Cool Vendor, Zeotap works with over 80 of the world’s top 100 brands, including P&G, Nestlé and Virgin Media.
13 Best Ecommerce Marketing Tools for Businesses
1. Tagshop: Transforming Social Media Into a Sales Channel
Tagshop is a shoppable Instagram and user-generated content tool that allows users to aggregate social content and curate captivating shoppable galleries for ecommerce landing pages.
With Tagshop, e-commerce businesses can seamlessly utilize user-generated content software to showcase products more naturally, allowing customers to make purchases more confidently. Tagshop is one of the best e-commerce tools for brands looking to generate sales through Instagram posts or other social content from different channels, including:
TikTok
YouTube
Google reviews
2. Hubspot: The Foundation for Ecommerce Marketing
Hubspot is a CRM or customer relationship management software that has become more popular. It provides business owners with a suite of lead generation, marketing, and customer service tools to create more long-term revenue from each customer acquired. HubSpot is one of the most prominent leaders in providing features like website building, hosting email campaigns, and other marketing features.
Its robust integration with BigCommerce and Shopify offers a key advantage, allowing businesses to directly leverage HubSpot’s full marketing, sales, and customer service features within their online stores. It also integrates with BigCommerce and other platforms, allowing businesses to streamline their e-commerce and marketing efforts. HubSpot also has a free inbound marketing school to help businesses learn how to market their services or offerings digitally.
3. Desku: Using AI to Improve Customer Support
Desku is an AI-powered customer support platform that helps businesses manage customer queries efficiently. It offers:
Live chat
Chatbot
Shared inbox
Virtual features
Desku offers an AI assistant, ecommerce platform integration, and a knowledge base. It streamlines customer queries and provides a unified inbox for better customer engagement.
EngageBay is an all-in-one marketing, sales, and customer support software for small businesses, startups, and solopreneurs. You get email marketing, marketing automation, landing pages, contact management, segmentation, customer journey mapping, sales pipelines, and more. EngageBay is one of the most affordable marketing software programs. It offers unlimited contacts and other advanced features, which allows businesses to scale up quickly without worrying about marketing funds.
EngageBay also integrates with top eCommerce platforms like:
Shopify
BigCommerce
WooCommerce
Making it easy to manage your online store from one place. With built-in eCommerce marketing automation, you can streamline your campaigns and boost sales without ever leaving the platform.
5. Customer.io: Targeted Messaging for Ecommerce
Customer.io is an outbound marketing and sales tool for e-commerce businesses. With ecommerce tools like Customer.io, companies can strategically market to potential customers. The tool provides features like sending email and SMS notifications to leads and existing customers about sales, re-targeting abandoned carts and automating email funnels.
You can also integrate a Customer.io account with other marketing and ecommerce tools to automate the sales and marketing process. That way, your store generates income even when you aren’t doing anything, especially when you deploy the right messaging and strategies to your email marketing efforts.
6. Renderforest: Create Professional Websites with AI
Renderforest AI Website Builder is a versatile platform designed to create professional, responsive websites without any coding skills. The AI website builder free feature lets you start building impressive websites at no cost, offering a suite of tools to enhance your site’s content and design effortlessly. But Renderforest is not just a website builder but also a comprehensive video maker and editor.
7. ShippingEasy: Streamlining Order Fulfillment
On top of the ecommerce business equipment and tools you should have for marketing, you should also pay attention to fulfillment. A business that effectively delivers and ships out products will inadvertently get repeat customers. That’s where tools like ShippingEasy come in handy.
With ShippingEasy, you’re able to track and fulfill orders with ease. It brings your online stores from all marketplaces into one dashboard and helps you manage your product shipping schedules and progress. To manage repetitive tasks better, you can choose from several invoicing software to make your work easier.
8. ScrapingBee: A Tool for Competitive Analysis
ScrapingBee offers a simple API that can scrape any website and deliver the data in a structured format without the technical headaches typically associated with web scraping. Forget endless copy and pasting sessions, this powerful tool can automatically help your business collect crucial product information, including:
Pricing
Availability
Descriptions
From other ecommerce websites, giving you a vital edge over your competition. Better yet, ScrapingBee’s rotating proxies and rate-limiting avoidance features ensure that your scraping efforts aren’t blocked, allowing you to access vast amounts of data without worrying about being cut off.
9. Scrapingdog: Another Tool for Competitive Analysis
Like Scrapingbee, Scrapingdog is API-based software that can extract data from any e-commerce platform, such as Amazon, eBay, or Walmart. With the help of Scrapingdog, you can build an Amazon price tracker and monitor your competitors.
This price tracker can help you change your pricing strategy when your competitors do so. You will even get a real-time notification when the pricing fluctuates. Using Scrapingdog, you can extract reviews from e-commerce platforms, which will help you do sentiment analysis and develop your product accordingly.
10. Delight Chat: Recover Abandoned Carts with Conversational Marketing
DelightChat is an omnichannel marketing tool that helps e-commerce businesses utilize messaging platforms like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Gmail, and Instagram DMs to market and provide customer support.
This e-commerce tool is a leading platform for recovering abandoned carts and sending accurate order updates. It provides a seamless onboarding process and features such as COD verification, ROI analytics, and a smooth integration with Shopify stores.
11. Alloy: Automate Your Ecommerce Operations
Alloy is an eCommerce automation tool allowing eCommerce brands to integrate with several tech stacks to enhance eCommerce operations and customer experiences. In addition, the platform has recently launched a B2B solution, Alloy Embedded, which provides seamless embedding solutions to SaaS platforms for adding third-party eCommerce data and functionalities. Alloy supports six eCommerce platforms:
Shopify
Webflow
WooCommerce
Magento, etc.
With the unified goal of making automation accessible to all online businesses. The platform owners also believe in removing monotonous processes to build a better, more productive working environment. If you are unsure where to begin, surf Alloy’s marketplace. It features multiple app integrations and ready-to-use cards that can be curated to satisfy specific business needs. The best part? You can get a hands-on experience for free.
12. Listrak: Retargeting Customers Across Channels
Listrak is an omnichannel marketing platform that empowers retailers and brands to grow revenue through cross-platform marketing efforts. With optimized emails, SMS, and mobile push notifications, you can reach out and retarget customers throughout their journey.
Using the platform, brands can listen and respond to customer signals, pushing them to move from one step of the buying journey to the next. Brands can create responsive and appealing email designs, leverage abandoned cart messaging suites, and use detailed analytics provided to understand the behavioral triggers of consumers’ behavior, amongst other things, to enhance the performance of their marketing campaigns.
13. Omnisend: Automated Emails to Boost Ecommerce Sales
Omnisend is yet another easy-to-use marketing automation platform that helps eCommerce brands lock growth without having you run wild. It helps keep the shoppers engaged throughout their lifecycle by sending relevant emails or SMS, encouraging them to complete their purchases.
Ecommerce brands are also empowered to personalize the already available email and SMS templates to enhance earnings by sending cart recovery to post-purchase, customer experience campaigns, and more. Additionally, you can leverage audience segmentation based on campaign activity and shopping behavior to make audience targeting possible with the right message delivered at the right time. Relish the power of sales at every stage of the buyers’ journey.
1. Shopify: The Gold Standard of Ecommerce Platforms
Regarding ecommerce, Shopify is the best platform for most businesses. Why? Because it has everything you need to get started right out of the box. With Shopify, you can create your website, integrate multiple apps, and access shopping cart software and other features.
And the best part? You don’t need to know how to code to use Shopify. The highly intuitive platform offers more than 100 templates to help get you started. Shopify also has many apps and plugins to cover almost every need, including SEO and security features. Beyond its online store builder, Shopify has many seamless integrations with advanced ecommerce marketing tools to help you get your store up and running quickly.
Set up abandoned cart emails to recover lost sales.
Automate security features through additional apps to keep your online store secure.
Can be customized with unique design solutions if you enlist the help of a developer.
2. WooCommerce: The Best Ecommerce Plugin
Unlike Shopify, WooCommerce isn’t a standalone platform. It’s a WordPress ecommerce plugin. It’s one of the most popular and best tools for ecommerce available in the market. If you already have a WordPress website and are comfortable using it, you can add ecommerce compatibility by downloading the WooCommerce plugin.
You can sell products, offer subscriptions, and perform other e-commerce-related tasks with WooCommerce’s extensions and integrations. This makes it the perfect way to monetize your website, whether you run a small or medium-sized business. Besides, it’s among the best e-commerce tools, and it is easy to use and customizable. Since it’s open-source software, you can easily tailor your online store to your audience’s needs.
3. BigCommerce: The Best Ecommerce Platform for Growing Businesses
Like Shopify, BigCommerce is another full-service ecommerce platform with features. These include a highly customizable website, SEO and analytics optimization, numerous payment gateways, inventory management, and more. BigCommerce has several years of experience to draw upon. It comes with a website builder.
If you want to create your website designs, there are easy-to-follow tutorials for both beginners and tech-savvy developers. BigCommerce also offers integrations with several tools, including some of the best AI tools for ecommerce. If you’re looking for:
Top-notch security
Lightning-fast loading speeds
24/7 customer service
This tool is a good option. Its site offers tutorials and other great customer support resources. If you need more help, you can also reach the team by email, phone, or live chat.
4. Wix: The Best Website Builder for Ecommerce
Wix is more than just a website builder. Like Shopify and BigCommerce, it’s an all-in-one e-commerce tool that lets you build your online store, sell products, create a blog, and grow your business. Wix is a beginner-friendly tool that’s cheaper than most. Its drag-and-drop website builder interface makes it easy for small business owners to design functional e-commerce stores without coding experience.
This tool has over 900 customizable templates that enable you to tailor your online store to your needs. It also enables retailers to advance their website’s functionality by integrating with other third-party tools and marketing apps. A Wix website is secure as it comes with a free SSL certificate. It’s also PCI compliant, ensuring all your customers’ transactions are secure.
5. Customily Product Personalizer: The Best Ecommerce Tool for Product Customization
Customily is a product personalization app that helps online stores create and sell personalized products. With Customily, stores can add a variety of customization options to their products, including:
Text
Images
Vector
Maps
Besides its wide range of personalization tools, Customily also provides a live preview, allowing customers to visualize the final product before purchasing. It also prints files for the merchant to automate the fulfillment process. Stores can also offer personalized products, creating unique and memorable shopping experiences. As a result, this boosts conversion rates and reduces returns.
6. Shift4Shop: The Best Ecommerce Tool for Beginners
Shift4Shop, formerly 3DCart, is one of the best ecommerce tools, with its all-in-one platform and many useful features. With its drag-and-drop interface, you can build your online store even if you’re a beginner!
Other features include:
Social media integration capabilities
Inventory management tools
Email tools
SSL certificate
It also comes with a GDPR toolkit for businesses that sell products to Europe. Like Shopify, your transactions will be free if you use Shift4Shop’s credit card processor. Unlike most e-commerce tools, the tool has a pre-built customer relationship management system. You won’t need third-party integration to track customer interactions.
7. Hostinger: The Best Web Hosting Provider for Ecommerce
Hostinger is a reputable web hosting provider that offers an online store builder to build and host your e-commerce store. The builder has an intuitive drag-and-drop interface and designer-made templates to help you quickly create and publish your online store.
The online store builder relieves pressure if you’re a beginner or business owner of small, to medium-sized companies. It offers features like:
Shopping cart integration
Payment gateways
Product management tools
Marketing automation
The builder plan includes web hosting and a free domain name for an all-in-one solution. Hostinger also provides customer support and reliable hosting that will have people raving about your site.
8. Magento: The Best Ecommerce Tool for Large Businesses
Magento is an ecommerce tool offered by Adobe. It’s an all-in-one ecommerce solution that processes over $100 billion in gross merchandise sales yearly. With Magento, you can create an ecommerce store no matter how big or small your website is. This platform also supports small businesses, mid-market and enterprise, and B2B online sales. Magento stands out from other platforms' efficiency, automation, and access to crucial data. You’ll benefit from:
Inventory management
Business intelligence
Shipping solution
Order management
This ecommerce tool has specific features for customer segmentation and personalization. Your store will automatically display products, promotions, content, and prices based on factors like:
Customer location
Order history
Customer gender
LTV
Wish list items
You can even improve the shopping experience for unknown website visitors based on their shopping cart or products viewed.
9. Squarespace: The Best Ecommerce Tool for Creatives
Squarespace is another well-known website builder. Unlike Wix, Squarespace has integrated ecommerce capabilities into all of its business plans. This ecommerce tool is popular for businesses and individuals in creative industries. The Squarespace designs are known for being both beautiful and modern. These award-winning templates are perfect for fashion designers, artists, musicians, and photographers. Squarespace is the place to do it if you want to showcase your work and sell it online. You can also Squarespace to sell subscriptions and digital content.
Squarespace offers automatic inventory management, shipping calculator tools, and a rich product display if you're selling physical products. Use this ecommerce tool to showcase videos of your products as well. Squarespace integrates with other popular online selling tools such as:
PayPal
Stripe
USPS
FedEx
Apple Pay
It also integrates with popular accounting solutions like Xero. Squarespace is the best choice for creating and monetizing a portfolio website with e-commerce capabilities.
10. Easy Digital Downloads: The Best Ecommerce Tool for Selling Digital Products
As its name implies, Easy Digital Downloads is an e-commerce tool designed to sell digital products. Similar to WooCommerce, it’s a plugin for WordPress websites. More than 2.44 million users have downloaded EDD. This e-commerce tool makes creating discount codes easy, tracking download activity, and restricting file access. It comes with a fully integrated shopping cart that allows customers to purchase multiple downloads simultaneously.
There are no limitations on how many digital products you can sell with the Easy Digital Downloads plugin. The tool integrates with other popular tools and extensions you already use. Some examples include:
PayPal
Authorize.net
Stripe
Slack
Zapier
AWeber
Dropbox
Amazon Web Services
11. Ecwid: The Best Free Ecommerce Tool
Ecwid is a free commerce extension compatible with WordPress and other popular CMS platforms. You can add the Ecwid tool to Weebly, Joomla, Tumblr, Squarespace, Wix, Blogger, and Adobe Muse. You’ll also be able to sell online from marketplaces like Amazon and eBay or sell on social media via Facebook and Instagram. Unlike 3DCart, you can install Ecwid to your website without any development or coding experience.
The Ecwid software can integrate with in-person selling at your brick-and-mortar retail stores as well. If you’re currently using WordPress but don’t want to use WooCommerce as an ecommerce tool, Ecwid is a viable alternative. Ecwid has a free forever plan, but it’s minimal. You’ll only be able to sell up to ten products and won’t have access to sales channels outside of your website.
12. OpenCart: The Best Open Source Ecommerce Platform
Last but certainly not least on our list is OpenCart. Unlike some of the other tools listed above, this is not a website builder. OpenCart is a free and open-source platform that adds ecommerce functionality to existing websites. Over 342,000 e-commerce websites across the world use OpenCart to sell online. The most significant standout feature of this ecommerce tool is the OpenCart marketplace. You’ll have access to 13,000+ modules and themes. You can integrate OpenCart with an extensive list of payment gateways and shipping providers.
As an open-source platform, OpenCart has an outstanding community support forum with more than 550,000 posts from 110,000+ registered members. For a one-time fee or ongoing monthly service, you can have access to OpenCart’s dedicated support staff.
Speed is one of the most important factors for e-commerce conversion rate optimization. Research by Google shows that 53% of mobile users will abandon a site that takes longer than three seconds to load. The hosting service you use for your e-commerce site can significantly affect its speed. SiteGround is a hosting provider officially recommended by WordPress.org.
Apart from the WordPress hosting package, SiteGround also offers web hosting, cloud hosting, and, probably most importantly for online marketers, a WooCommerce hosting package. One of the main advantages of the WooCommerce hosting service is improved website speed, which leads to better search engine results and a much higher conversion rate.
2. Hotjar: Understand Your Users
Your website is the door to your company. Your visitors will learn everything from it, and it’s the tool you use to hopefully make a sale. This is why it’s important to know how your website is performing, and how your users interact with the site.
Are your CTAs in the right spot?
Where do your shoppers stop scrolling?
What links draw my customers to my product pages?
Hotjar allows brands and retailers to quickly and easily discover user intentions through click, scroll, move, share, and download heatmaps. It is the perfect tool for further investigating conversion funnels to see where visitors lose interest and what works best for conversions.
3. Sooqr: Optimise Ecommerce Site Search
Did you know that studies show that users who search for products are five times more likely to make a purchase? An optimised solution offering relevant search results can instantly improve your conversion rate. Sooqr can ensure your visitors can really find the products and content they are searching for in your shop, helping you to provide an optimized user experience and ultimately enabling people to buy more!
4. Saucelabs: Test Your Store on Any Device
Automated browser testing is probably the easiest and one of the most efficient ways of cross-browser testing. You don’t need to test the checkout pages yourself. You simply run automated tests with services like Saucelabs.
Saucelabs is a great tool for automated browser testing in different browsers. It also offers automated mobile testing, which we recommend when testing B2C e-commerce sites. Saucelabs services include more than 400 OS browsers and devices on which the tests can be performed. There’s also the option for unlimited manual testing.
5. UserTesting: Get Feedback From Real People
If you don’t have a testing team and you don’t want to test your checkout pages on virtual machines, UserTesting may be your go-to tool. UserTesting offers you browser tests from real people. You can test any web page you’d like at any stage of your development process, it’s even possible to test your prototypes during production which is great for dealing with different issues early on.
With UserTesting you can choose from a panel of users in order to secure that the real (potential) target group is testing your checkout pages. Further on, you’ll simply create certain tasks which the testers should complete on your testing site. Of course, you add additional information about browser versions and operating systems with which the tests should be conducted.
6. Crazy Egg: Find Out Where Visitors Click
Similar to Hotjar, Crazy Egg will show you where users click with heat maps. It’s as easy as just typing in your URL and it will show you your heat map with the 30 day free trial. What’s more, it’s a common question for most retailers to know why visitors aren’t converting.
Crazy Egg will tell you why they’re leaving, giving you the knowledge to enhance your pages for a better customer experience and makes sure your most important content is being seen and not ignored. With the overlay tool, you can also view the number of clicks of all elements on a page and find out where the most clicks are and how they’re converting. This allows you to optimise pages and increase conversion, without even bothering my visitors to ask.
7. Fitle: Reduce Clothing Return Rates
If you’re an e-store that sells clothes, you’re probably well aware of the high return rates you encounter. A common reason for clothes being returned is that they don’t fit. Finding the right size for shoppers can be incredibly difficult, but it’s extremely valuable to you as a seller to reduce my return rate. This is where Fitle comes in.
This sizing recommendation tool combines the biggest clothing panel with the largest database of forms and shapes worldwide. The collected data from your store’s users is analysed and then Fitle will be able to recommend the best size for them.
8. TrueFit: Personalise the Shopping Experience
TrueFit helps you bring more personalisation to your shopping experience, with APIs, software, and intelligence powered by the world’s best data set for fashion. Using their data, they help decode style, fit, and size of every body and create a personalised experience for each shopper, helping you to drive conversions while decreasing returns.
Need help offering multiple payment methods to my customers? Mollie is an east to integrate plugin for your webshop that will help you quickly feature multiple major payment methods in your checkout. They offer the likes of:
Mollie can help you quickly scale my checkout, providing more to your customers without the stress of the manual input it would normally take. What’s more, there’s no lock-in contract. This means, as a customer, you only need to pay for successful transactions.
10. Klarna: Another Payment Solution
An alternative payment solution to Mollie is Klarna, particularly if you want to offer afterpay. Klarna is one of the leading solutions for checkout payment, and it gives your customers more options with their payment, offering the choice between buying now and paying later, paying in installments, or just paying instantly. Increasing payment options will help encourage consumers to still place the order, even if they have doubts, ultimately increasing your conversions and ROI in the end.
11. Instapage: Create Landing Pages for Your Campaigns
We all know that marketing and advertising budgets can too often be wasted, especially if marketing campaigns don’t take their specified target group to the right place. With Instapage, you can easily create landing pages that are tailored perfectly to each group of visitors from my campaigns.
The tool allows you to quickly create landing pages for specific campaigns in just a few minutes using its templates and drag-and-drop options. You can also go one step further by using the built-in A/B testing and heatmap features to help further optimize your page and, therefore, your campaign.
12. Divi: Build Unique WordPress Pages
Divi is for anyone who wants to create an absolutely unique and appealing WordPress page, but without the complex development skills usually needed. The Divi builder makes it easy to build a customised website, section by section, with a multitude of features you can quickly add into your site. Regardless of the type of page you want to create, with Divi you can set up a customer experience with individual branding and without any loss of website speed and efficiency.
13. Lander: Create Landing Pages Without IT Skills
An alternative tool to help you create the best landing pages for your site without the need for IT skills is Lander. Use Lander’s easy-to-do visual editor to design and customise your landing pages. Drag and drop elements with no need for HTML or CSS.
Lander also includes an A/B testing tool, which allows you to test up to three different versions of your landing pages. Decide the best copy, images, CTAs, and colours in real-time to continually optimise my site’s performance, and add a personal touch with the dynamic text replacement using PPC ad’s keywords to alter the text.
25 Personalisation and User Experience Tools
1. Qualaroo
To improve buying experiences and learn more about your customers and website visitors, you can use a tool like Qualaroo to include quick surveys throughout your e-commerce store. This can ultimately help you increase conversions, uncover objections, and better understand the buyer journey.
2. SearchSpring
SearchSpring is another powerful personalisation tool that offers multiple possibilities with a variety of features. At its core, Searchspring provides intelligent search results and powerful merchandising capabilities for e-commerce sites. Ensuring your customers can find the products they’re looking for is essential.
SearchSprint will help you to deliver fast and relevant search results, also letting you tailor the products displayed to your shoppers based on your business goals. SearchSpring achieves this by importing your product data and storing it on their servers for deep analysis (or Indexing). In return, you are able to provide high speed, dynamic search results to your site directly from their servers, helping your customers quickly find the right products for them.
3. Taglayer
Implementing personal experiences can be difficult as it usually requires development skills, resulting in a lot of frustrations and a high investment. Taglayer gives marketers the opportunity to create these personal experiences without having to write any code. With the plug-n-play software it is possible to give visitors unique experiences on your webshop, via email or by using notifications. This can help to increase conversions and brand loyalty.
4. Personizely
Personizely is a conversion marketing toolkit used to make the most of every website visitor by collecting their contact info, increasing average order value and boosting sales with targeted widgets. Easily create personalised messages on your store so visitors feel special with your personal approach towards them. Use the tool’s builder for full freedom of design and produce high-converting popups. Use the website personalisation tool to edit your website according to visitors easily:
Activity history
Referral source
Geolocation
Device
Cart Value
Order history and more
With its visual on-site editor, you can split the website into variations. Personalize your headers, calls to action, images, and other content to move visitors faster toward the goal. Advanced targeting and data placeholders add the right content to your website to convince visitors and increase your conversions.
5. Custobar
Custobar is a combined customer data and marketing automation platform. It enables consumer businesses to provide meaningful customer experiences and improve sales through smart use of customer data. With this tool, create automated marketing campaigns through its Marketing Automation function using the data you have evaluated from your Customer Data Platform. It also provides a variety of add-ons and several integrations to continue to optimise your work.
6. Criteo
Do you want to create more compelling ads for visitors? With Criteo, you can create and launch personalised retargeting ad campaigns. Convert more shoppers by tailoring dynamic ads to them, recommending your best offers and products from your catalog. The tool also allows you to optimise campaign performance by automatically selecting creative components that are likely to drive the most engagement.
7. Aimtell
Re-engage website visitors through targeted mobile and desktop web push notifications. Aimtell allows you to send website visitors various types of notifications, including offers and reminders about your products, automated campaigns targeting abandoned carts, welcome notifications, and a lot more.
Best of all, these notifications are sent even when a subscriber doesn’t have their browser open, and they don’t have to provide any personal info to opt in. It’s quick and easy to install via a WordPress plugin, Shopify App, or any other website with just a simple line of code.
8. Channable
Channable is a solution for feed management and PPC automation, helping you scale without a lot of manual input. Use Channable to increase your products' exposure on more than 2500 price comparison websites, affiliates, or marketplaces worldwide.
You can also automate your advertising, creating dynamic ads that automatically sync with your inventory as it changes. Push products to marketplaces with deep-integration, automatically updating your product ads. Connect orders by syncing order data from many different marketplaces straight to your online shop. And keep optimising your process with Integrated analytics and e-commerce plugins.
9. CleverReach
CleverReach allows you to conduct efficient e-mail marketing. The software helps to create professional and effective newsletters without the need for previous experience or knowledge. You can take it one step further by automating your email campaigns to increase efficiency and take that timely task off of your hands.
10. Sumo
Sumo is one of the email capturing tools that’s worth giving a try. The power of email marketing is still underrated. Use Sumo to capture the right data to automatically build you email list and set up some smart campaigns to reach them again. Sumo is easy to integrate and has plugins for both Shopify and WooCommerce. You can even start with a free plan, which contains a good amount of valuable features.
11. Mailchimp
It’s highly likely you’ve heard of MailChimp. But just in case you haven’t or you need a refresher, MailChimp is one of the top automated email marketing solutions to:
Create beautiful email templates
Target subscribers
Send your email campaigns
Manage subscriptions
Track your campaigns
Setup autoresponders
Split test campaigns
12. Maxwell
Even though Messenger doesn’t have the same reach as email, there is one area where Messenger performs better than any other digital marketing channel: engagement. Nearly all messages will be read and half of them result in a click.
This results in revenue increases. Maxwell’s WhatsApp & Messenger Marketing App can help you run your campaigns on auto-pilot and offers:
13. Zendesk
We all know the importance of Customer Service. And Zendesk is one of the biggest players that can help make your life easier when handling customer service. The platform is a robust customer service and engagement tool that can help make interactions with your customers quick and simple, whether:
On the phone
Chat
Email
Social media
The ticketing system collects all customer queries from multiple sources to bring management into one location, making it easier for your employees. The Help Desk software allows your representatives to track, prioritise, and solve customer support tickets without hassle. With the help of macros, your employees can quickly respond to recurring customer queries that can be extremely time-consuming. This frees time to get ahead of the game and proactively talk to your customers before they contact you.
14. Drift
Drift is a Live Chat tool. Create conversational chatbots on your website to interact directly with your visitors and capture more potential customers. By setting predetermined questions and answers to commonly asked questions and tailoring these questions to different pages on your site, you can help potential new customers quickly find the information they’re looking for and boost your conversations on product pages. This tool also gives you the ability to directly connect your customers to your support team for any interactions that require a more “human” touch.
15. GrooveHQ
GrooveHQ is a customer support tool that can help bring your customer communications together, providing a shared inbox for your customer support team, easy knowledge base setup and retorting that brings accessibility to your company’s interactions with customers. This tool is ideal for brands and retailers wanting to scale their customer service, providing shoppers with better experiences and easier ways to communicate with your team.
16. Xsellco eDesk
Providing support across multiple channels can be tedious. Hours are wasted each day hopping from tab to tab just to stay on top of pre-sale and post-sale issues. eDesk gathers customer interactions from your website, all your marketplaces and social channels into one place.
They appear together in a simple dashboard that you can learn to use in a few minutes. Customer support tickets are matched with the correct order data from everywhere you sell, unifying the process into a simple system for your team.
17. Authentipix
Instagram is a key social media in most brand’s affiliate marketing. People love to talk about where they’re shopping and what products they’re buying on IG, and many brands encourage this with branded hashtags and celebrating user generated content containing their products.
To help utilise this strategy even further, you can use AuthentiPix (formerly Instagration) to bring Instagram into your store. This can help drive product sales and conversions, allowing your customers to show off your products directly on your homepage. We all know social proof is incredibly powerful, so make sure to take advantage of this great opportunity. AuthentiPix is a quick and easy way to show prospective customers how much other people love my products!
18. Yotpo
Social proof is incredibly powerful, and we all know the importance of customer reviews in driving future sales. Yotpo is a customer review tool you integrate into your e-commerce store. The on-site widgets are completely customizable and easy to install.
You can also use Yotpo to send Mail After Purchase (MAP) review requests automatically after they purchase a product. It’s a simple way to capture compelling reviews from happy customers.
19. Buffer
Social media is a non-stop machine. However, it’s impossible to spend the whole day slaving over it. Buffer allows you to easily bookmark and schedule Tweets, Facebook updates or your latest Pinterest pictures from any browser or mobile device.
This means you can effectively and evenly distribute the content you share to your users, keeping your brand on their minds throughout the day rather than spamming all your content at once.
20. Hootsuite
If you’re planning social media on a larger scale, we recommend Hootsuite as an alternative to Buffer. Hootsuite is particularly useful if you’re managing multiple accounts across multiple platforms and have a number of team members working on them. It is a Social Media Management tool and can be a great asset to increasing efficiency and effectiveness across the board.
Hootsuite is a very popular tool for Social Media. It makes finding, scheduling, managing, and reporting on your content easier. A valuable feature that’s added to the tool is the ability to track your results in depth. Find and filter social conversations by keyword, hashtag, and location in multiple languages to hear what people are saying about your brand, competitors, and industry.
21. Shop Instagram & UGC
Connect your Shopify store to your Instagram and use your beautiful Instagram images as shoppable galleries in various styles on your homepage, Instagram shop page, or product page. Tag products on Instagram photos and make them shoppable anywhere on your site, allowing your visitors to add these products directly to their cart from the images on your site without additional searching or steps.
22. Loox
As we all know, reviews can be detrimental to product sales in this day and age. Social proof is key, but we also know images and visuals are also detrimental to today’s online world. And they can be extra helpful in reviews for people to visualise the products they’re interested in and see themselves using them. This is where Loox is super helpful. Looz can help you request my customers to leave reviews, encouraging them to include pictures with their reviews.
23. Preview
Curating an aesthetically pleasing Instagram feed with a clear theme and cohesive visuals is becoming the norm, with your customers seeing beautiful feeds from the likes of both brands and Influencers every day, it’s important you can also follow this standard. Preview is a great tool to help you do that.
Not only does Preview allow you to schedule your posts in advance, including the caption, but it also syncs your existing feed with your future scheduled posts so you can see exactly what they will look like. Then, you can easily choose which posts to schedule when in my feed to make sure everything is cohesive and aesthetically pleasing for the people who come onto your account.
24. Canva
It’s without a doubt that images, graphics and branded visuals are gaining more and more importance in the digital world. But it can be hard to create stunning visuals without digital design skills, or an on-site designer. Canva enables you to create such content quickly and easily, even if you have little to no graphic design skills.
Whether you use your Canva-created designs online or off, you’ll be able to create a large variety of content that will visually appeal to your targeted prospects and attract them to your business. You can also download their powerful phone apps to create beautiful visuals that you can directly share to your socials.
25. Colorcinch
Colorcinch is an easy-to-use photo editor and graphic design tool that allows you to produce engaging visuals on the fly. It comes with hundreds of adjustable filters and cartoonizer effects. You can fine-tune photo details and make their colors pop. You can add texts and play around with its collection of stock photos, icons, masks & overlays to customize your designs. With Colorcinch, you can resize, enhance, and transform your images like a pro.
Most e-commerce businesses don’t manufacture the products they sell. They rely on various suppliers to source the items that end up in their customers’ hands. Sourcify helps you find the right manufacturers for your products. The platform connects you with multiple sourcing suppliers from around the world to streamline the bidding and shipping process.
Sourcify is dedicated to creating a simplified and stress-free sourcing experience for enterprise buyers and procurement teams. The goal is to help you increase your margins, have complete transparency with direct communication lines between the buyer and the manufacturers, and have a faster turnaround to keep up with today’s demand. Sourcify’s software facilitates a four-stage process:
Submit your project
Approve your sample
Start production
Receive your products.
2. Buyerquest
Buyerquest’s Procure-to-Pay tool is one simple connection that will transform your procurement operations. It offers locked-in discounts in contracts, an easy-to-use Marketplace, accuracy and speed in invoice processing, and spending tracking with robust business intelligence tools.
Quickly and simply search and browse for the products and services you need while viewing your budgets and controlling your spending in real time. Most importantly, Buyerquest will allow easy communication and collaboration with your suppliers and approve orders from anywhere.
3. Oracle Procurement Cloud
Modern procurement starts with standardising, streamlining, and automating the source-to-pay process. With Oracle Procurement Cloud, you can better track your procurement organization, helping to keep your costs under control. It also makes collaboration with your suppliers easy through document sharing and increased information accuracy for deeper insights. Procurement Cloud is a solution for businesses of any size for direct or indirect spending.
4. Tradeshift Buy
Tradeshift Buy helps simplify your procurement process, aiming to make it more like the way you buy everyday, while still providing more control and compliance. With Tradeshift Buy, you can simplify your management of all your products and services, creating a marketplace where your employees can shop.
Guide your employees to the right products and services from contracted and approved suppliers. You can also offer access to a public spot market to discover potential new suppliers, collaborate, and qualify sources of supply. You won’t have to deal with disconnected, difficult-to-maintain content anymore. Tradeshift Buy is easy for suppliers, and you get structured data that reduces free-form requests and delivers better real-time spend visibility.
5. Oracle NetSuite
Planning your supply chain is a dedicated process of trying to balance demand and supply, potentially across the globe, in a way that provides your company with the right combination of cost control, lead times, and service level. NetSuite uses advanced inventory management and demand planning techniques to help you make the right decisions and increase your on-time delivery metrics.
6. Da Vinci
Da Vinci is Wolin Design Group’s supply chain management (SCM) solution, and it can be either cloud based or on-premise. It’s designed specifically for small to midsize internet retailers and wholesale businesses with demanding warehouse, fulfillment and transportation needs. The tool is commonly used to manage a wide range of products, including apparel/footwear, household goods, electronics, dry and temperature-controlled food and beverage and pharmaceuticals.
Da Vinci has a wide range of features for various supply chain management needs, including barcode scanning, small parcel manifesting, pick and pack, wave processing, smart packing carbonization, reporting, yard management, LTL/FTL support, and more.
7. Oberlo
Looking to quickly source products to dropship to your Shopify store? Oberlo is a great tool that allows you to find products, add them to your Shopify store, and ship them directly to your customers. You can choose to connect your Shopify store directly to AliExpress or use Orberlo’s verified dropshipping suppliers.
8. Inventory Source
Avoid having to notify your customers that your products are out of stock. Inventory Source helps with your inventory management, automatically syncing my inventory, and updates your website accordingly. It also helps by integrating ordering and tracking functionalities.
Use Inventory Source to integrate your online store with over 100 drop shipping companies so I can quickly plug and play to track my inventory. Is your supplier not on the list? No worries, I can easily add it myself.
9. TradeGecko
Founded by a former clothing retailer, TradeGecko can help make the backend of your retail process easy. TradeGecko will help you tackle tasks like inventory management, order syncing, product bundling, and running reports. Get rid of the mountain of spreadsheets (and headaches that come with them) used to stay on top of inventory and avoid oversells using this solution.
10. Ships-a-lot
Ships-a-Lot is a state-of-the-art order fulfillment service. They partner with fast growing brands that need a highly dedicated service to outsource their order fulfilment. They provide fulfilment from everyone to high-volume or small e-commerce stores, to even crowdfunding fulfillment, with a special nod to Shopify stores.
As a certified Shopify Partner, Ships-a-Lot integrates beautifully with every aspect of Shopify’s powerful e-commerce platform. In fact, nearly 90% of Ships-a-Lot’s fulfillment clients are Shopify stores.
11. Fishbowl Warehouse
Fishbowl Warehouse is an affordable Inventory Management Solution for small and midsize businesses. It is mainly used for Inventory Management and offers advanced features to help your business manage multiple warehouses, track parts using a variety of criteria, set up auto-reorder points, generate barcodes, and a whole lot more.
Fishbowl Warehouse will help you: easily generate and print barcodes, automate the reordering process, quickly pick, pack and ship products, and track and receive shipments efficiently.
12. Mobe3
Mobe3 is a cloud-based warehouse management software for midsize and enterprise level warehouses. Main features include; an artificial intelligence layer that assess the processes of batch picking and task assigning; an intuitively designed interface that helps streamline everyday processes and maximises user experiences; and in-application inventory images to maximise accuracy and user experience.
13. Anchanto
Anchanto is an e-commerce warehouse management software for e-commerce sellers, brands, and warehousing & fulfillment service providers. It has become a solution for global players such as:
Nestle
L’OREAL
Luxasia
GreatDeals
Garnier
And many more
Businesses can use Anchanto e-commerce to manage operations such as warehousing, catalogue, pricing, logistics, shipping, etc. It’s ready to integrate with over 41 e-commerce marketplaces and platforms, and you have 24/7 access to inventory, orders and customer data.
14. Orderhive
Order management can be havoc, especially if you’re rapidly growing and increasing in orders exponentially. Orderhive is a cloud-based order management system designed for any business from SMEs to distributors. With Orderhive, you can track orders, inventory and shipments across all online sales channels as well as analyse team performance across functions and locate inventory in the warehouse.
What’s more, keep up-to-date with the system providing users with real-time updates about their business via a reporting and analytics feature. Orderhive also allows users to store customer information for future marketing use, build purchase orders, track inventory across warehouses, fulfill drop-shipping and 3PL orders, track raw materials required for products, and create invoices and track payments.
15. DataFeedWatch
DataFeedWatch is an all-in-one feed management solution for online merchants, retailers, and marketing agencies. DataFeedWatch helps you to deal with your product feeds on one centralized platform. DataFeedWatch processes millions of products per day meaning that no product catalog is too big and your feeds will always be up-to-date. They are integrated with over 2,000 Global eCommerce channels and marketplaces, including:
Google Shopping
Amazon and eBay
Facebook & Instagram
Pinterest
And many more
As well as shopping carts such as:
Shopify
WooCommerce
Magento
hift4Shop
BigCommerce
16. JungleScout
Want to start selling on Amazon? JungleScout is an e-commerce tool that can help you do just this. It can help with everything from product research to product launches and can help you plan your whole strategy from scratch. Use the app to filter millions of products to source the most in-demand products related to your niche.
You can even use this to identify products to sell on your own site and on Amazon. The tool will show you the average units sold per day and the average revenue, giving you a clear idea about your prospects and helping you decide which products to invest in.
17. SellerApp
Discover your best selling Amazon product with SellerApp’s Advanced Product Intelligence feature. Discover the highest potential, lowest competition products and niches. Get instant product data and insights, with in-depth product analysis, reliable data metrics and expert support to really hone the products you will sell in your Amazon business.
18. Sellics
An all-in-one software solution to help Amazon sellers increase organic traffic, automate PPC campaigns, track profits, and more. This tool works great for managing Seller Central, Seller Vendor, and for agencies administering to vendors and sellers.
19. eComEngine
EComEngine is an automation software for Amazon sellers. If you have an Amazon store or if you’re thinking of having one, you can use the following tools to manage your online store: FeedbackFive helps you increase your Amazon reputation with reviews.
Among other features, the tool automatically follows up with buyers to request feedback and reviews on your behalf. MarketScout allows you to do product research and provides you with FBA data that sellers need. RestockPro is an inventory management tool to help you manage your stock. These are just some of the highlights of each tool, but the best thing is that you have them all in one place.
20. Seller Dynamics
In our Advertising and Automation section, we mentioned a tool to help with feed management and PPC for multi-channel selling (Channable). Selling in multiple places can be chaotic, and it can be helpful to centralise all your operations in one place to ensure a smooth process. Seller Dynamic’s multi-channel software allows you to easily connect your store to all major marketplaces so you can manage it all from one place, meaning you never lose control.
Simply select the markets you sell on, set up your stock levels, and decide on your pricing and fulfillment options. Then, you can list your stock using Seller Dynamics across all your integrated markets and stores, easily managing pricing, sales, and stock levels automatically across all platforms to keep things simple and hassle-free.
21. Linnworks
Do you sell on Amazon, or any other marketplace? Or are you planning to? Managing several channels can be a headache when all your processes aren’t centralised and managed in one place. Linnworks allows you to take ownership of your business across multiple marketplaces and your store to minimise errors with automated multi-channel retailing.
You will have full knowledge of your stock levels across all platforms, ultimately reducing the occurrence of overselling while also eliminating the risk of human error that comes with manual inventory management. Linnworks will allow you to sell on multiple channels easily in significantly less time, with quick integration to hundreds of marketplaces, e-commerce platforms, and courier integrations.
22. Sellbrite
If you’re an online business, Sellbrite can help with multi-channel listing and inventory management. It’s a tool for merchants of all sizes that helps them list and sell products on multiple sales channels, control, and sync inventory, manage and fulfill orders, and access the multi-channel reporting intelligence needed to be successful.
23. ProfitGuru
If you’re selling on Amazon but struggling to calculate Amazon FBA Fees, ProfitGuru can be a highly beneficial tool to you. The free tool is designed to help Amazon sellers efficiently determine fees and profit for individual Amazon ASINs.
It’s especially useful for determining whether a product opportunity is worth pursuing before placing an order with a supplier. What’s more, The Amazon FBA calculator provides deep data for product research including price history, sales rank history, and estimated monthly sales.
24. Shipstation
Shipstation is a cloud-based centralized tool that offers APIs that can be integrated into your online business platforms. With the integration, you can allow sellers to operate from the user dashboard and conduct shipping operations from printing labels to batch shipping and much more. The eCommerce tool offers the best rates from leading logistics companies such as:
UPS
DHL
FedEx and more
Shipments are seamlessly managed with their scan and ship features. The solution also offers instant tracking details when orders are booked via its software, allowing eCommerce businesses to solve key pain points in shipping operations and give buyers pleasing shopping experiences.
25. Aftership
Aftership is also a cloud-based tool that offers API integration with your eCommerce website. It will allow you to offer your buyers real-time tracking of the shipment. This will also help improve the visibility of in-transit shipments for your operational convenience.
Just like Shipstation, Aftership also helps fetch real-time shipping rates when orders are being accepted with an estimated date of delivery at that time. In addition to these features, Aftership also assists in better return management in case buyers need it.
What’s the Best Ecommerce Tool to Use?
It depends on your unique situation. An ecommerce startup won’t have the same needs as a small business retailer that wants to expand online. There are ecommerce tools that are better for selling wholesale B2B products and other tools made for digital downloads. Every online shop has unique needs, and your ecommerce platform should reflect that. There are some native, out-of-the-box ecommerce tools and features that should come with your platform:
Hosting environment
Domain name
Year-over-year uptime
Bandwidth
An in-product ecommerce website builder with free, user-friendly site themes and drag-and-drop functionality:
Extensive app store with pre-built integrations and add-ons (e.g. social media, email marketing) with best-in-class service providers.
Mobile-optimized site or mobile app with a UX-friendly checkout.
PCI compliance visibility into your inventory management across all sales channels.
SEO tools and fully customizable URLs throughout the site (so you can rank on leading search engines).
Built-in basic ecommerce features including promotions and discounts, analytics, catalog management, etc.
Great customer support for abandoned cart recovery tools.
Ability to sell an unlimited number of products (e.g. digital or physical products).
In order to be competitive in the market, you’ll want to make sure you choose e-commerce software with advanced features that are native to the platform at no additional cost.
Ask the Right Questions Before Choosing Ecommerce Software
Like most steps you take in starting an online business, you’ll want to be prepared with a set of questions that will help you make the right decision for your store. You can connect with sales and support staff to get your burning questions answered, or test out features yourself by starting a free trial. Either way, make sure you go through the following ecommerce planning checklist for each platform you consider:
Ecommerce Platform Functionality
Checklist when evaluating solutions for your business, confirm the ecommerce platform:
It has everything you need, including drop-down menus or an editor.
It is easy to use, and most importantly, do you feel comfortable using it?
Offers a reliable hosting solution. That means no worries about your store crashing on high traffic days!
Offers incredible support at no extra cost.
Supports the type of products you want to sell (e.g., physical or digital products).
If the product has variations, how does the platform display all of these options?
How simple is that to manage?
Allows you to sell directly to customers on Facebook, eBay, Amazon, and Pinterest, without managing separate inventories.
Is optimized for mobile devices and allows you to easily customize it. Is equipped with industry-best SEO optimization, so you can rank highly on Google and drive more traffic to your store.
It offers integrations with additional applications and is built with open APIs. It is also built with advanced native functionality and UX features.
Offers resources (e.g. blog) to get educated on how to sell online and how to grow your business over time.
Some additional questions you may want to explore:
Is there a limit to the number of products you can sell?
Are there any transaction fees?
How do you manage inventory?
What payment options do you have (e.g. payment gateways like PayPal)?
How much do they cost?
What options can you offer for shipping?
What are your options for themes?
How customizable are those themes?
Even after you get the answers to these questions, make sure you take the ecommerce solution for a spin before signing up for a plan.
Compare the Cost of Platforms
Ecommerce platforms are not free. The services they offer combine the need for multiple technologies all in one:
Hosting
Checkout
Payments
PCI compliance
Fraud protection
DDoS attacks
Analytics and more
Each ecommerce platform organizes all of this on the backend for easy access. Ecommerce platform pricing models do differ and you must research your options. Pay special attention to what is included at each price point to make sure you capitalize on the most value for your spend.
Find the Right Design For Your Ecommerce Site
Your site’s design is a fundamental part of your business. It is your first foot forward with your consumers. And today’s consumers are used to excellent web design and UX. When starting up an online store, it’s important to find a theme or template that best represents your brand. There’s no need to have to learn advanced CSS or HTML coding.
Evaluating Themes for Customizability and Scalability
You’ll want to find a theme or template that is customizable enough for immediate differentiation at launch and for long-term growth overtime. Most platforms have paid and free themes. I recommended starting trials with your top ecommerce platform choices, uploading filler content to the backend, and then previewing your site on multiple themes to see what will work best for you. Look specifically for attention to device size, ease of use, customizability, and scalability over time. Need some design inspiration? Here are some of our favorite website designs.
Test Store Functionality and Ease of Use
When it comes to ease of use, you want to be able to do your job (typically marketing your brand) without having to learn a crazy amount of coding and greater technological knowledge. This means that the platform needs to be easy to navigate, set up properly, and use over time. Here are a few things to look for:
Setup Flow: Does the platform offer an easy setup flow, explaining everything you need to do before you launch, including loading in products, setting up taxes, domain name registration, payment processing and the like?
Product and SKU Management: Once you have the basics set up, bulk uploading products from CSV files is a much faster way to add products to your catalog. You'll also want to keep tabs on an unlimited product or SKU count. Be sure the platform you are on allows this, especially if you have a large or growing catalog.
One-Click App Marketplace: You’ll want a plethora of one-click apps or already built-in integrations to help you grow without having to hire developers. Use your platform’s app store to browse and integrate tools you want or need to use. It's essential to make sure these tools connect and update in real-time.
Centralized Channel Management: The current state of e-commerce thrives on omnichannel strategies. Whether you realize it or not, today’s customers are shopping everywhere and anywhere, including Instagram, Etsy, Facebook, Amazon, and so on, and it’s important that your product be exposed to your audience across various channels.
Once you launch and begin to see sales, you’ll likely want to expand pretty quickly into additional channels. With many ecommerce platforms, you’ll then be required to manage both your ecommerce site platform as well as the platform of any other channel. This can get confusing, and even get you kicked out of certain marketplaces for unintentionally breaking the rules. Look instead for a centralized channel management platform where you can push your product directly to those channels, manage price points and product descriptions, and more in one dashboard.
Plan for the Future: Scalability and Customization
Because you’ve planned your business so well, over time you will grow. And as you grow, you’ll need additional support from your ecommerce platform. What kind of support? Well, that is hard to predict. Every business is unique. That’s why many brands use APIs to customize and automate their stores based on their needs.
Businesses just starting out aren’t quite at this point, but it’s something you want to plan for if you intend to scale (and if you’re reading this, then you probably do). Plan well for this stepping stone and look for platforms with trusted and fast APIs. Ultimately, when considering your options you’ll want to make sure you’re thinking long term. Save yourself time and add more value by focusing your efforts on marketing and business-related objectives. Don’t let a lack of fast technology limit your success.
Sign Up for a Free Trial (no credit card required) to Our Shopify Sales Tracker to Find Your Next eCom Opportunity Today!
ShopHunter's Shopify sales tracker is a game changer for eCommerce store owners. At its core is a custom algorithm that estimates sales for both entire stores and specific products, helping users quickly validate product potential.
This platform goes beyond basic sales tracking, featuring an ad spy tool that monitors advertising activity across stores. This combination allows users to spot trending products and successful marketing strategies early on. Whether you're a dropshipper, a Shopify store owner, or someone looking to enter the eCommerce space, ShopHunter aims to streamline product research and reduce the risk of investing in low-performing items.
Sign up for a free trial (no credit card required) of our Shopify sales tracker tool to find your next eCom opportunity or to level up your current eCommerce store by learning from your competitors.