Whether you’re having an online business, bringing an offline brand into the online world, or are at the stage where your online presence leads to thousands of orders in a week or a month, the online selling or eCommerce platform your storefront is hosted on has a significant effect on your business.
An online selling or eCommerce platform helps manage a website, sales, marketing, and operations for any business that sells products or services—small, medium, or large. You can think of it as the center of your online business. At present, retail eCommerce sales are valued at USD$4.9 trillion globally.
Likewise, concerning having the correct choice of eCommerce platform, you must be aware that your eCommerce site will determine the following four things: running costs, objectives, growth, and customer engagement. That’s why choosing the ideal eCommerce platform for your business is crucial.
Overall, continue reading if you want to know more about how to choose the right one.
- It Should Cater To Your Needs
Settle your needs before you even begin to choose the right eCommerce platform. Knowing your requirements early on will make finding and selecting the right solution less complicated.
Start with a roadmap regarding your search. Define where your business is now and what direction you want it to take. What are the experiences and features that your site presently provides? Write them out and ensure the solution you choose has better potential. Next, think of your plans for the business. Are you deciding to broaden your business to more stores or markets? Do you want to bring in more fulfillment options? You want a platform that will allow your business to scale and become better.
Another ideal practice is to map your customer’s purchasing path. How will they notice you? How will they like their orders to be received? What channels will they utilize? The answer to these questions will allow you to recognize the features and capabilities you want in a platform.
Overall, you can read various resources online if you have an online business and want to know how to sell on Amazon US from Australia.
- It Should Be Secure
Your business must assure its customers that they can trust your eCommerce site to conduct transactions with you. And so, it’s vital to be aware of the security capabilities of an eCommerce platform. Here are the characteristics of two eCommerce solutions in terms of security:
Self-Hosted Solution: With a self-hosted solution, any mistakes with data security depend on you, even if security is a component of your self-hosted eCommerce package. Yet, with a hosted solution, the cloud-based provider is the person tasked with handling data security. However, this is done in exchange for having less control and possibly paying high transaction fees.
Non-Self Hosted Solution: On the contrary, those who don’t opt for the self-hosted solution must ensure that their site complies with Payment Card Industry (PCI). PCI requirements guarantee that any business that processes, stores, or sends credit card information has a protected environment. Some eCommerce platforms are PCI compliant from the beginning, while others aren’t.
- It Should Get Along With Everything You Use
Your customers will likely return to your online store if it’s user-friendly. That’s primarily the whole basic idea of how eCommerce works. Also, wherever your business has an online presence, it’s where you desire your products or services to be also.
Likewise, you must choose an eCommerce platform that gets along with all you use, including your social media and brick-and-mortar websites. Connecting all your social media, retail sales sites, and marketplaces should be accessible.
Know also that if you, as an eCommerce owner, want to go behind the scenes on your website to develop the perfect custom page, ensure the platform allows you to have the freedom needed for that process. Similarly, if you don’t want to deal with software, ensure that the templates your eCommerce website offers are something you love. Lastly, you should also remind yourself about analytics. Even if you’re unsure how it works, having the details about your clients can be helpful. Know if the store has analytics features to ensure you’re updated.
- It Should Offer The Best Customer Experience
How you offer your client the best experience will dictate the direction of your eCommerce business. One crucial factor that dictates client satisfaction is your eCommerce platform’s user experience(UX). A platform that’s intuitive and user-friendly improves customer engagement. So, it will assist you in attaining your objectives much better. That’s why you must know if your eCommerce platform’s UX aligns with your requirements.
Besides user-friendliness, client experience now greatly depends on a specific platform’s adaptability and flexibility. The platform you opt for should constantly adapt to the ever-changing trends without causing issues along the way.
Personalization has another crucial role in client experience. Your platform must be able to integrate machine learning tools and artificial intelligence to know various patterns regarding customer behaviors and then use this information to provide personalized services such as personalized ads.
- It Should Be Good For Search Engine Optimization
Selecting the ideal eCommerce platform solution will assist a business in running its operations with less difficulty and help with search engine optimization (SEO). Various eCommerce platforms have search engine features that assist businesses in getting noticed by prospective customers more quickly. Some of these search engine features consist of (but aren’t restricted to):
- Use of own domain name
- Independent H1 headings
- Independent image ALT tags
- Independent navigation links
- Integrated blog
- Product reviews
- 301 redirects
Likewise, when an eCommerce platform concentrates on SEO, the mobile-friendliness of a website is often one of its features. As many customers utilize their mobile devices to find out about the various products and services they want, your business can benefit from this by allowing your website to become mobile-friendly and optimized for search engines.
Wrapping Up
An eCommerce platform is at the core of your online business. That’s why choosing the right platform is crucial to ensure that your selling of products and services will be effective.
There are various ways of determining how to choose the right platform. You can start by knowing if it will cater to your business needs. Will it allow your business to scale and grow better, or is it otherwise? The second is to know if it’s secure. The two solutions have different characteristics regarding security for your customers, and you must decide which one is more ideal. Third, you should know if it can go along with everything you use.
Overall, consider the information above as your reference.