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If you are looking to scale your eCommerce business, you can only DIY it with manual and time-consuming solutions for so long.
Once the velocity of orders begins to pick up, you are going to need to invest in more tools to help you with marketing, reporting, customer support, shipping, and order fulfillment.
In fact, according to the eCommerce businesses we reached out to, 60% are using 6 or more eCommerce integrations.
In this guide, we’re taking a much closer look at some popular eCommerce tools that you can use to grow your store, including:
As you scale your business, you are going to need a range of marketing tools to inform and execute on your strategy.
“Ahrefs is our indispensable tool since we do a lot of SEO to get the site to rank naturally,” says Frederik Drost of Friluft.dk. “How is it helpful? It helps us assess why our competitors rank in Google and their strategy and budget to reach their positions in Google. It’s great for finding link opportunities, checking your competitors’ keywords and your own metrics as well.”
Related: Here’s How to Use Ahrefs for SEO (According to 97 Marketers)
“It allows a marketing expert to show highly targeted ads based on each individual person’s customer journey,” says Brenton Thomas of Twibi. “As a result, I’ve been able to show specific ads to someone who just viewed a specific product vs someone who viewed their cart. By personalizing the ads I’ve seen as high as a 15:1 Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) for my clients, mostly made up of prospect traffic.
Jessica Campos of Marketing for Greatness adds, “Ever since we set up the Facebook Attribution tool, our metrics were much cleaner! This tool helped us see the full journey of our target audience. We were able to help our eCommerce clients grow exponentially while saving up to 45% in ads budget.” Also, track key parts of your online store’s PPC campaign in one place with this paid ads ecommerce dashboard.
“Honeycomb Upsell Funnels,” says Tori Farley of Better Than Belts. “An additional $1,685 in revenue since we launched 11/25/2020. 11% of customers have upsold one or more additional products. Has increased our average order value by 14%.”
“Klaviyo is a flexible eCommerce email service and at first may not seem like the most obvious tool for growth,” says Adam Bastock of Abastock. “However, the flexibility it offers with its automation has been a huge help in both marketing products to potential customers, but also empathizing and handling objections at the right time in our customers’ journey – both pre and post-sale.
Rather than simply selling, we’ve reduced the number of questions customer support receive by sending a series of emails to new sign-ups before they need to ask. Over several weeks they receive information about the product they have looked at, with information on technical details, delivery options, service, and product features. This welcome journey has seen consistently high open and click-rates across all campaigns.
This has been achieved across multiple product ranges (each customized and unique) which has meant the main questions being sent to sales are much further down the funnel – and usually unique to the customer’s situation.
Our sales team can therefore focus their time and efforts on high-quality leads who are ready to buy, and the normal objections have been handled already.
There’s plenty of advice out there on how to use automation to sell more – but we have found that focusing on educating customers instead has been much more successful. Ultimately there was no hack or trick that we have used to achieve this growth – but instead listened to our customers and aligned our marketing to be empathetic rather than full-on sales based.”
Another popular email marketing software for eCommerce companies is MailChimp.
Matt Tudge of WDA says, “For us, it has to be MailChimp to send automated e-commerce abandonment emails for our clients.”
“Moz is helpful in gaining insight to what keywords online shoppers are using to search for products in the category or niche market we sell in,” says Opal Hurteau of Sunvixen. “Using Moz, we have been able to use targeted search terms in product descriptions and blog posts to help direct traffic to our business online. Moz is also helpful for doing research on what domains are linking to our online competitors as well as what keywords the competition is ranking for. This competitive analysis gives us value information about how to build our business in a way that allows customers of our competitors to find us.”
“I have been managing and building eCommerce websites for more than 8 years and if I have to narrow it down to the ONE tool that has been proven the most valuable is Omnisend,” says Filippo Decotto of Ploumanac’h. “Email marketing is essential for eCommerce websites, it is one of the most powerful converting tools that allow every eCommerce owner to make the most out of their website.
Their beautiful and easy-to-use interface makes creating campaigns a breeze, but what is even more powerful is their ready-to-use automation batches that make the implementation extremely smooth.”
To improve the performance of your online store, it’s vital to have access to useful and actionable data. But, with so many metrics available to track, it may be hard to determine which ones will actually help you move the needle.
That’s why we have created a concise dashboard template that only tracks the most important metrics for analyzing the core elements of your ecommerce businesses, such as:
And more…
Now you can benefit from the experience of our Google Analytics 4 experts, who have put together a plug-and-play Databox template showing the most important KPIs for monitoring your online store’s performance. It’s simple to implement and start using as a standalone dashboard or in ecommerce reports, and best of all, it’s free!
You can easily set it up in just a few clicks – no coding required.
To set up the dashboard, follow these 3 simple steps:
Step 1: Get the template
Step 2: Connect your Google Analytics 4 account with Databox.
Step 3: Watch your dashboard populate in seconds.
“The Proof social proof extension and WordPress plugin is an awesome way to automate social proof in real time,” says John Donnachie of ClydeBank Media. “The service shows a corner pop-in with a brief ‘John Smith in Springfield just purchased a widget’ pulled from your actual orders and actual inventory. We love that it is accurate, lightweight, and can be customized to not only provide social proof for product and checkout pages in our ecommerce store but can be used to encourage signups on opt-in pages as well.”
“Retainful is helpful because they offer the ability to save someone’s cart if they abandon their shopping experience,” says Charlie Worrall of Imaginaire. “This means that if and when they ever come back to the site in the future, the products that they were going to purchase are still there. By offering these products straight away when they next arrive, the user is much more likely to keep them in their cart and purchase them with the other products that they find this time around.”
“SEMRush allows us to step up our SEO game, and that has proven to be critical for success in an online store,” says Melanie Musson of SFAutoGuard.com. “We use it to compare what we’re doing with what our competition is doing and identify how we can emphasize and use our strengths to draw customers.”
Jennifer Neylon of My Supplement Store adds, ”The one ecommerce tool that I, as a digital marketer, value the most for growth is SEMrush. The reason that I select SEMrush for the one most important tool is because I feel that it really is indispensable for tracking growth and data, and is the most useful out of similar programs. SEMrush is helpful because it delivers all of the marketing information my team needs in one place, rather than having to pull from multiple different sources. We use SEMrush on a daily basis to track sales, trending products and our competition.”
Related: The 25 Most Powerful SEMrush Features for Improving Your Search Rankings
“One indispensable eCommerce tool for the growth of my online store is the Snov.io Email Tracker extension,” says Evian Gutman of Ringcommend. “It allows me to gain additional insights with my leads to see if they have seen any email correspondence I have sent or clicked on any links in that correspondence.
In this way, I have a much better understanding of how to advance the sales process and the best times to follow up on any live opportunities.”
Whether you are looking for data to inform your marketing strategy, pulling product sales and revenue numbers for your accountant, or doing cash flow forecasting, you are going to need ecommerce reporting software, like Quickbooks, Google Analytics, and Databox. ?
“I value data-driven insights and have found time and time again that Google Analytics is the best (free) tool around to provide a massive level of data for making business decisions,” says Kaleb Ufton of EKOH Marketing. “From changing copy to fit demographics to understanding the buyer’s journey through the purchasing process, and even troubleshooting I always go and look at GA first.”
Related: 13 Advanced Google Analytics Metrics & Hacks for Measuring Your Marketing Campaigns
Customer support and loyalty tools handle everything from helping you to reply to customers in a timely fashion to collecting customer feedback and reviews.
“Memalia has helped us to stay on top of feedback from our customers and resolve customer service issues quickly and painlessly,” says Rick Hoskins of Filter King. “As a CEO, I appreciate how Memalia allows me to easily stay up to date on all customer service emails from my private email account and from any device, including my phone when I’m on the go.
Staying current on conversations between my customers and my team helps me to make informed business decisions based on real data, not just assumptions.
And my team loves how the app allows them to collaborate with each other when solving complex customer service problems.
Empowering my team to respond to customer feedback collaboratively and expeditiously has helped improve employee morale and customer loyalty.
Using Memalia has been a true win-win.”
“Yotpo allows you to set an automated email to be delivered to customers X-days after the sale, asking them to review the product they purchased,” says Scott Penick of Soul ShāXe. “The reviews are automatically added to the product pages on our website once we approve them. Other than responding to reviews, it is a real “set it and forget it” tool that has worked flawlessly so far. Customer support is fantastic, too.”
Whether you are dropshipping or selling across multiple platforms, such as your own website, Amazon, Walmart, and more, you are going to need third-party tools that can manage it all, including:
“For me, personally operating two 7-figure eCommerce businesses, the key to growth has been around having a solid foundation to build off – and in this case that’s clean product data,” says Elliott Davidson of Contrast. “Using an ERP like Brightpearl means you can have all of your data in one place. And making sure that it’s clean makes scaling a lot easier than you think (until you ever have to deal with the opposite situation).
You’ll be able to mass list products in an omnichannel approach, opening up new sales channels overnight, all of which helps you to scale quickly and grow your online revenue.
On top of that, you’ll be able to make more commercial decisions through data reports by keeping an eye on KPIs, making you a better business leader. Rather than being reactive and having to deal with things on the fly as they happen down the line, you can get ahead of this by being more strategic.”
“Using Oberlo has been helpful in many different ways,” says Julien Raby of ThermoGears. “One advantage is that you don’t need to manage or hold an inventory for your goods. It minimizes so many operations for you. All you need to do is identify the products you want to be listed on your eCommerce store, and Oberlo handles all the minor details. Oberlo’s dropshipping service is very reliable as they understand how one user’s bad experience can be costly for you.
I refer to Oberlo as indispensable because it brings you a list of verified suppliers only. You don’t have to try out suppliers before identifying whether they are reliable or not; it saves a lot of time for any eCommerce store owner.
These verified suppliers make sure your order is delivered on time, and the customer gets the support they desire. After using it for some time, you stop worrying about the orders and positively start relying on Oberlo’s services.”
“I run an eCommerce & affiliate marketing blog and have 2 dropshipping stores where I source products from both AliExpress and other vendors,” says Drew Mann of Drew’s Review. “The two tools I use to find suppliers who will dropship for me are SellTheTrend and Salehoo. Both of these have been instrumental in finding products that are located in North America rather than having to dropship from China. The advantage here is less lead time and lower customer frustration.”
In sum, these 17 eCommerce tools can help you scale your business. As your revenue and team grows, leveraging tools as mentioned above or centralised dashboards like these free ecommerce dashboard examples to track and manage processes – like shipping and fulfillment, marketing, data, and customer support can go a long way.
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At Databox, we’re obsessed with helping companies more easily monitor, analyze, and report their results. Whether it’s the resources we put into building and maintaining integrations with 100+ popular marketing tools, enabling customizability of charts, dashboards, and reports, or building functionality to make analysis, benchmarking, and forecasting easier, we’re constantly trying to find ways to help our customers save time and deliver better results.
Jessica Malnik is a content strategist and copywriter for SaaS and productized service businesses. Her writing has appeared on The Next Web, Social Media Examiner, SEMRush, CMX, Help Scout, Convince & Convert, and many other sites.
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