The Internet is a fast moving place, constantly changing and shifting to incorporate new technologies and ideas. eCommerce is of course subject to the exact same forces and keeping up with the momentum is a full-time job for developers of platforms, extensions, apps, and services alike.
However, a business naturally wants to avoid spending where it doesn’t have to and your choice of eCommerce platform may not have kept up with all the requirements of the modern age. We’re going to talk about a few things here that your platform absolutely must be offering you in 2020.
More than ever, online retail customers are relying on their mobile device for their access to online services, with mobile device usage growing 504% since 2011 . Many people do not even use a desktop or laptop for their browsing, in fact, one estimate suggests 75% of Internet users will be mobile only by 2025 .
All this adds up to a compelling reason to provide access to Paypal, Apple Pay, Google Pay and other mobile friendly, secure and fast payment services for your customers. These are available either natively or through payment processors such as Braintree or Stripe .
Administration of an online store can very quickly build up. Hand adding each individual product and its variants is a great way of using up all the time you had allocated for merchandising, marketing and other business activities.
Your modern Ecommerce platform will have one or more ways to speed up the process of product creation. For instance, a built in product editor that takes all the labour out of creating variants for an item, or an import/export feature that means a retailer can amend all items on a single spreadsheet, then re-upload to alter hundreds or thousands of products at once.
Both platforms have a multitude of product creation tools either available natively, or via their respective app stores.
You’ve taken the design of your website seriously, and invested time and money into a high performing, beautiful web store, but that doesn’t mean the task of presenting your best offers is complete. Continual efforts by your marketers to increase traffic, conversions or turnover will doubtless require many incremental changes to optimise the look and function of your site.
This is only possible if you or your team are free to act, and your platform should be offering you content and page building tools to assist you. Easy product creation, adding of variants, and intuitive ways to adjust your content and layout are expected, as well as intelligent tools to help you show the right products to the right customers, at the right time!
It would be a tall task indeed for any one developer to predict the needs of the entire online-retailer sphere in one go. As such, we should expect eCommerce platforms to have some blindspots when it comes to addressing the needs of your business.
This is where an established support, community and marketplace come into play. Shopify has the Shopify app store (we touch on this in the article “How Much Does Shopify Cost Each Month?”) within which you can browse through thousands of pre-vetted, approved by Shopify Apps that all aim to hit one or another niche. The same is true of Magento; the Magento Marketplace hosts thousands of apps by hundreds of developers, all of which have to comply with strict quality and security safeguards.
The best customers to reach out to are those who have already shown a distinct interest in your products. Abandoned basket emails let you remind potential customers of the items that were tempting them in the first place. Did they lose connection? Did they get interrupted? Are they just unsure if they need this particular item right now? Polarising this decision making by following up with an email is a proven and powerful tool.
Your platform needs to be able to handle these emails for you or at least have readily available add-ons and extensions to target this ready-to-buy group of potential customers.
We have guides to setting up abandoned baskets in Shopify and in Magento with added Mailchimp functions .
This is just a brief list of some of the most important features to consider in your hunt for your first or latest eCommerce platform. With our 20 years of eCommerce experience, and our roots in retail, magic42 can help you pick the right platform for your business, as well as getting you up and running, fast.
Contact us to speak with one of our qualified eCommerce Specialists and we can help you get your first, or millionth, sale.
