Ecommerce management

What do these tools do?

They provide a platform for online retailers to sell their products and services online; they create a ‘digital store front’ to enable products in different categories to be search, browsed and purchased.

Why are they important to digital marketers?

To maximise conversion, an online shopping experience needs to be simple and easy for the user, secure at the point of payment and robust so as to deal with both high volumes of product and traffic. E-commerce management tools were designed for this specific purpose and have a number of features that other platforms (i.e. a generic content management system) do not.

Key things to consider before purchasing and using these tools:

þ Implementation and running costs. There are (often large) costs associated with development, maintenance and migration from these tools. Be clear on these up front. Also, understand the programming language (Java, PHP and .net are the most common) of each solution and their impact on future costs and your internal/agency resource.

þ Scalability. It’s important that a clear development pipeline is in place to ensure the right platform is chosen, therefore future proofing (as far as possible) for additional requirements. A steering committee should help with this.

þ How will you host your e-commerce platform? Cloud based services offer flexibility and require less up front investment. Physical on-site hosting provides a greater degree of control over your data and its privacy.

20.1 Magento

Free with the Community Edition

Free demo’s available on various options

Why do I need it? Magento Commerce is the leading provider of open omnichannel innovation.

What makes it stand out? Used by over 20% of the worlds websites, this detailed ecommerce platform is built for people with professional web development experience, usually tending to Medium to Large sized organisations

Key features þ SEO

þ Marketing, promotions and conversions

þ Site management þ Catalog management þ Catalog browsing þ Product browsing

þ Checkout, payment and shipping

þ Order management

þ Customer service

20.2 Woothemes

Some free themes and extensions available Paid options are also available

Why do I need it? WooThemes is a provider of high quality WordPress themes,

What makes it stand out? One of the plugins WooCommerce, offers some powerful shop faciliities to your website, powering 30% of all online shops. It’s great for both, developers and store owners, due to it’s ease of use.

Key features þ Payment Gateways included as it Woocommerce comes bundled with myriad of payment options

þ Easy to configure shipping options

þ Automatic tax calculations

þ Tracking stock levels and shipments

þ Integration of various extensions to build your own databases

þ Onetime payment

The Smart Insights view Recommended Tool

WooThemes and the WooCommerce plugin are a great alternative to Magento, granted it isn’t quite as powerful as Magento. But for the non-web developer, the seamless cohesion with WordPress makes it hard to ignore. Certainly the best option, if you’re looking for any easy way and cheap way to implement

20.3 Shopify

14 Day Free Trail available

Monthly payments ranging from $9 - $179 depending on what you’re looking for

Why do I need it? It has almost everything you need, to run your own ecommerce store, with something for everyone. From if you’re planning to run your store fully online or from a brick and mortar.

What makes it stand out? They have one of the most extensive and thought-out dashboards of any

ecommerce platform and as previously mentioned, have something for everyone. From POS software for iPads to Content Management Systems for your site. It has free and paid for options for all

Key features þ Ease of use

þ Lots of integrations

þ Wide range of professional looking themes, both free and paid

20.4 Prestashop

Free

Why do I need it? PrestaShop is an opensource shopping cart, that provides everything you need to get started with an ecommerce venture

What makes it stand out? It’s completely free to set up and open source, and offers a tremendous amount of templates to modify the look of your site. It’s main benefit is the amount of data you can pull out of Prestashop.

Key features þ Solid SEO

þ Easy to navigate add-ons

þ Mobile Compatability þ Detailed Statistics þ Free to set up

The Smart Insights view Top 5 Tool

A great platform to use if you’re looking to start up an ecommerce site and love getting your teeth into the nitty gritty of data. Watching your net profit margins raise in real time would really spur you to get the most out of your site. This is what sets it apart from the competitors.

The only negative about prestashop is to be careful if you’re a small merchant selling a couple dozen to a couple hundred items online, it’s easy to see how developer fees, extra support, add-ons, hosting, and processing fees would quickly end up costing

20.5 Actinic

Free Trail

Paid options available

Why do I need it? A shopping cart software has effective and useful administrative tools to manage every aspect of your eCommerce website.

What makes it stand out? It’s standout feature is the web-design features and an administrative dashboard with great functionality.

Key features þ Great graphic design

þ Simplified stock and order management

The Smart Insights view Top 5 Tool

If the other tools don’t suit your needs, Actinic does the key things very well and has some of the best designs. However, it lacks some of the more common