Why eCommerce features and integration are important for your online businesses?

Well, a webstore has got various processes and components that an eCommerce solution streamlines via easy interface where a regular business user can work on. Hence, future upgrades depends on the flexibility of eCommerce platforms to integrate on other solutions like CMS, ERP, CRM, email marketing solutions, payment gateways, social media tools, accounting solutions etc.

As you are aware, the eCommerce industry is massive! eMarketer predicts eCommerce business to drive in sales worth $4 trillion by the year 2020. Hypermarkets and Supermarkets are losing its popularity these days as users prefer to buy online. For the very first time, 51% of the shoppers prefer online platforms rather than going with traditional shopping means. Certainly, thanks to the growth in eCommerce sector that has boosted the growth in eCommerce solutions as lot of businesses are setting up online stores or collaborating with 3rd party providers to take advantage of their brands online.

Typical features for your E-commerce Software to kick start your business!

For your eCommerce platform to function smoothly, you will need the below components:

Web Hosting

Most of the eCommerce solutions offer web services as default for hosting your webstore with all the necessary features to go with it. As a result, it is important to have a good online store which is easily accessible, having a great bandwidth (handling larger web traffic) and faster load time.

Catalog

This is the key for any eCommerce business. Your online customers are going to view and learn about the products that you have put for sale. Compared to a printed catalog, it is made up of pages, products and information where your customers can browse. It is very important to have a flashy and attractive designs to capture your customers in addition to adding value to your brand and organization.

Shopping Cart

From our experience with customers, having glitches with your shopping cart is going to be a nightmare. Never ever comprimise on the final checkout area page as this is where customers think twice before making a purchase. Also, If things go wrong here, its more like having a department store with nobody walking in! Different payment options needs to be enabled for smooth payment transactions.

Also, marketing solutions these days are integrated with the shopping carts, so reminder emails can be sent to the customers that has atleast 30% chances of converting a sale from an abandoned sale. It needs to work smoothly and optimally.

Vendor Interface

As an eCommerce business provider, it is equally important to setup Vendor Dashboard/Interface along with Customer and Administrator Dashboards/Interface. Similarly, please note that the vendor user interface needs to be flexible, robust and definitely, customizable. You don’t have the luxury to keep training your vendors and instead, that time can be saved for something else.

Inventory Management

Along with payment processing areas, inventory management is equally important in a webstore. This needs to be updated live as you might expect thousands of customers making transactions in seconds. eCommerce businesses hire a lot of personnel just to manage inventories. However, for smaller businesses, hiring lot of employees is going to be a cost overhead. Solutions such as x2x eCommerce helps you integrate their tools with your top-notch eCommerce platform for automating inventory management areas, that will eventually cut employee overheads.

Order acceptance and logistics

You will have to deal with various 3rd party logistics providers to ship your items to different locations ensuring faster delivery. Your eCommerce platform should support these functionalities ensuring smooth handling of logistics and order fulfillment. SMS services used for efficient tracking of shipments for both employees and customers are perfect for a webstore. Having an integrated tool like x2x eCommerce will help you manage your webstore from end to end seamlessly.