The eCommerce industry has seen tremendous growth, offering entrepreneurs both opportunities and challenges. The rapid surge in online shopping, influenced by changing consumer preferences and global events, has forced businesses to adapt quickly. With this transformation comes increased competition, emphasizing the importance of companies utilizing eCommerce tools effectively.
Aloa, a trusted managed service provider, is dedicated to supporting businesses and startups in overcoming these challenges. With a wide range of eCommerce tools, including user-friendly website templates and streamlined shipping solutions, Aloa provides comprehensive support for online businesses.
Their team of experts specializes in marketing strategies, eCommerce analytics, and inventory management, empowering businesses to maximize the potential of their online stores. By seamlessly integrating with popular platforms, Aloa enhances the visibility and performance of eCommerce websites.
Throughout this article, we will explore the top eCommerce tools that are essential for modern businesses. Our discussion will include eCommerce marketing tools, inventory management solutions, and customer service applications.
Whether you're a small business owner or responsible for managing a large eCommerce store, this guide aims to assist you in selecting the appropriate tools to enhance your online presence, streamline operations, and provide an exceptional customer experience.
Let's dive in!
7 Best Ecommerce Tools for Businesses and Startups in 2023
The rapid rise of eCommerce tools directly links to the high demand for businesses to establish online shops for their customers, allowing startups and businesses to thrive in eCommerce. Here, we've curated a list of eCommerce tools for 2023, each offering unique features to boost your online presence and sales.
In today's fast-paced digital landscape, businesses and startups need the right tools to thrive in eCommerce. We've curated a list of the seven best eCommerce tools for 2023, each offering unique features to boost your business's online presence and sales.
1. BigCommerce - Best for Building Enterprise Commerce Websites
BigCommerce is a versatile ecommerce platform that stands out from the competition due to its roots as a content management system (CMS). Unlike other ecommerce tools, BigCommerce seamlessly combines the functionality of a CMS with powerful ecommerce capabilities. This unique blend of features makes it an ideal choice for businesses building enterprise-level commerce websites.
One of BigCommerce's strengths lies in its extensive range of integrations, allowing businesses to expand their eCommerce capabilities effortlessly. BigCommerce integrates with popular payment gateways, social media platforms, and marketing tools like Mailchimp.
Notable Features of BigCommerce
- No limits on product variants: BigCommerce allows you to offer a wide range of product variants without restrictions, providing flexibility in your product offerings.
- Easy to scale: Whether you're a small business or a large enterprise, BigCommerce offers the scalability to grow with your business's needs.
- No transaction fees: Unlike some other platforms, BigCommerce doesn't impose additional transaction fees on top of payment processing fees.
- SEO features: BigCommerce offers robust SEO features to help improve your store's visibility in search engine results, enhancing your online presence.
- Unlimited Products: BigCommerce's capability to manage an unlimited number of products and detailed attribute management makes it a standout choice for businesses with extensive product catalogs.
BigCommerce Price Plans
BigCommerce offers flexible pricing plans to suit various business needs:
- Standard ($29/mo): Ideal for startups and small businesses, offering unlimited products, real-time shipping quotes, and 24/7 live agent support.
- Plus ($79/mo): Suitable for growing businesses with features like abandoned cart recovery, stored credit cards, and lower PayPal transaction fees.
- Pro ($299/mo): Designed for larger businesses, with advanced features like Google Customer Reviews, custom SSL, and even lower PayPal transaction fees.
2. EngageBay - Best for Customer Acquisition and Sales Management
EngageBay is a complete software solution that empowers businesses with CRM, marketing automation, helpdesk, and live chat capabilities. Unlike other platforms that may require complicated integrations or separate subscriptions, EngageBay offers a unified experience. This means users can effortlessly manage customer relationships, drive sales, and address support issues all from one convenient dashboard.
EngageBay offers a wide range of integration options to enhance its versatility. With seamless integration capabilities, it can connect with various external tools and platforms, including Stripe, Zapier, Xero, QuickBooks, and RingCentral. This lets you integrate payment processing, accounting, and communication tools with EngageBay effortlessly.
By streamlining your workflow and improving efficiency, these integrations support your eCommerce website management, email marketing campaigns, and customer inquiries. With EngageBay's flexible integrations, you can quickly adapt to the specific needs of your business.
Notable Features of EngageBay
- Email Marketing: EngageBay offers a drag-and-drop email builder with customizable templates, making designing and sending engaging emails easy. It also provides analytics to track email performance.
- Segmentation: You can precisely target your audience by applying various filters, improving the relevance of your marketing efforts.
- Marketing Automation: Automate tasks, workflows, and lead nurturing to save time and increase efficiency in your marketing campaigns.
- Landing Page Builder: Create attractive, high-converting landing pages with A/B testing and SEO optimization.
- Live Chat: Engage with website visitors in real-time, providing immediate support and enhancing customer experience.
EngageBay Price Plans
EngageBay offers a range of pricing options to suit different business sizes and needs:
- Free: Basic access with limited features.
- Basic: $14.99/user/month (billed annually) with expanded features.
- Growth: $49.99/user/month (billed annually) for more advanced capabilities.
- Pro: $79.99/user/month (billed annually) with the most comprehensive features.
3. Chargebee - Best for Ecommerce with Subscription-Based Billing
Chargebee is a robust platform that helps businesses manage their subscriptions more efficiently. With Chargebee, you can streamline your billing processes, automate subscription management tasks, and gain valuable insights through comprehensive analytics. It also offers additional features like add-ons and gift subscriptions, making it versatile for various eCommerce needs.
Chargebee operates globally in over 30 countries and provides a range of plans to choose from. You can even get started with a free plan for up to 3 users or take advantage of the 14-day trial of its full-featured paid plan to experience all the benefits it offers.
Chargebee stands out with its impressive integration capabilities. It seamlessly connects with leading payment gateways such as PayPal and Stripe, as well as popular eCommerce platforms like BigCommerce and Shopify Plus. This broad range of integrations enables eCommerce managers to effortlessly synchronize subscription orders with customer data and seamlessly integrate them into their customer support systems. As a result, not only are operations streamlined, but the overall customer experience is greatly enhanced.
Notable Features of Chargebee
- Automated Billing: Chargebee supports 480+ recurring billing cases, ensuring businesses can adapt to changing payment preferences, trends, and tools. It enables automatic subscriptions, free trial periods, feature mapping, and unique monetization models tailored to specific product specifications.
- Flexible Architecture: With Chargebee's flexible architecture, businesses can build efficient workflows and ensure future-proofing for their eCommerce revenue operations.
- Analytics: Detailed analytics provide valuable insights into billing and subscription data, helping businesses make informed decisions and optimize revenue operations.
- Multi-Currency Support: Chargebee supports multiple currencies, catering to businesses with a global presence.
Chargebee Price Plans
Chargebee offers different pricing plans to suit the needs of various businesses:
- Starter: Ideal for ambitious companies looking to launch a subscription model, with pricing based on billing volume.
- Performance: Designed for scaling companies optimizing their revenue operations with additional features.
- Enterprise: Tailored for leading companies seeking continued growth through customization and advanced capabilities.
4. Veeqo - Best Inventory Management Platform
Veeqo is a robust inventory management platform designed explicitly for eCommerce businesses. It seamlessly handles multiple online stores with different products and requirements. One of its key strengths is order management, allowing businesses to handle shipments and process returns efficiently.
Additionally, Veeqo offers automation capabilities for order workflows based on triggers like weight, value, or product type. This enables sending receipts, follow-up messages, and upsell recommendations. Another standout feature is the unified tracking of orders from various sales channels, providing real-time insights into inventory replenishment needs. Veeqo simplifies reporting by enabling easy analysis of sales figures and fulfillment reports.
Veeqo's versatility is enhanced by its integration capabilities. The platform seamlessly integrates with various external tools and platforms, such as HubSpot, Asana, DotDigital, Salesforce, Campaign Monitor, Mailchimp, and more. These integrations extend Veeqo's functionality and allow businesses to streamline operations and improve customer management. Whether you need to synchronize your inventory, automate marketing campaigns, or manage customer support, Veeqo's integrations offer the flexibility to meet your eCommerce needs.
Notable Features of Veeqo
- Inventory Tracking: Veeqo allows businesses to track and manage inventory across multiple warehouses efficiently, optimizing supply placement in high-traffic areas.
- Order Management: With robust order management features, Veeqo simplifies the handling of shipments, returns, and order workflows, making the process more efficient.
- Unified Sales Tracking: Veeqo enables businesses to unify and synchronize orders and inventory from different sales channels, providing a comprehensive view of sales performance.
- Shipping Tools: The platform offers shipping tools for bulk label printing, order shipping, and tracking, all within one program.
- Reporting and Analytics: Veeqo provides easy-to-use reporting and data visualization features, helping businesses analyze sales figures and fulfillment reports to make informed decisions.
Veeqo Price Plans
Veeqo offers a transparent pricing model with its "completely free" option for users. Here's a comparison with other eCommerce tools:
- Veeqo: Unlimited shipments and users for free.
- ShipStation: 7,500 monthly shipments with ten users for $229.99 per month.
- ShipHero: Unlimited monthly shipments with five users for $1,995.
- SKULabs: 50,000 monthly shipments with five users for $1,999.
5. Funnel - Best for Omnichannel Marketing Data Analytics
Funnel Funnel is a powerful tool for collecting marketing and sales data. It gathers data from different channels and brings it all into one central location, making it easy to analyze. With Funnel, businesses can calculate conversion rates and ROI by combining sales and advertising data.
The software also makes transferring the data to reporting tools simple, allowing users to generate clear and informative reports. One standout feature of Funnel is its ability to store data for up to two years, ensuring that historical information is readily available for comparison and reporting needs.
Funnel stands out with its wide range of integrations, allowing smooth connectivity with various essential platforms. This includes Google BigQuery, Amazon Redshift, Google Data Studio, Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics, Facebook Ads, Shopify, and more. These integrations give users the power to leverage data from multiple sources, making Funnel a comprehensive solution for omnichannel marketing data analytics.
Notable Features of Funnel
- Analytics and Conversion Tracking: Funnel offers powerful analytics tools and conversion tracking capabilities, enabling businesses to gain valuable insights into their marketing efforts.
- Dashboards and Data Visualizations: Users can create interactive and visually compelling data representations for more effective data-driven decision-making.
- Multi-User Collaboration: Funnel supports multi-user functionality, facilitating team collaboration in analyzing and interpreting marketing data.
- Forecasting: The software provides forecasting capabilities, helping businesses anticipate trends and make informed marketing strategies.
- Referral Tracking: Funnel includes referral tracking features, allowing users to monitor the sources of their website traffic and conversions.
Funnel Price Plans
Funnel offers a range of pricing plans tailored to different business needs:
- Free Plan: Ideal for those starting their journey into data-driven marketing, it provides access to core connectors with a maximum capacity of 350 flex points.
- Starter Plan: Geared towards smaller deployments, this plan starts at $400 per month (billed annually) and offers 700 flex points with core connectors.
- Business Plan: For robust business intelligence and connectivity, starting at $1100 per month (billed annually), this plan provides 1000 flex points, core connectors, and additional destination options.
- Enterprise Plan: Designed for large-scale organizations, it offers advanced features such as personalized onboarding, advanced setup, Single Sign-On, data region choice, and more. Pricing is available upon consultation with the sales team.
6. Brevo - Best for Streamlining Marketing Campaigns
Brevo is a versatile business marketing platform that provides a comprehensive solution for all your digital marketing needs. Unlike other eCommerce tools, Brevo goes beyond just email and SMS marketing. It offers a complete toolkit for CRM (Customer Relationship Management), marketing automation, transactional emails, and precise audience segmentation.
Brevo creates highly targeted landing pages, improving the overall visitor experience. The platform provides in-depth insights through open and click-through reports, an email heatmap, A/B testing, and real-time statistics.
One standout feature of Brevo is its seamless integration with multiple channels, which allows marketing campaigns to reach audiences across various platforms. It offers support for email, SMS, chat, and WhatsApp, giving businesses the flexibility they need in their marketing strategies. Moreover, Brevo streamlines the advertising process by enabling users to launch directly and oversee Facebook ads from within the platform.
Notable Features of Brevo
- Automation Capabilities: Brevo offers advanced automation features, including automated greetings and messages, streamlining customer communication.
- Advanced Segmentation: The platform provides robust audience segmentation tools, allowing businesses to target specific customer groups with tailored content.
- Chatbots and Automated Responses: Brevo incorporates chatbots and automated responses to frequently asked questions (FAQs), enhancing customer support and engagement.
- Drag-and-Drop Email Editor: Users benefit from an intuitive drag-and-drop email editor, simplifying the creation of visually appealing and effective marketing emails.
- Customizable Deal Pipelines: Brevo facilitates the customization of deal pipelines, empowering businesses to manage their sales processes efficiently.
Brevo Price Plans
Brevo offers a range of pricing plans to accommodate diverse business needs:
- Free Plan: Ideal for those starting, Brevo offers a free plan that provides primary access to its marketing platform.
- Starter Plan: The Marketing Platform product starts at $25 per month. However, it's important to note that each product within Brevo's suite may have different pricing plans. Additionally, Brevo offers customization options for tailored plans based on specific requirements.
7. Omnisend - Best for Ecommerce Marketing Automation
Omnisend is a leading email marketing automation tool tailored for the ecommerce sector. Unlike general website builders like Wix, Omnisend has been uniquely designed to cater to high-growth ecommerce businesses, providing a platform that integrates email, SMS, and other channels to enhance customer experiences. Its emphasis on a multi-channel approach ensures that brands maintain a consistent voice, regardless of the medium.
A significant advantage of Omnisend is its integrations. Not just limited to traditional email platforms, it seamlessly integrates with ecommerce giants like eBay and Adobe Commerce, providing order fulfillment metrics and allowing ease of use for ecommerce store managers.
Notable Features of Omnisend
- Personalized Messages: Omnisend delivers tailored content marketing messages to users, enhancing customer engagement.
- SMS Integration: Beyond email, users can leverage SMS as a powerful communication channel, ensuring broader reach.
- Automation Library: With pre-built workflows, users can optimize their campaigns efficiently, relying on proven strategies.
- Segmentation Capabilities: By segmenting audiences based on behavior or preferences, targeted marketing becomes a breeze.
- Comprehensive Reports: Detailed metrics and reports enable users to measure the effectiveness of their campaigns, allowing for better decision-making.
Omnisend Price Plans
Omnisend's pricing is flexible. Their free plan focuses on email, accommodating up to 5,00 sends monthly. The Standard plan, priced at $16/month, is comprehensive, offering integrations like Google Drive notifications and covering up to 500 contacts. The Pro plan is ideal for those seeking unlimited email sends and broader capabilities.
Important Features of Online Ecommerce Tools
To assist you in navigating through the multitude of options available, we have compiled a list of five essential features that modern eCommerce tools must possess. Regardless of whether you operate a Shopify store, a WordPress website, or any other online business, incorporating these key features will enable you to succeed.
User-Friendly Interface
One essential aspect is a user-friendly interface. eCommerce tools should be easy to navigate and intuitive for business owners, regardless of their technical expertise. Whether you are adding products, creating marketing campaigns, or monitoring sales metrics, a user-friendly interface ensures efficient management of your online store.
Marketing Automation
Successful e-commerce relies heavily on effective marketing strategies. To enhance your marketing efforts, consider utilizing eCommerce tools with automation features. These can help streamline tasks such as email marketing, social media posting, and content promotion. By automating these processes, you can schedule posts in advance, send personalized email campaigns, and actively engage with customers across popular social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram.
SEO Optimization
Another essential feature to consider is SEO optimization. Your eCommerce platform should offer powerful eCommerce tools that improve your website's ranking on search engines like Google. These tools include customizable URLs, meta tags, and keyword optimization. Higher search engine rankings will increase your visibility and attract more potential customers.
Customer Support
In the realm of online shopping, providing exceptional customer support is essential. Look for eCommerce tools that offer comprehensive help desk and CRM (Customer Relationship Management) features. These tools allow you to efficiently manage customer queries, ensure prompt resolutions, and create a seamless shopping experience. Prioritizing customer satisfaction leads to repeat business and positive reviews.
Integration Capabilities
Lastly, it's crucial to consider the integration capabilities of your eCommerce tool. It should seamlessly connect with other platforms like Google Analytics, Google Drive, and social media channels. This ensures easy access to essential data, smooth order fulfillment processes, and effective customer communications across multiple channels.
Key Takeaway
Selecting the appropriate eCommerce tools is crucial for online success. These eCommerce tools act as the foundation, allowing businesses to tailor their strategies to their specific goals and requirements. From improving customer experiences and streamlining operations to utilizing content marketing for increased sales, the importance of utilizing the right eCommerce tools cannot be emphasized enough.
To succeed in today's market, businesses must take the initiative to adopt the necessary tools. Whether it's an eCommerce website builder, advanced analytics, or a user-friendly checkout system, there are plenty of available options to help drive success. These tools come in various pricing structures, offering flexibility for businesses of all sizes, with free plans and comprehensive paid options.
Discover the benefits these eCommerce tools offer and stay ahead of your competition. Streamline your operations and attract online shoppers by incorporating these tools into your business setup. Take the first step towards online excellence today. For more information and assistance, please don't hesitate to contact us at [email protected].