Top 5 Features Your Online Store Needs If You Want To Scale

TOP 5 FEATURES YOUR ONLINE STORE NEEDS IF YOU WANT TO SCALE

Can an iPhone land you on the moon? Given that the processing power of a mobile device in the hands of ordinary people today far exceeds what was available for the Apollo 11 moon landing, it’s a curious question indeed. Here’s what we think: Power is not the point. It’s what you choose to do with the tools at your disposal that make you succeed. Nowadays there are thousands of platforms and plugins available in the eCommerce market space, offering an overwhelming amount of incredible features you must consider for your online store. But which to choose from? At eComplete, we’ve combined our learnings over a decade of experimenting with a wide range of these options to offer our clients the ‘Best-of-Breed’ solution. Because it’s not about all the things you can have when you can have all you need. So what are the top features in this solution that allow us to launch sites fast and enable brands to succeed and scale in eCommerce? Here are five things that every e-commerce site needs in order to really grow fast:

1. REAL-TIME INVENTORY & ORDERS SYNC If you want to scale your e-commerce it’s a no-brainer that you need to have your website talking to your warehouse and accounting system continuously. This ensures that the inventory in stock in your warehouse is fed onto the website immediately and the moment an order is placed on the website the stock levels on your website, and your warehouse are synced with your accounting system to create true digital harmony.
2. CRM AUTOMATION CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management. Some people assume it means the same as customer service (call centres). In the digital world CRM refers to the messages that are sent to the customer whether on the site (with pop-ups and subscription forms) or via external messaging (Emails and SMS). Using tools to automate this process means your direct marketing communications regarding offers, discounts and new product promotion works like clockwork. Some such techniques include exit-intent pop-ups, remarketing, and abandoned cart notifications among others.
3. LIVE CHAT AI No matter how advanced our technology gets the human element will remain a factor. Errors occur and mistakes happen. When they do, communication between yourself and the customer becomes increasingly important, especially in times of high request volumes (like during a big sale). Live chat is a widget that appears on the bottom right of the website site screen. Yes, you could hire natural customer agents to receive and reply to customer queries as they come. But if you want to scale you need to leverage the power of Live Chat AI. With it, you can set up hotlinks offering suggestions based on the keywords a customer asks in the chat. Returns, refunds, product info? You can even automate service tickets that get sent to the relevant department based on what the customer says in their message. Faster response times mean happier customers. Now that’s smart.
4. PRODUCT INFORMATION MANAGEMENT SOFTWARE Full-product-list-3rd-quarter-final-final-version-2(autosaved).xls. “Is that the most recent product list?”, “I can’t remember!”. And neither can you. Scale means you have to embrace new ways of doing things if they allow you to do more with less time, energy and resources. Product Information software manages your content in the cloud and sends all the product images, and attributes (colour, size, material) to your website at a click of a button. Fully collaborative, your entire content team can access the very same system with their own logins at the same time. No more Excel volleyball. Benefits include no more team misalignment, no more missing and outdated files; always having your product content accessible and up to date at any time from anywhere.
5. ROBUST & SECURE CDN INFRASTRUCTURE Security. It’s about peace of mind. Assurance from threats and avoid annoyingly slow website performance. This is the reason we have a robust CDN infrastructure. You need to leverage cloud servers to provide fast, global content delivery, optimized for security, performance and reliability. It protects your internal resources such as behind-the-firewall applications, teams, and devices. It’s essential for developing globally-scalable applications. If you want to move fast and grow quickly, remain agile but still provide professional service then you need robust and secure CDN Infrastructure.

Neil Armstrong couldn’t send emojis and view memes on the moon. But more importantly, he got there. And that’s what really matters. You can become inundated with bugs and leave your team confused and uncertain when trying to find what works and what doesn’t. At eComplete, we’ve done the miles in this race and have come up with a complete end-to-end solution that enables brands and retailers to really succeed and scale in eCommerce. If you’d like to be part of an eCommerce ecosystem that has all these top five features and more, then give us a call. Get in touch here. WRITTEN BY CHAD LEE BRYSON, HEAD OF PRODUCTION