5 crucial ecommerce tools for new or established online stores

When you search for ecommerce tools that you can use for your online store, you will find that there are thousands of them available at your disposal.

They range from ecommerce website platforms to those with more specific functions like automation tools and form builders.

With the multitudes present, it can feel overwhelming to select which tools are ideal for your needs.

Just by using the right tools, you can achieve optimum operational efficiency, better customer relationships, and improvements in your sales and conversions.

That said, here are five crucial ecommerce tools you should use for your online store.

1. BigCommerce

There’s no shortage of ecommerce platforms available to help merchants build websites, maintain product catalogues, manage shopping carts, process payments, fulfill orders and market brands. Amid this crowded market, BigCommerce has risen in prominence in recent years, thanks to its embracing of the “headless commerce” trend.

Today’s ecommerce merchants need more than functional storefront websites. You need to offer your products on several digital sales channels, and your site needs to be a media-rich destination led by content, brand and community experiences. By allowing merchants to manage the commerce side of business in one centralized place that’s optimized to sync effortlessly with other channels through plugins, APIs and other integrations, BigCommerce’s headless commerce offering is where it’s at.

To support that experience and raise your income and visibility, you should also be where your customers are, whether that’s with social commerce, mobile apps, blogs, marketplaces or price comparison engines.

BigCommerce can help you with just that. It builds stunning and seamlessly integrable storefronts for Amazon, Facebook, eBay, Google Shopping, WordPress, Instagram and others. And you can do all that while handling products, payments and deliveries all in one place. The platform allows you to develop whatever digital experience you like and link out to a BigCommerce-hosted checkout interface, or to host it all yourself.

For your online store to give customers a stellar brand experience, sell where they are, and generate more sales, you need a headless commerce tool like BigCommerce.

2. Crisp

Engaging with your customers through direct messages is essential to the success of your online store. If you can accommodate your customers’ inquiries instantly, you will make them feel valued, and they’re more likely to patronize your products and services.

To make that happen, you can use a tool like Crisp. It automates chatting with your site visitors when pre-set triggers are prompted. This makes for more personalized and highly interactive customer engagement.

It allows you to send files, documents and images – and to connect your live chat with social networking sites like Messenger and Twitter.

Scheduling calls with your customers is also more convenient with Crisp. Instead of using a third-party communication software, your customers can enjoy video and audio calls right through Crisp.

Plus, if you have customers speaking a different language and you’re worried you can’t converse with them, you can breathe easy. Crisp can translate both your and your customers’ messages automatically so you can still interact in real-time.

With Crisp, you can foster customer relationships through live chat and significantly improve your conversions.

3. TrustPulse

Did you know that when it comes to purchasing decisions, 83 percent of consumers trust their peers’ recommendations more than advertisements? Moreover, if they see people patronizing a product, they are likely to consider it as attention-worthy. This reality is called “social proof,” and if you haven’t leveraged it yet, you should now, because it can increase your conversions by 15 percent.

To make that happen, you need a tool called TrustPulse. When you install it on your online store, visitors can see real-time and recent activities such as sign-ups, purchases and product demonstrations.

Such notification creates a “fear of missing out” (FOMO) in your visitors and prompts them to participate, just as the others have. And if you want to see how your conversions and pages are doing, TrustPulse can provide you analytics and reports.

Additional tip: aside from TrustPulse, you can also leverage user-generated content (UGC) such as testimonials for social proof. Testimonials will help convince your prospective customers that your products are worth it. Not leveraging UGC is one of the biggest branding mistakes online retailers can make, mind you.

4. JustReply

JustReply is an AI-powered customer support tool designed for e-commerce stores, facilitating support through email, a sleek help center, and live chat.

Unlike other live chat and customer support tools on the market, JustReply boasts blazing speed and effortless integration with existing e-commerce platforms. Moreover, it is priced attractively for companies of all sizes.

One distinctive feature of JustReply is its native integration with Slack. This integration allows all support conversations to be accessible not only within the JustReply interface but also within Slack, enabling instant viewing, assignment, and resolution of customer support conversations.

Finally, you can also customise the live chat to match your brand colours, which builds trust with your customers. In a world where near-instant and outstanding customer support is important, JustReply empowers e-commerce brands to deliver this at scale.

5. Sumo

Imagine this. Your shoppers browse through your product list on your ecommerce site and add items on their virtual carts one after another. Suddenly, when they’re about to hit checkout and seal the deal, they leave without making any purchase.

Is this a common scenario in your online store? If so, then you need to win your sales and shoppers back using strategies and a powerful tool called Sumo.

Sumo is built to help you supercharge your ecommerce sales and conversions. It has a neat pop-up feature which helps you gather emails and regain lost revenue. In this way, Sumo decreases cart abandonment and increases your average order value.

Here’s what happens when you wield abandoned cart popups using Sumo:

Sumo recognizes signs of shoppers who want to leave the site.
It launches an attractive exit intent pop-up form to bring shoppers back to the purchase funnel immediately – or at a later time through its autoresponder email.
Using the popup, you can present irresistible discounts or value offers when shoppers try to click away or desert their carts.
Sumo delivers an exclusive discount code in the success message and the auto-response email.

Sumo’s abandoned cart pop-ups help online store owners to recover sales from potential buyers who don’t make a purchase.