There’s no doubt that E-Commerce companies have taken over the consumer market, especially in the US where this market holds an estimated worth of 220$ billion. That means that having an E-Commerce startup today is hard since the competition isn’t getting any smaller. Success in this market relies completely on making good choices when it comes to planning, financing, and pricing. If you want your E-Commerce business to survive through that 5-year period, which many fail to do, there are a number of budget-friendly tools and platforms to help you with that.
Shopify Lite
You can use this tool to quickly setup your online store at an affordable price. Since it’s so cheap, it has become a very reliable and low-risk way for E-Commerce startups to test the waters with their products. It has everything you need to quickly start selling your products on the web. However, this plan won’t actually let you construct an independent and functional online store, but rather it will let you integrate Shopify into a site built on another platform or your Facebook page.
Optimizely
Growing your E-Commerce business will require you to test different decisions in design to determine what leads to a higher revenue. A/B Testing lets you test different colors, layouts or copy on your webpage and comes back with conversion results. Optimizely is one of the best tools at it. It offers a number of packages which will support different levels of engagement. It can be overwhelming, as Optimizely offers so many options to tweak that it takes a while to start using it effectively.
Magento Community Edition
Even though it’s free, Magento is still one of the most advanced E-Commerce platforms out there. And being open-source platform has its benefits, like reliability, security and a lot of flexibility and freedom. There’s a large number of professional developers working on Magento, and with its community rapidly growing it means that you’ll be covered as far as support goes. You can find a large number of extensions on Magento Marketplace, everything from SEO management to image optimization, as well as a number of tools to improve customer experience. Most E-Commerce web design Sydney companies consider Magento to be the No.1 choice when designing an E-Commerce storefront.
Google AdWords
If you’re looking to increase your traffic, and you should be, besides organic search, search engine marketing is also a good place to start. With Google AdWords, you can promote your website more efficiently, thus directly influence your sales. It will let you create and run ads which will be displayed based on their relevance to the keywords that searchers used.
MailChimp Free
Communicating with your customers is very important for a number of reasons, some being brand promotion and customer retention. Since emails are still the best way to do this, the MailChimp Free platform is a good place to start. You can even integrate it with E-Commerce platforms we mentioned, like Shopify or Magento. It lets you easily run email or SMS campaigns, but also helps you deliver them to a specific group of people. And if that’s not enough, it will also provide you with the numbers for opened emails, users who clicked the link, as well as the unsubscribed users.
Facebook Shop
Facebook is no longer just a social-networking platform. Besides being immensely important for developing any small business, today it also offers its own shop section where you can sell your products directly to your followers. You can also just use it as a secondary market for discount sales of your old inventory. Having a Facebook Shop is a good foundation for strengthening the ties with your Facebook followers too. It will also let you promote your products through paid ads and sharing.
Start Selling
There are a lot more tools out there that can help you with successfully running your E-Commerce business, but you should use them sparsely because you won’t have time to use all of them effectively. The tools we covered here will get you covered for the most part, but if you feel like there’s something that better suits your needs, by all means, go with that. Just don’t spend too much money on all the best tools, at least until you start earning because the lack of money might lead to your business’s downfall.
