5 Tips For Choosing The Right eCommerce Software

Launching an eCommerce business can be quite overwhelming. Negotiating with multiple suppliers, identifying the right price for your products, picking a shipping company for the various geographies you operate in are just some of the different things you will be doing at launch. The right eCommerce software is one that is easy to learn and should help you with these operational tasks out of the box.

But that is not all. Given the complexities of running a business, your eCommerce software should also do a host of other things to make your business operation smoother. Here is a checklist of features your eCommerce software must have.

1. Local Payment Integration

User preferences change depending on the country they are viewing your website from. Studies have shown that an overwhelming 92.2% of online buyers tend to prefer websites that show product prices in their local currencies.

Not only that, nearly 33% of these buyers tend to abandon sites where the pricing is USD-only. But converting your product price to the local currency is alone not sufficient.

You should also be able to integrate localized payment gateways to your eCommerce website. That means that your visitors from China should be able to transact via Alipay (which is the most popular payment gateway in the country) while your European shoppers should have other options like Worldpay or iDeal.

2. Localized Shipping

Similar to payment integration, every country has their own popular logistics providers that offer delivery at the most affordable prices.

Instead of forcing businesses to only pick between a Fedex or UPS, your eCommerce software should be customizable enough to integrate with local shipping providers like DPD in Germany or DTDC in India.

3. ERP/CRM Integration

Processing orders and fulfilling them is just one component of an eCommerce business. Demand management which involves forecasting future orders and also identifying a warehouse that is closest to your potential customer is an important component of the supply chain.

Integrating your eCommerce software with your ERP system makes it possible for you to feed real-time transactional data to your ERP system. You may also want to integrate your eCommerce software with a CRM system that ensures seamless communication management with your prospects and existing customers.

4. Content Management System

A lot of eCommerce companies rely on language translator tools to cater to their global audience. This is however not ideal as the auto-translated content does not convert as well as the original.

It is recommended to hire knowledgeable local language copywriters to rewrite your pages in the various languages you want to cater to. From a website management perspective, this can be pretty hard to manage.

An eCommerce software with an integrated content management system should, however, do the trick since it becomes easy for the website administrator to map the various product pages in these different languages making a multi-lingual website easy to manage.

5. Personalization

Every customer is unique, more so in a business that caters to visitors from across the world. Your website should hence be capable of personalizing your offering based on the visitors’ profile. For instance, your Chinese visitors may love a discount during the new year season in February while your customers in Germany may love their discounts during Oktoberfest.

Not just this, you may want to offer your repeat customer a higher discount than what you provide a new customer. Similarly, a customer who buys a larger volume deserves a higher discount than one who buys for a few dollars at a time. Your eCommerce software should be flexible enough to bring in these various tweaks to your system without much hassle.

Running an eCommerce business is hard and the job of a back-end software is to make things simpler for you. Pick a software that is not only customizable but also scalable. This way, you do not have to go shopping for a new provider when you grow big.

The post 5 Tips For Choosing The Right eCommerce Software appeared first on Lifehack.