8 Essential Tools You Need to Grow a Booming eCommerce Business

By: Timothy Masek

At Ladder, we’ve had the pleasure of working with dozens of eCommerce businesses. Every day we hear problems that founders and marketers face in building successful online eCommerce store.

Very often, we find that they get caught up in finding the right tech stack. They get very excited upon finding a shiny new niche analytics tool. They spend hours on the phone with sales reps from every social listening tool available. They burn through countless free trials of software tools they don’t fully understand.

We understand that pain.

We went through it in building the essential eCommerce tech stack you’ll read about below.

This post is geared towards putting an end to tech stack confusion and helping early-stage eCommerce businesses get their stores off the ground and start selling their products cost-effectively. (Note: This stack also works for late-stage eCommerce businesses by removing inefficiencies).

At a high level overview, here’s what you need to create a perfect eCommerce business that is set up for success:

> An online store: Shopify/Cratejoy
> A way to analyze how people behave on your store: Google Analytics
> A way to install tags on your website: Google Tag Manager
> A way to test different interfaces to get more conversions: VWO
> A way to capture emails: Sumo
> A way to send emails: MailChimp
> A way to incentivize referrals: ReferralCandy
BONUS: A way to tie it all together: Zapier

Which shopping platform should l use?

Shopify (non-subscription based store)

Cratejoy (subscription based store)

Use Shopify.

They’re hands-down the most advanced platform for eCommerce. On the surface you might find that Shopify has similar capabilities as other players like Magento, WooCommerce, and others. It’s Shopify’s deep integration with thousands of tools that makes it stand out.

Once you’re done with the basic setup for your store, Shopify will take you a LOT further than any other tool. Most importantly, it has the most user-friendly dashboard, making it super-simple to set up a store.

So you want to start an eCommerce store, eh?

Here are the basic features you need and the basic features that Shopify provides:

> Inventory tracking
> The ability to sell physical or digital goods, in categories of your choosing and using shipping rates / methods of your choosing
> A wide range of themes to choose from
> Credit card processing via Shopify Payments (Stripe) or a third party payment gateway
> PayPal integration
> Blogging functionality
> Customer & order tracking: import / export of customer data
> Content management (CMS) functionality
>Good search engine optimization (SEO) options – easy to add relevant keywords to your products and site pages
> Integration with MailChimp
Discount codes / Coupon codes
> Ability to edit CSS and HTML: For custom design work
> Point-of-sale integration: Hardware to ensure you’re using the same technology online/offline
> Abandoned cart functionality (more on this below).
> 24/7 Support: Don’t beat yourself up reading through thousands of blog posts. Hit them up – they’ll fix it.

Read More >> https://blog.ladder.io/ecommerce-business/