Choosing the right eCommerce platform for your online business

Choosing the right eCommerce platform for your online business

So finally you have decided to build an eCommerce website! Now comes the most daunting question as to which platform to choose for your site. Building your own online store using eCommerce platform requires evaluating a number of elements. Though the choices are endless; but you need to examine what’s really important. Let’s look at the factors that you must weigh while choosing an eCommerce platform:

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  • Define your product category: What are you selling? Are you selling digital or physical products? How many products you’re going to sell online? Some platforms are designed to handle only physical products while others can handle both types of product categories. Ecommerce platform such as WooCommerce offers a powerful inventory system to track the stock of your products in real time while with other platform you need to integrate other inventory management system.
  • eCommerce platform designs: eCommerce businesses come in all sizes and with all sorts of budgets. Which design to choose will largely depend on what is your budget. Some eCommerce platforms are designed to be extremely simple and easy to use. If you’re selling few products, the ease of use with simple platforms is more important for your online store. You can even customize the design of your eCommerce store to create a great buying experience on every device for your customers. For this, you need to hire custom eCommerce website designer.
  • Open Source vs. Hosted Solution: Open source eCommerce platforms such as Magento Community Edition, PrestaShop and osCommerce are standard software packages developed by web developers around the world. With hosted eCommerce platforms such as BigCommerce, Shopify and Magento Go, you can deploy your online store by paying a small monthly fee and don’t have to worry about installation process and other technicalities.
  • Future updates: Does the platform you’re selecting provide options for scalability? Does your platform vendor guarantee you future updates for your online store? Shopify is the best platform for those online stores that are looking to scale up quickly. Magento is another great platform that is highly scalable. For online retailer with low budget, Big Cartel solutions will work just fine. If you get bigger, you’ll have to hire eCommerce website designing company to upgrade your online store.
  • Platform Integration: When choosing an eCommerce platform for your business you should consider the integration capability of the platform. Shopify platform offers more than 100 different apps that can easily be integrated into your online store. The platform you select should also integrate with other systems such as CMS, existing EPOS and accounting software to facilitate multi omni-channel commerce.There are a lot of options and several different types of eCommerce platforms available for small to large online businesses. The best way to examine which is the right platform for your website is to consider the above mentioned factors and your business requirements. The process of mapping out your eCommerce platform should start with these factors and end with an understanding of your target audience.Which eCommerce platform are you using for your business and why? Share your comments below!

Internet and technology have immensely changed the way we do business today. Whether big or small organization, nobody can deny the need to have a strong online presence and neglect the importance of having well-designed professional looking corporate website. Every potential buyer of your company will look at your website first before making their purchase decision. An ineffectual website with slow performance could lead to significant sales loss every day. This is where the proficiency of the web design and development company comes into existence.

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Choosing a website solution provider is a critical decision. After all, you’re entrusting your business reputation to the provider. Before you type the best website design and development company on Google, here are the factors that will help you assess the right provider for your business:

#1 Does the company has domain expertise?
Domain expertise is experience and competence that are acquired through consistent track record of delivering outstanding projects in various domain areas. When selecting your web design company, check whether or not it has domain expertise to meet your requirements and expectations. When you buy professional web development services, you can rest assured that a team of experts will be putting in time to design, develop and manage your project.

#2 How much should you pay?
Website design and development prices range a lot and depend on the service you’re asking for. In the website solution industry, one thing holds true – “You get what you pay.” If you want simple website for your start-up firm, go for small packages. But cheap option won’t work for all. You need to increase your budget to get a uniquely designed, user-friendly and interactive website for your business. Hire services of the website design and development company that has transparent pricing policy.

#3 Will you get ongoing support for your website?
If you leave your website after getting it developed by your provider, you’ll simply end up wasting your investment. Regular website updates are necessary to rank higher in search engine result pages. A website has a lot of different functions and aspects associated to it. With good quality support from your website design company can help you fix the problems related to your website. It is essential you hire reliable and cost effective website support on an ongoing basis from your service provider. Along with maintenance and publishing of content services on an ongoing basis, a good web development company will also ensure that your website has high conversion rates.

Before partnering with a web design & development service company, it is important that you inquire the above mentioned questions so that you can foster overall business growth through your website. Only a reputed and experienced company can increase your brand’s ROI and market value through their comprehensive and high-quality web design and development services.

In this digital world where customers are king, standing out of the crowd is very challenging. Businesses are going social to reach out to their customers, engage them, interact with them and ultimately build long-lasting relationship. Today, businesses have realized that social media is not about pushing out promotional materials but about having collaborative interactions with customers.

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Businesses employing social media often wonder how to link social media activities to business strategies. That’s literally the million-dollar question! Goal setting and a well-planned social media marketing strategy are critical to your social success. Below is given a social media marketing plan that will help you tap into the world of empowered customers:

1. Choose the right social platforms and practices: There are over 1.49 billion monthly active Facebook users, 500 million WhatsApp users, 284 million Twitter users and 200 million Instagram users. These stats reveal that these platforms are too big to ignore. Whatever type of business you own and products you deal with, you need to reign in popularity over all these social media channels.

2. Create Buzz with Powerful Message, Images and Videos: When it comes to social media marketing, content reigns supreme, whether you post it in the form of a message, images, or videos. Offer appealing, attractive and valuable information to your customers to evoke positive emotions as this will lead to “sharing” and ultimately create buzz for your company.

3. Integrate Social Media into Core Business Processes: The ideal way to truly leverage the true benefits of social media channels is to integrate them into your existing business processes. Integration will help your business to have access to the social listening and engagement. Your business can use social media data, understand and influence the consumers by molding your social media tactics.

4. Listen! Listen Listen! Join as many LinkedIn groups as possible. Follow your customers on Twitter accounts. Spend weeks listening to them on social platforms. You’ll be amazed to know about their concerns, frustrations and much more. It’s a great way to get open honest market research.

Social media is a powerful business marketing tool that helps to increase success rate of your business. If your business is able to use social media correctly, your brand can create strong personal connection with prospective customers. Don’t dive into social media marketing without having a proper plan. Follow the above mentioned social media marketing plan and hire a social media marketing company to step up your social media game.

The search engine giant Google implements nearly 500 updates to its algorithms each year. Some of them go unnoticed while some changes have substantial impact on the search results. In 2011, Google announced Panda Update, creating a stir in the marketing industry. Panda update favored websites giving user-friendly experience to visitors through their valuable and reliable content. Again in 2012, Google came out with Penguin Update that affected websites having duplicate content and cloaking. One conclusion that can be drawn from these algorithm updates is that ‘Content Matters.’ Today, consumers have switched from magazine content to digital content. Having an extraordinary product or exceptional service is no longer enough. You need to tell your brand stories to entice website visitors. If you want to lead the Google’s search results, you need to consistently post quality content on every online platform you use for marketing your brand.

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Why content marketing is important?

Content marketing is the art of communicating with your prospects without pitching your products or services. This way you make your customers more intelligent and you become trustworthy in their eyes. Good content marketing makes your customer stop, read, think and act immediately. People don’t want advertising but valuable information when making purchase decision. If your website provides content that people seek out, Google will reward you by ranking your site higher in the search results.Business should follow one simple content marketing concept – “It’s not me, it’s you! When you put customers first and company second in your content marketing tactics, you build relationship with your ideal customers. Whether you own a small or a multinational corporation, if you’re able to provide compelling content to the marketplace you’ll achieve over-hyped sales pitches. There are different types of content marketing for attracting your customer and creating your own success story:

  • Articles or blogs – The powerful way to build an audience is by distributing content via blog posts. A careful and researched discussion of a topic is guaranteed to drive more traffic to your website.
  • Infographics – Everyone loves Infographic! They are viewed more and shared more as compared to other content types. Infographics are a great way to get your information out there in an appealing visual format.
  • Videos – A good video helps businesses communicate their core message in a succinct way. Videos are extraordinarily persuasive and put more impact on customers’ memory.
  • Social media – Social media engagement is the ideal way to interact with & retain loyal customers.
  • eBooks – eBooks are long content usually presented in PDF format. They are a downloadable product offered for free in exchange for joining company’s mailing list.

The content marketing funnel doesn’t end over here. You can publish press release, newsletters, how-to-guides and many more. Creating, publishing and promoting content should be at the core of your marketing. You need a professional content marketing company to do the writing for your business so that you can focus on your core business functions. Publish. Get Noticed. Get Higher Conversion Rates.