A common barrier to starting an online store, especially for small businesses and solopreneurs is the perceived expertise necessary to build and design one. Considering their lack of coding skills and the money to hire a professional, many decide against taking their business online, if unable to bear the costs. But we’ve come a long way since the early days of the internet. Web design no longer requires so much coding. Today, you can build an online store with lots of bells and whistles in a matter of minutes, without any coding skills or a big budget. This is the core of what an e-commerce website builder can do. The really good ones come with tools that can boost the sales potential of your online store as well.
Let’s take a look at seven must-have features for your online store builder:
A good e-commerce website builder accommodates users of varying levels of tech proficiency, from absolute beginners and up. This allows them to create online stores that appear professional, modern, and visually appealing. Now a truly impressive builder would also have the capacity to help you craft an online store that has an ‘intuitive’ or easy-to-use interface, with relative ease.
76% of consumers do require simplicity when using a website and the same rules apply for online stores. It’s essential that visitors to your store find it easy to use as they browse your products and services, add items to their cart, log in or create accounts, and proceed to check out. It follows that complicated and tedious processes often lead to abandoned carts. Customers are less likely to return to your store if it isn’t easy to navigate.
Thus, do look for online store builders that facilitate the painless setup of intuitive e-commerce site designs, like these:
There are 2.14 billion people expected to shop online in 2021 and that number is likely to increase in the years that follow. With these figures, even niche online stores that focus on local markets (16.53 million online shoppers in Malaysia) might enjoy access to their target market. The key is to employ a combination of tools and strategies that include search engine optimisation (SEO).
What is SEO? It’s a practice and process to design or offer content that helps your website rank higher and gain greater visibility on a search engine (Google), based on search terms or topics related to your business.
A good website builder will contain handy SEO tools to drive quality visits to your online store. Built-in optimizing helpers often include on-page (or on-site) SEO tags, automatic sitemap and structured data SEO generation, blog sections, as well as image optimizers (e.g. Alt Tag setup or edits).
Having SEO tools equipped will help customers find your products easily when they get ranked at the top.
No business wants to suffer the costly and sometimes irreparable consequences of having their online store compromised by security breaches. If the unthinkable happens and private customer data are exposed, your business will have to bear the costs of investigating and resolving the breach, pay for potential legal penalties and lawsuits, and restore the loss of customer confidence.
Thus, a prime consideration when choosing e-commerce website builders is that it offers maximum protection against the risks of hacking, malware, and other cyber threats. Businesses often employ multi-pronged strategies to keep their websites and online stores safe, as well as adhere to legal compliance requirements.
As such, choosing online store builders that support these efforts and practices as much as possible are a must. Here are important security features to look for with your website builder:
Online store builders that come with product and order management tools can significantly reduce workload and conserve other resources. It aids with organizing and streamlining the entire process.
Seemingly simple features like out-of-stock inventory reminders, syncing options for retail and online store products and orders, as well as simplified bulk product uploading can be immensely helpful to trim the need for repetitive and tedious tasks. And moreover, depending on the scale of the business, such tasks may not even be suitable for manual entry.
In addition, do also look for features that can further enhance the customer experience without significantly adding to the workload of your employees. For instance, simplified layered product categorization, automatic publishing of out-of-stock or newly launched products, and the ability to create orders for customers with checkout links (e.g. SHOPLINE WhatsApp Commerce) makes for a more convenient shopping experience for the customer and a less laborious environment for staff.
Apart from digitalizing these tasks to optimize resources, certain features related to product and order management can also improve sales. Consider automatic ‘abandoned cart’ reminders that encourage customers to checkout and complete their purchases. Customizable free gifts inventories that provide more suiting/enticing offers to subsets of customers, and presets or automated add-on product suggestions that may help upsell or cross-sell other items.
If you’re a full-time online retailer, consider getting a multichannel eCommerce system such as an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) System that can connect your online shop to other marketplaces such as Shopee and Lazada. ShopHub can manage products, orders and inventory of multiple marketplaces in one system.
An order management system integrated into the e-commerce website builder will save a lot of time.
Diverse payment and shipping options are essential for businesses to meet the diverse needs of their customers. Moreover, shopping carts are abandoned approximately 70% of the time, and the two main reasons for this phenomenon relate to payment and shipping issues.
Online store builders that provide support and integration for multiple payment and shipping options are effectively reducing abandoned cart rates. They also generally improve customer experience.
In addition, related payment and shipping tools can also reduce workload and the opportunity for error. For instance, auto delivery systems features can generate waybills and automatically update the shipping status.
Merchants should also consider online builders that have a wider range of logistic partners in order to cater to customers in more locations and with various shipping budgets.
Visits to your online store by customers and prospectives can be made more valuable with the aid of supportive analytics, marketing, and CRM tools installed or connected to your store.
When executed effectively, these components can encourage repeat visits, build brand trust and loyalty, as well as grow your customer base through digitalization.
Most, if not all businesses can reap the benefits of simple and sophisticated marketing features such as:
Good online store builders may offer these tools for free with the option to purchase and expand these modules or simply on an optional basis.
For merchants that do or plan to sell internationally, using an online store builder that provides tools to manage cross-border operations and sales tasks is certainly a must-have.
Support for multi-currency options, international tax requirements, as well as diverse international payment methods are simply basic conditions that must be met when engaging international consumers.
It’s also a good idea to ensure that your chosen e-commerce website builder enables multi-lingual storefronts in order to effectively communicate with customers in countries where English is not the predominant language.
Similarly, if you have international staff, the administrative panel as well could require a multi-language translations component. In addition, do consider builders that offer logistics integration for global deliveries, a wide range of preferred shipping partners, and related support services.
Interested in setting up an online store of your own? Then you might want to consider using the SHOPLINE e-commerce website builder to kick-start your online business journey! With SHOPLINE, you can have your online store up and running in a jiffy! What’s more, SHOPLINE offers the business boosting features mentioned above. Ready to try? Enjoy a 14-day free trial with SHOPLINE to see just what this powerful e-commerce suite can do for you!
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