In the day and age of emerging technologies, a burgeoning social media stratosphere and an ever-expanding internet, ecommerce has cemented itself as a mainstay industry. Over $1.24 billion was spent online over the Black Friday and Cyber Monday weekend this past year, according to CNBC, representing a healthy 14% increase year over year.
The estimated e-commerce revenue of top 5 countries in 2018 are (Source: Statista):
- $584 billion for China
- $474 billion for the US
- $105 billion for Japan
- $103 billion for UK
- $70 billion for Germany
Needless to say, ecommerce isn’t just growing, it’s exploding beyond all expectations, surpassing growth charts and accounting for a substantial part of a rich and intertwined, inter-continential and economic hemisphere that will only continue to surge forwards in the years to come.
If you are a player in the ecommerce game, these numbers, while astounding, should not dwarf your efforts at competing better with your rivals. Arming yourself with the proper tools in advance can, of course, do wonders for your future endeavors. Many of the following 12 ecommerce tools we’re about to enlighten you with are simply must-have for all viable contenders in this arena.
Honestly Captures Customer Feedback
Honestly is an app that was designed to mine customer feedback. You can create custom questionnaires that are presented to your customers on their smartphone handsets. The app then culls the responses, amassing a database that’s adorned with plenty of statistics, metrics and analytics.
What’s more is that you can respond to customer feedback with a personalized message, or by even sending the coupon codes and special offers to their smartphone. It’s a great way to better assess what your customers are thinking about the products and services that you are offering. The reengagement factor is a surefire method to win over disgruntled customers by nurturing your relationship with them, and to better retain existing customers using the same methodology.
Create Social Campaigns with Justuno
Justuno is a very intuitive application that was designed to help you better orchestrate, organize and execute winning social campaigns from your ecommerce store. It contains countless features that allow you to target specific customers, based upon habits, preferences and behaviors, in a profoundly engaging manner.
This allows for targeted onsite promotions to specific user groups using a simple dashboard and intuitive interface with strong reporting functions and good compatibility. No coding is required, and a variety of easy-to-edit templates exist for instant integration. This application enables the creation of sharable live coupons and specials that encourage an intimating and direct consumer response.
Operate from the Cloud with NetSuite
Netsuite is an award-winning ecommerce business management tool that is cloud-based. It contains a wide array of powerful features and functions designed to ease your back office operations, including: CRM, project management, order and inventory management and much more (and all managed from the cloud with multi-device capability). It is rated as the top application in its class and is used by more than 20,000 different entities.
Get Personal with Smoope
Smoope may have a silly name, but it’s a very serious ecommerce tool. It empowers your business to continue nurturing the relationship with your customers long after the sale has been completed, allowing customers to communicate with your business from their smartphone using instant messages. It enables your ecommerce store to seamlessly traverse the communication barrier across both standard and mobile channels.
The goal of Smoope is to encourage a direct chain of personal communication between businesses and customers, where it feels the same as an everyday conversation between two friends, and long after the sale. It’s business-to-consumer communications amplified and rethought, exceeding the digital trends of the present day and perhaps setting new benchmarks for the future.
Smartphone payments with Flint
Flint is a very useful, secure and easy-to-integrate app that can allow you to manage your point-of-sale system from your smartphone. It is capable of a wide range of point-of-sale processing that includes mobile invoices and even digital coupons. The app comes with a variety of marketing tools and payment options, all which can be managed and overseen from your smartphone or computer.
Show Your Customers the Way with Pega
Pega is a very innovative and creative plugin that allows you to show your customers the way as opposed to telling them it. This is a powerful and cooperative browser sharing tool that is very transparent. It allows your visitors to enable screen sharing, where your customer support staff has the ability to take over the screen of the customer requiring support.
This is a wonderful tool that can be used to help struggling shoppers find that high ticket item they are trying to purchase, or aid them in the checkout or returns process.
Gain Face-Time with Dozeo
Dozeo is a wonderful plugin that can allow you to keep up with your customers’ needs by providing visual video conferencing. Whether your customers are located within 10 miles of your location or whether they are across the pond, this enables powerful video chat features that can be used for online meetings, customer support, conferences and much more.
The best part is that your employees and customers won’t have to download a thing to use this plugin. No contact requests are mandated, either. It’s a great way to take your online selling to the next level. Dozeo allows an unlimited number of guests, giving you complete control of the customer journey. Imagine flaunting this feature during your Cyber Monday sales rush and announcing special web-only deals via video in real-time, where your customers can actually converse with you back and forth.
OMQ Intelligent FAQ is Self-Learning
OMQ is a very viable tool for many ecommerce stores. It’s a self-learning frequently-asked-questions plugin that is designed to create a superfluous database that ultimately learns more answers to common questions the more that it’s being used. Instead of offering a standalone FAQ form, which can often leave customers waiting for hours or even days to receive a response, OMQ instead offers real-time answers.
As you feed it information, based upon answering other support related questions, the software learns how to answer future questions. It can even create templates that can be used to instantly send answers to customers based upon their question. It’s a great tool to use in efforts to provide some relief for your support department while appeasing your customers simultaneously.
Find Dead Links with LinkTiger
LinkTiger is a very useful app that is designed to help you find broken or dead links on your website. Since many ecommerce stores are constantly changing, things can get overlooked or can break and malfunction from time to time. Dead or broken links can equate to frustrated customers and lost sales opportunities.
LinkTiger actively scans your site to find any dead or broken links. Its simple dashboard highlights the discovered and dead links, tells you where they are in the source code, and enables instant report generation and sharing with team members.
Reoccurring Orders with Think Subscription
If you run an ecommerce store that drives a lot of sales from reoccurring subscriptions, than look no further than Think Subscription to find help with managing them all. It supports multiple subscription modes, working with both digital and physical subscription products and reoccurring orders.
Think Subscription also allows easy product bundling with reoccurring order management that is integrated, to name a few of the many features that come with this software solution. Don’t overlook the renewal and recapture feature, which can help you regain lost sales from former and existing customers.
Easy Returns with ReadyReturns
ReadyReturns is a plug-and-play product returns management software solution that can drop into virtually any website without any programming knowledge required. It enables the creation of a user-friendly returns management widget that allows customers to initiate self-service returns, cutting down on support hours involved in the returns process.
Retailers set their own rules for returns, including: the date-from-purchase that returns can be made, the cost of return shipping, and any associated restocking fees and return shipping fees. Customers are able to generate their returns online and print a return shipping label, with smartphone compatibility for easy and fast mobile returns. Retailers are instantly updated about the returns being made, including the details of the return, its tracking number, package contents, weight, etc.
Stop Cart Abandonment with Cloud IQ
Cloud IQ is a very intelligent app that actively scans your shopping cart data and your customers’ shopping habits to help you reduce and prevent avoidable shopping cart abandonment rates. Since studies show that shopping cart abandonment hovers around 65% for all ecommerce stores, useful ecommerce tools like this can help you reclaim 5% or more of lost sales from abandonment.
This intuitive software analyzes your shopping cart data, helping you assess what your abandonment rates are costing you while providing suggestions on key changes that you can make to decrease shopping cart abandonment rates and improve conversion rates and average order value.
Need even more info? Check out this infographic we’ve created that can help you better understand and reduce cart abandonment rates at your online store. 
