The eCommerce industry is on a boom more than ever. Restrictions due to worldwide lockdowns have only added to that fact. With an increase in the number of digital consumers, companies continue to make huge profits every day. There was a 76.2% YoY growth in eCommerce in June 2020. And these numbers aren’t just regional. The trend is homogenous across the globe.
But the success of any eCommerce business doesn’t lie solely on the quality of its products. Instead, there is a wide array of factors coming into play. So, it might come as a surprise to you that many eCommerce businesses are flourishing by the day while others are barely surviving.
What is it that differentiates a successful eCommerce business from its competitors? There is no secret recipe for success. They follow the same eCommerce industry protocols but do things differently. Before stepping into the eCommerce realm, these businesses focus on their fundamentals. A friendly user interface and an unmatched customer experience are their fundamental pillars. Also, a fast and reliable eCommerce platform makes its way right there at the top of the list. A simple and elegant eCommerce website with quick and safe payment options, mobile responsiveness, and aesthetic features are also part of the parcel.
It is beneficial to both the business owners and the customers if they are equipped with the best-fit eCommerce platform. A business owner needs to have access to specific tools and analytics and manage their website while having tailor-made administrative features that tick all the boxes for the business.
Without further ado, let us dive into some of the must-have features for any successful eCommerce platform.
1. Rapid Content Updation
Content is one of the crucial factors for any eCommerce platform. If you aim to perform better in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages), you need to make sure to put up fresh and unique content on your eCommerce website. Also, duplicate meta descriptions, product descriptions, snippets, and blog posts, any plagiarism can negatively impact your website’s page ranking in the search engines. Therefore, adding relevant keywords and respecting optimized keyword density is as important as the website content.
The website content must also be continually updated and personalized as per the insights penned down by the analytics and SEO teams. About 87% of consumers give importance to content when deciding to make a purchase. But the content alone is not enough. Personalized and relevant content is the driving force. As per Adobe, more than two-thirds of consumers want textually relevant content. Therefore, an eCommerce business should give much importance to content and create a user-friendly and informative customer experience leading to a high conversion rate.
The industry knows the importance of potentially good content leading to higher engagements and conversion rates. But many small and medium businesses are not efficiently equipped or have infrastructural limitations to create and code their content independently. Hence, they turn to third-party content management agencies or IT agencies. But it becomes a tedious task to get a job done on time and at a higher cost. There are communication gaps too. And ultimately, there is no guarantee that you might end up with what you wanted in the first place.
Hence, merchants and business owners should turn their attention towards an eCommerce platform that allows rapid content updates. There are eCommerce platforms available in the industry that support a wide variety of content types, including images and video, and will enable businesses to have quick no or low-code content updates as to when required.
2. Quick, Simple Checkout
For rendering a good customer experience, you have to put yourself in the shoes of the customer. Do you want a complicated and tedious checkout process when all you need is to make a purchase as effortlessly as possible? A complex checkout process is one of the main reasons for the rising number of shopping cart abandonment. And what adds to the agony of the customer? Having to mandatorily set up an account, fill in all the details, and then go through a hundred pages before a customer can make a purchase of may be what’s just a single article.
Almost 21% of potential customers abandon their carts more than half the time because of a long and complicated checkout process. And being another barrier to purchase, creating an account is why almost a third, 28% of the carts are abandoned more than half the time.
Therefore, one of the most important features that business owners must look for while choosing an eCommerce platform is an eCommerce platform that supports fast and straightforward checkout. Also, an option for guest checkout is of utmost importance to allow the shoppers for an instant purchase without having to set up an account mandatorily.
3. Personalized product recommendations
Personalization is the ace of the eCommerce market. A whopping 91% of the consumers have started to have preferred to shop with brands that provide product recommendations and relevant offers. Another 72% say that they engage with only personalized messaging with the customer service. And finally, 56% of the shoppers say that they would definitely visit back or even make a purchase from the eCommerce website that offers them relevant product recommendations. And these product recommendations make up to 30% of the total revenue generated.
Such is the power of personalization in the eCommerce industry. But building personalized product recommendations manually can be very time-consuming and a strenuous task. Moreover, product recommendations need to be updated regularly as the seasons change, so do the buyer’s preferences. Hence, it can be very challenging to keep up consistently with the effort.
Hence, the business owners now prefer eCommerce platforms that support automated personalized product recommendations leveraging technologies like AI and Machine Learning. Not only would the customers get customized product recommendations, but also they will get them equipped with relevance and accuracy. Moreover, with automated personalization, businesses can cut back on that extra time and effort and save precious resources.
4. Support for BOPIS, BORIS, and more
With the advent of the pandemic, consumer behaviors in the retail industry have changed drastically, some even permanent. With this, the businesses have realized the importance of the omnichannel business model. As a result, retailers are now adopting BOPIS, BORIS, and other omnichannel capabilities to meet customer expectations. This, in turn, is reflected in the revenue. For example, last year during April, the retail curbside pickup rose as much as 208% in just a span of twenty days.
Now, for a smooth functioning omnichannel business, you need an eCommerce platform that supports omnichannel workflows. In addition, your eCommerce platform must have seamless synchronization with your ERP and POS platforms to leverage the benefits of omnichannel capabilities.
Hence, the retailers are now looking for an eCommerce that efficiently orchestrates orders and takes their commerce capabilities to the next level. With BOPIS, BORIS, and other omnichannel capabilities, business owners can exceed customer’s expectations, simultaneously providing the flexibility that customers expect nowadays.
5. Scalable cloud infrastructure
Downtime and website crashes are significant reasons for higher bounce rates. Every time a page fails to load within 5 seconds, the bounce rate hikes up to as much as 90%. It would be almost as if in a brick-and-mortar store, a customer chose to walk out the door just because there is no one to attend to them. This equates to losing money. For instance, Amazon loses $220k for every minute of downtime.
Although no server can promise you zero downtime, a scalable eCommerce platform can prevent it to a vast extent and curb further revenue loss to your business. On the other hand, as we know, an eCommerce platform’s inability to scale effectively can contribute to more frequent downtimes and site crashes, for instance, on-premises web infrastructures. eCommerce platforms that are not scalable are not equipped to sudden spikes of online traffic, orders, and transactions, posing a threat to the conversion rate.
So, new-age business owners are looking for scaling on cloud services. There are eCommerce platforms in the market that equip websites with scalable cloud infrastructure. Such platforms offer scalability as an option with “surge protection” SLAs with managed cloud services.
Final Thoughts…
Being an eCommerce retailer, you need to stay on solid ground concerning everything, from infrastructure to innovative features and tools to foolproof bank and front-end performance. Hence, these must-haves of the eCommerce platform will equip your business with all the necessary tools and solutions for most industry problems.
Also, to leverage a competitive edge and build a profitable eCommerce business, take this self-assessment and render your eCommerce website with innovative features to accommodate futuristic growth. If you plan your next eCommerce upgrade ahead of time, then Choose Krish TechoLabs is the Best Digital eCommerce Agency and Magento Solution Partner Agency. With 10+ years of experience with 200 certified Magento developers are ready for your ideas to change into reality.
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Minal Joshi is a content marketer at Krish with a flair for eCommerce and Digital Commerce aspects. She is a MarTech fanatic with a knack of writing with which, she helps brands to curate, create, & commence digital brand positioning. Sharing insights via articles, case studies, eBooks, Infographics, and other forms of content creation is what she lives for. Being an ardent traveler, when not writing, you'll find her sipping coffee into the mountains or petting a stray.
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