10 Essential E-Commerce Tools for Your Business

There’s a lot of work that goes into running a successful e-commerce website. One of the most important aspects of managing an e-commerce website is establishing and maintaining a high conversion rate. If you’re unfamiliar with the term, conversion essentially refers to the process of transforming a visitor into a paying customer.

As you can imagine, this is particularly crucial for e-commerce websites; after all, what’s the point of good search engine optimization if most of the people who visit your site don’t end up buying anything?

There are a considerable number of tools out there that can help you increase your e-commerce website’s conversion rates. While most of the available ones are paid, there are a few decent free and freemium options out there for those of you who are either on a tight budget or who are just starting out and testing the waters.

These range from analytics and conversion funnel tools to live chat platforms and even survey services. Without further ado, here’s a list of 10 tools to help you supercharge your e-commerce site.

HubSpot

HubSpot is an all-in-one platform that provides a range of tools for marketing, sales, customer service, and customer relationship management (CRM). Its main goal is to help businesses draw in people, turn them into customers, and keep them happy.

HubSpot offers a variety of services like email marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), content management, lead generation, social media marketing, and analytics, among others. It’s known for being easy to use and for its ability to work well with other commonly used tools and platforms.

If you run an e-commerce site, HubSpot can be really helpful. Its CRM tool can help you keep track of customer information, monitor interactions with customers, and tailor customer experiences.

The marketing tools can help you plan and carry out effective marketing campaigns, including email marketing and social media management, with the aim of bringing more people to your site and turning them into customers. The analytics tools give you important information about customer behavior, helping you understand what’s working and what’s not in your marketing strategies.

Plus, HubSpot can automate tasks like sending follow-up emails or posting on social media, saving you time and making your work more efficient. In short, HubSpot can help your e-commerce site grow by improving how you interact with customers, making your marketing efforts more efficient, and giving you useful insights based on data.

Mailchimp

Mailchimp is a leading email marketing service that provides various tools for businesses to design, send, and manage email campaigns. It offers a user-friendly interface with drag-and-drop email templates, making it easy for businesses of all sizes to create professional-looking emails.

Beyond email marketing, Mailchimp also provides services for social media ads, landing pages, customer relationship management, and automation tools. It also offers robust analytics and reporting features, allowing businesses to track the success of their campaigns and make data-driven decisions.

For an e-commerce site, Mailchimp can be an invaluable tool. It can help businesses keep their customers engaged and informed about new products, sales, and other updates. With its automation features, businesses can set up triggered emails based on customer behavior, such as welcome emails for new subscribers, reminder emails for abandoned shopping carts, and personalized product recommendations.

Additionally, Mailchimp integrates with many e-commerce platforms, including Shopify and WooCommerce, allowing businesses to sync their customer data and tailor their marketing efforts based on their customers’ purchase history and preferences. This can lead to more effective marketing campaigns and ultimately, increased sales.

SEMrush

Think of SEMrush as a Swiss Army knife for digital marketing. It’s a robust toolkit packed with features designed to help businesses fine-tune their online presence. From SEO and PPC to content and social media, SEMrush has got you covered.

It’s like having a personal assistant that tracks your keyword rankings, analyzes your backlinks, researches keywords, and scrutinizes your website traffic. Plus, it’s got a handy site audit feature that acts like a health check for your website, spotting and fixing any SEO issues.

If you’re running an e-commerce site, SEMrush is like your secret weapon. It’s got a competitive research feature that lets you peek into your competitors’ strategies, giving you the upper hand. Its keyword research tool is like a magnet, pulling in potential customers by identifying high-volume keywords they might use when searching for your products.

This boosts your visibility on search engines. And let’s not forget the site audit feature that ensures your website is in tip-top shape for search engines, paving the way for more organic traffic and sales.

SEMrush can even help you optimize your product descriptions and other on-site content with its SEO writing assistant, making sure your content is SEO-friendly and ranks well on search engines. In short, SEMrush is a key player in your e-commerce site’s SEO strategy, driving more traffic your way and ultimately boosting your sales.

Shippo

Shippo is a tool that makes shipping easier for online businesses. It’s like a one-stop-shop where you can find different shipping companies, check their prices, print shipping labels, and keep track of packages. It works with big shipping companies like USPS, FedEx, UPS, and DHL, and it can also connect with online store platforms like Shopify, WooCommerce, and Magento.

Shippo is really useful for online stores. It makes shipping simpler and faster because you can do everything in one place, instead of visiting different shipping company websites. It also helps you save money by showing you the prices of different shipping companies so you can pick the cheapest one.

Plus, it lets you track packages, which means you can give your customers updates about their orders. So, Shippo helps online stores run more smoothly, cut down on shipping costs, and give better service to their customers.

Yotpo

Yotpo is a platform that helps online businesses gather and manage content created by their customers, such as reviews, photos, and Q&A. It’s a tool that helps these businesses build a stronger relationship with their customers, enhance their online presence, and ultimately, increase their sales.

Yotpo can easily be integrated with popular online store platforms like Shopify, Magento, and WooCommerce, making it simpler for businesses to collect and showcase reviews on their websites. Additionally, Yotpo offers features like loyalty programs and referral incentives to help businesses keep their customers coming back.

The reason an e-commerce site would benefit from Yotpo is quite straightforward. First, it helps build a sense of trust and authenticity. In the online shopping world, customers rely heavily on reviews and ratings from other customers. Yotpo allows businesses to display these real customer reviews, helping to build credibility.

Second, it can enhance a site’s SEO. Fresh and relevant user-generated content, like reviews, can help a site rank higher in search engine results. Lastly, Yotpo provides businesses with valuable insights into their customers’ behavior and opinions, which can be used to improve their offerings.

The added bonus of loyalty and referral programs encourages repeat business and customer referrals, further increasing sales and customer loyalty.

ClickTale

ClickTale integrates a Mouse Tracking Suite, Heatmap Suite, and Conversion Suite into one robust tool designed to optimize your e-commerce website’s potential. ClickTale supports Session Playback on both desktop and mobile platforms, allowing you to replay customers’ sessions on your website.

Additionally, ClickTale offers comprehensive heatmaps for both desktop and mobile, inclusive of link analytics. The conversion tools provided by ClickTale encompass Form Analytics and Conversion Funnels.

Beyond these tracking and conversion optimization tools, ClickTale also features a suite of analytics and site efficiency tools. These include a JS Errors Report that identifies and prioritizes JavaScript errors, a Page Console that displays the most engaged and clicked pages and elements, and a Bounce Rate Report that identifies various user bounce types.

Heatmap

Heatmap is a tool that collects and displays real-time data for your websites. These heatmaps are swiftly generated and constantly updated, allowing you to make modifications to your website and observe the effects immediately.

Heatmap also employs an ‘augmented reality’ approach to the interface, featuring a sidebar that provides real-time data. This allows you to interact with and browse your pages even while the heatmap data is displayed on the screen.

Installing Heatmap is straightforward, requiring only a small JavaScript tag to be inserted into your website’s code. This tag is compact and asynchronous, ensuring that the loading time of your website is not affected. The JavaScript tag is compatible with all browsers, Ajax navigation, and fixed elements. It even supports responsive design and dynamic elements.

Pure Chat

One of the most crucial aspects of delivering an excellent shopping and user experience, and consequently, cultivating returning customers, is offering top-notch live customer support to address any inquiries they might have.

Pure Chat serves as a fantastic and free tool for this purpose. Pure Chat is one of the simplest methods to integrate live chat into an e-commerce website, allowing you to interact directly with customers while they browse your products and make purchases.

Pure Chat enables you to tailor the appearance of the chat widget to match your website, and it even provides a library of in-app images to enhance the chatting experience further.

Moreover, Pure Chat offers Hosted Chat pages, which allow you to connect with customers and buyers even if you don’t have a dedicated e-commerce website. Hosted Chat pages are compatible with eBay and Etsy pages, as well as Craigslist listings.

SurveyMonkey

SurveyMonkey is a renowned survey tool that can be extremely beneficial for optimizing your e-commerce website. SurveyMonkey surveys are not confined to being exit-only; it provides real-time results and an exceptionally user-friendly web-based survey tool.

It also offers a variety of survey templates and visual themes for optimal ease of use. Additionally, SurveyMonkey includes a feature for validating or requiring survey responses.

SurveyMonkey provides several methods to deploy or send your survey: you can distribute your survey via a web link, email, or Twitter. Alternatively, you can share it on Facebook, deploy it in a pop-up window, or embed it directly into your website. Paid accounts also allow you to download responses, filter and cross-tabulate data, and access other useful tools.

Google Analytics Experiments

Google Analytics Experiments is Google’s own free A/B testing service, and it’s part of Google Analytics. Formerly known as Google Website Optimizer, Google Analytics Experiments allows you to test different versions of a website in order to analyze important data such as bounce rate and session duration.

This is particularly useful for testing site revisions; simply set up a Google Analytics Experiment with the original site and the new version to see how both perform.

With Google Analytics Experiments, you can select the percentage of visitors included in the tests, as well as choose the objectives you’re aiming to test. The Experiments service comes with its own setup wizard to guide you through the process of creating a new experiment.