Multi-channel, omnichannel, cross-device. The eCommerce has become too complicated and outgrew any existing platform capabilities. The businesses need to knit together several solutions in one infrastructure which any eCommerce platform just incapable to provide. The main value left for platforms as of today – to become a business dashboard, a control center, a management tool for cross-platform eCommerce. Sounds contradicting from the first glance, but let’s sort things out.
Everything is eCommerce platform
Almost all services or solutions we use or touch every day are willing and working hard to integrate with our lifestyle granting us with limitless capabilities to extend our outreach and the range of occupation range. Including the ability to sell online. Whatever, whenever, in any possible way.
Social media, smartphone apps, websites – all Internet is kindly offering us solutions to start making money by selling online. Individuals don’t need to make a research, create a business plan, draw a business process mindmap, connect suppliers, establish shipping and return procedures and so on. It all done already. The boat is sailing, jump in and let’s go.
In this context eCommerce platforms lose, as they can’t start selling the same day. They need some time to launch. Is there any need to use them? Keep reading.
Everywhere is eCommerce platform
We’re selling and buying on the go, at home, at work, online, offline, on desktop, tablet or mobile, we pay by a card or with cash, we base our decision on friends and family recommendation, on the research of active users, on experts’ opinion, on intuition. We start communication with the brand from posting a comment in social media post, continue it in the live chat on the website, talk on the phone, come to the brick-and-mortar store, pay with cash and get a digital coupon with a discount on our next order.
We’re jumping from channel to channel, from platform to platform, reach out from different environment being under the complex physical and phycological influence.
Can any eCommerce platform provide that level of density onto the lifestyle peculiarities?
Why you still need eCommerce platform
Still, there’s something that eCommerce platforms are valuable for – control and management.
While all existing non-professional solutions, tools or services that offer to sell online alongside something else are exciting to use for opening prospects, they are incapable to become the core of your business. They can be integrated with each other and even interchange the data, but they won’t provide the business-level quality because they don’t have that level standard in the core. They play by their own rules. The eCommerce platform brings the order into the chaos.
How people shop online missing the eCommerce platforms’ values that you admire
Does your current eCommerce platform offer you a ton of selling, converting, marketing and whatever other features to earn more? Forget it, your buyers just ditch it.
Fact #1. A study by Bronto tells: 40% of consumers use online shopping carts as storage. Plus, the largest part of them is waiting for a discount offer from you as they know about that all online stores have “abandoned cart” automation. According to Statista, 64% of all online consumers wait to buy things until they go for sale.
Fact #2. According to 99firms study, 61% of US consumers use their mobile devices in stores to compare prices. The shares for other countries are approximately the same. The Internet density and self-awareness of consumers is high enough to manage the process of shopping and filter good deals and fake (converting, triggering, etc.) ones.
Fact #3. Over 50% of consumers prefer to buy from trusted brands via their official shopping app instead. The point here is not in the mobile sales channel but in the relationship between brand and individual. Without connection with consumers, there will not be any future for eCommerce business regardless of the platform.
The main values of the eCommerce platform left so far:
- Management. No other online tool can offer you the range of management tools to arrange the products, categories, product options, and stock.
- Control. Being the hart of the business and the operations, the platform is the home harbor of all information, analytics, processes, and requests about your brand. It interacts with all sales channels, passing all data through itself. All influential levers reside here. This value is born by another one.
- Integrativeness. Despite being a all-in-one solution fighting hard to provide the ability to create, maintain and scale the distribution infrastructure by its own, the platform that the business needs instead of its own offer something more – the ability to connect with any other existing specialized and effective solutions and in unity and conjunction with them, build the ecosystem of non-stop shopping. Integrating is faster, more effective and costs less.
How to sell regardless of eCommerce platform
- Don’t concentrate on converting features of your storefront.
- Instead of that, focus on clear design, reasonable and honest offers, CTAs. Make your visitors calm down and feel comfortable.
- Offer value to build a connection. Display emotion to create a relationship. Use visual covers, fonts, blog posts with stories, real reviews.
- Make your storefront mobile-friendly. With PWA or responsive technologies, it’s very easy. Your target is to display correctly on the device.
- Emails need to be made mobile-first.
- Along with adding to cart, offer buyers to Bookmark your products. This way the products will display on all customer’s devices (browser sync) and will accessible at any time.
- INTEGRATE! This is the most important. Build into all possible ecosystems and bring them to your storefront: social media, review services, email marketing tools, analytics, testing tools, payments, shipping, ERPs, other eCommerce platforms (as synchronization), marketplaces, converting tools (as widgets), etc.
Closing
Don’t choose the eCommerce platform for its features of marketing and sales as you can add them with 3rd-party tools and services. Choose the platform which grants you the freedom of integration, which opens the prospects of getting the best out of the industry by cooperation.
Try CS-Cart – the platform designed to create connections.