Ray L. Perry Consulting

10 ecommerce platform marketing features you can’t live without

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Making a decision about which ecommerce platform to use for your business can be tough. There are many options to choose from and it can be difficult to determine which is the truth and which is just marketing.

If you make the wrong decision when setting up your online shop, you could end up spending a lot more than you need to, paying too much in payment processing/transaction fees, or getting so frustrated that you have to start over. It’s easy to see how analysis paralysis can happen.

When thinking about the decision from a marketing standpoint, there are different things to consider. Marketing in ecommerce is different from other types of businesses.

Your ecommerce shop needs features that support the activities you’ll be emphasizing. Some of the must-have ecommerce platform features for marketers include the ability to create custom coupons, automated email marketing, and abandoned cart reminders. These features help marketers increase sales and conversions by keeping customers engaged with their store. This guide will hopefully help you choose the best platform for you.

1. Trigger Personalized Emails

Email marketing allows you to tailor your outreach to people in your target audience based on their interactions with your website and their browsing habits.

For example, you can send emails to people that highlight certain products based on a shopper’s purchase or viewing history. Keeping your shoppers coming back can be as easy as creating newsletters that feature product updates and exclusive discounts that are only available to subscribers. This can be done by sending special offers to customers who have bought from you in the past but have not visited your store in a while. Sending emails to people who have abandoned their shopping carts is a good way to try to get them to come back to your store and finish their purchase.

2. Leverage Reviews and Other UGC

The majority of customers trust product reviews from other users nearly as much as they would trust recommendations from friends. Online reviews are influential to 55% of customers when it comes to their purchase decisions. According to a recent report from VWO, customer reviews are the main factor that contributes to customer trust when they are unfamiliar with a store.

It is important to collect customer reviews to make the most of content. If you are a consumer brand and you are lucky enough to have customers who produce other kinds of user-generated content like photos or videos of your products in use, you need to be able to quickly and easily use that content as well.

3. Rich Analytics for Audience Insights

Analytics provides data that can be used to make decisions about a business. In order to be successful, you need to know your top customers, where new customers are coming from, which products and categories are the most and least popular, your conversion rates, and at which stage of the funnel people are dropping off.

The more you know about your customers and their behavior, the better you can focus your marketing efforts on the tactics and channels that work best, and get rid of those that don’t.

4. Easy Onsite Promotional Unit Management

An ecommerce platform that makes it easy to manage sliders, banners, and popups is essential if you want to promote any kind of sale or other special information to your audience. It would be ideal if the reasoning behind aggregating these promotions was smart enough to target the right audience members with messaging that has been optimized for them.

If the popup feature is not built into the website platform, you will have to use a separate platform to create and manage the banners and popups. This takes extra time and effort, or you will have to work with a developer to handle the work for you, which can be slow and expensive.

5. An Integrated Blog Platform

If you want to build long-term relationships with people, you shouldn’t use every touchpoint as an opportunity to make a sale. Blogs are a great way to provide rich stories and engagement for your audience. Blog posts can attract backlinks and rank for long-tail search queries in ways that product pages can’t.

Uploading fresh articles to your website on a regular basis can help improve your ranking on Google, because the search engine favors websites which have a lot of new and different content.

6. Conversion Rate Optimization Options

You will need to design your store in a way that you think your audience will most likely respond to positively. Even the smallest changes, like the color or placement of a button, can have a major impact on your sales conversion rates. The majority of respondents in a recent Econsultancy study who said they use a structured approach to conversion rate optimization experiments also reported seeing sales improve.

7. Discount Codes to Tip the Scales

Retailers use discount codes and other promotional merchandise to bring in new customers and keep them coming back. Having a discount available often makes visitors more likely to make a purchase.

8. SEO Features to Maximize Your Discoverability

When it comes to online marketing for ecommerce, you need to be in control of your SEO in order to make it easy for customers to find you on Google. Although it may take time to achieve a good organic ranking, it can be especially difficult to do so if the platform you are using was not designed with SEO features in mind.

9. Live Chat for Convenient Customer Service

Your online store needs to provide customers with multiple avenues to reach customer service. While email and social media are important, the phone support is no longer popular. Some people would rather do a less pleasant task than phone customer service.

However, you still need a solution for people who need a more immediate solution. A quick response can mean the difference between a customer leaving your site and making a purchase. Live chat is a popular channel for consumers to interact with retailers since it is relatively affordable to manage.

10. Smart Social Media Functionalities

Social media is a great way to connect with people who may be interested in what you have to offer. Making sure you have social media buttons on your store’s website is important so people can easily share their purchases with their friends on their favorite social media platforms.

So, which is the best ecommerce platform for subscriptions?

That’s the big question, isn’t it? Here are 5 of the best subscription e-commerce platforms in the game:

#1 – Sellfy

Sellfy is an excellent ecommerce platform that is trusted by 32,000 entrepreneurs. Sellfy is an excellent ecommerce platform for subscriptions because it has a suite of great features.

Many small businesses find subscription management to be a difficult task. If you want to start an online store, you should use a subscription ecommerce platform like Sellfy. It’s easy to set up.

Sellfy allows you to sell digital goods, video streams, and physical products in an easy and convenient way. Sellfy makes it easy to charge customers on a regular basis for your products or services, no matter what you’re selling.

In a very short amount of time, you can create an online business that perfectly represents your brand. This can be easily done while the next person is busy eating a sandwich. There is no need for coding when customizing the logo, colors, and layout of your website.

This allows you to maintain one store while providing a personalized experience for customers in different locations. The shopping cart is also available on mobile devices, so you can earn more recurring revenue even when you’re not at your desk.

If you assumed that was all, you would be 100% wrong. Sellfy has great marketing tools such as discount codes, email marketing, upselling, and tracking pixels. Now you can build your business online and have it accessible to customers through an ecommerce platform.

wing to these features, you can sell on your website, social media, or anywhere else. You can use buy buttons, product links, store embed, and YouTube end screens.

Pros

Cons

Pricing

Paid plans start at $22 per month. Choose a business plan that is right for your company.

#2 – Podia

Do you want to get your ecommerce subscription business up and running in less than 10 minutes? If you want an ecommerce platform for subscriptions, Podia is a good choice.

Over 150,000 creators use the popular Podia subscription ecommerce platform. It provides a combination of ecommerce store features that make it easy to sell subscription products.

Constructing a shop on Podia is as effortless as A, B, and C. You don’t need to have coding skills or any technical knowledge to create an amazing store. The website builder they offer is so easy to use that even a fourth-grader can do it.

During our research, we discovered that Podia is the most user-friendly subscription ecommerce platform. It’s intuitive and quite innovative. We were very impressed with the long list of features.

Podia makes it easy to set up subscriptions for any product or service. You can sell anything that can be delivered digitally, including webinars, digital downloads, online courses, coaching, and more.

Pros

Cons

Pricing

Similar to Sellfy, Podia offers a free plan with limited features. If your business requires additional features, you can upgrade to one of the premium plans. Paid plans start at $33 bucks a month.

#3 – Shopify

If you’ve never heard of Shopify, you’ve been missing out. Shopify is a versatile platform specifically geared towards ecommerce. This is one of the best ecommerce platforms that uses a subscription model.

Oh mighty Shopify, how far you’ve come. Shopify, which was launched in 2006, is one of the leading subscription ecommerce platforms today.

We’ve seen Shopify continuously improve its product over the years and they’ve done an impressive job.

Shopify has integrations with a lot of third-party apps for subscription sales. You can use one of the best ecommerce store builders and choose the best way to integrate subscriptions into your business.

Shopify comes with a strong website builder. If the website builder were more beginner-friendly, it would be the best.

Even though it may be confusing at first, it is relatively easy to use once you get used to it. In addition to that, they provide you with multiple templates to create a store that is good enough. If you have a background in HTML and CSS, you can further customize your experience.

Shopify does a great job with ecommerce. Firstly, they offer you a great way to brand your store. Generating a business name, logo, domain, and ecommerce site is easy and can be jazzed up with stock photography.

Secondly, they offer you a ton of sales channels. You can sell subscriptions to your online store through various channels such as Facebook, Google, TikTok, Walmart, and so on.

Don’t worry about marketing your subscription business with Shopify. The marketing team has a lot of tools at their disposal including email marketing, Facebook Ads, business chat, customer groups, and marketing automation.

Note : Shopify doesn’t support subscriptions natively. You will need to integrate third-party providers.

Pros

Cons

Pricing

Shopify doesn’t have a forever-free plan. You can try the service for three days without giving them your credit card information. Paid plans begin at $24 per month.

The $5 Starter plan allows you to sell through social and messaging apps if you’re interested. Though the Starter plan is cheaper, I would not recommend it for a business that is serious about having subscriptions.

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