It seems like there are more ecommerce tools than there are ecommerce merchants. The market is saturated with tools that can do almost everything for you – but how do you pick the ones that are going to make the biggest impact on your sales?
Here’s a list of 5 of the absolute best ecommerce tools on the market. Tools like these are the reason we’ve seen exponential growth at our ecommerce store, Dollar Hobbyz.
Facebook ads (advertising)
AdWords has traditionally been the #1 PPC driver of website traffic – and it still is a great place to start. Some of you might also be using Bing – to which I would congratulate you for realizing just how easy it is to migrate your AdWords campaigns into Bing – and why you need to.
But only a handful of you are probably using Facebook ads. I have consistently seen 500%+ on my Facebook ads ROAS (Return On Ad Spend). You don’t have to spend thousands of dollars either – get set up with something simple – maybe $100/month. If you keep making money – then you can continue to increase how much you spend.
Price: Free + whatever you want to spend
Moz Pro (SEO)
Location is still relevant for online shops! Not the location of your warehouse necessarily – but the location of your website in the search results of your customers.
There are myriad things you can do to increase traffic to your website, but how do you know which ones will leave a lasting increase in search results performance unless you use an ecommerce tool like Moz Pro to measure it?
Don’t simply believe the kid down the road that “is really good at the internets” – spend a few bucks on a great tool that will let you track the keywords you want to rank for, show you how aggressive the competition is for that phrase, and even give you suggestions on how you can optimize your site.
Price: $99+/month
AgoraPulse (social media giveaways)
We’ve been growing our social media presence big time – even doubling our Facebook followers in under 2 months. Facebook is the number one social referrer to our website and results in the most social purchases.
One of the best ways to increase your Facebook presence is by giving away great stuff that potential customers actually want. AgoraPulse makes it really easy by adding a dedicated tab to your Facebook page for giveaways that you can update often – and best of all, you get their email address which allows you to follow up with all of your new fans by sending them emails of products they will like.
Price: $29+/month
Sellbrite (multichannel ecommerce management)
It’s never been more important to expand your reach to other online sales channels. Simply put, your customers no longer shop in just one place. Sellbrite makes it easy to create and manage listings across multiple channels, as well as managing inventory, orders, and analytics, all from one simple dashboard.
One of the key features is inventory sync, which helps prevent overselling by adjusting inventory across all your channels when you sell an item. The platform also offers multichannel reporting and integration to fulfillment services, like ShipStation, to help you consolidate all your operations into one tool.
Price: $69+/month
dotMailer (email marketing)
If you want to take your emails to the next level – you should seriously check out dotMailer. They have improved our email marketing ten-fold.
We can create intelligent targeting lists so that we only send emails to people in a specific country that we want, language, or even send it to just the people that opened one of the last 3 emails we sent (in case we want a highly engaged audience). By being able to get as granular as we want with our targeting, we can send emails that are more relevant to that audience.
This increases the open rate, click-through rate, sell-through rate – and it increases the life satisfaction of Nathan – our Marketing Director that sets up all of our marketing emails. 🙂
Price: Not listed
Final thoughts
Obviously there are a lot of other great ecommerce tools out there, but if you’re looking for 5 tools that will make a huge difference – you should consider these. Get these tools implemented and figured out – then move on to your next growth play. Like maybe abandoned cart emails?
Do you have other ecommerce tools that you think are imperative for merchants? Tell me about them in the comments below!
24 thoughts on “5 Ecommerce Tools You Can’t Live Without”
Hey William, great round-up of tools here! Have you tried ShortStack?
Hey Sara – awesome! I just checked ShortStack out. I’ve never used it before but it certainly looks great. Connect me on Twitter – @wmharris101 and I will try to find some time to test it out. Thanks for letting me know about it!
Hey William, great round-up of tools here! Have you tried ShortStack?
Hey Sara – awesome! I just checked ShortStack out. I’ve never used it before but it certainly looks great. Connect me on Twitter – @wmharris101 and I will try to find some time to test it out. Thanks for letting me know about it!
Hey William, great round-up of tools here! Have you tried ShortStack?
Hey Sara – awesome! I just checked ShortStack out. I’ve never used it before but it certainly looks great. Connect me on Twitter – @wmharris101 and I will try to find some time to test it out. Thanks for letting me know about it!
Thanks for mentioning Agorapulse William! Don’t forget that it does a lot more than giveaways 🙂
Absolutely Emeric! I have only used it for giveaways – so I really couldn’t speak to everything else it offers – but you are right about all the many features of Agorapulse!
Thanks for mentioning Agorapulse William! Don’t forget that it does a lot more than giveaways 🙂
Absolutely Emeric! I have only used it for giveaways – so I really couldn’t speak to everything else it offers – but you are right about all the many features of Agorapulse!
Thanks for mentioning Agorapulse William! Don’t forget that it does a lot more than giveaways 🙂
Absolutely Emeric! I have only used it for giveaways – so I really couldn’t speak to everything else it offers – but you are right about all the many features of Agorapulse!
Google AdWords with dynamic conversion tracking. My clients see anything from 500% to 1,100% Return on Ad Spend with maxed out campaigns and unlimited budgets.
Right on David – AdWords is an absolutely MUST for anyone that is in eCommerce – as well as Bing. We are seeing just as good (sometimes better) returns on Bing lately.
I just wish we could get the same volume out of Bing!
Right – it will never be the same volume – but it’s still money on the table.
Google AdWords with dynamic conversion tracking. My clients see anything from 500% to 1,100% Return on Ad Spend with maxed out campaigns and unlimited budgets.
Right on David – AdWords is an absolutely MUST for anyone that is in eCommerce – as well as Bing. We are seeing just as good (sometimes better) returns on Bing lately.
I just wish we could get the same volume out of Bing!
Right – it will never be the same volume – but it’s still money on the table.
Google AdWords with dynamic conversion tracking. My clients see anything from 500% to 1,100% Return on Ad Spend with maxed out campaigns and unlimited budgets.
Right on David – AdWords is an absolutely MUST for anyone that is in eCommerce – as well as Bing. We are seeing just as good (sometimes better) returns on Bing lately.
I just wish we could get the same volume out of Bing!
Right – it will never be the same volume – but it’s still money on the table.