eCommerce has been steadily growing and expanding globally over the last few years. With the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, eCommerce saw unprecedented surges in growth. Companies all over the world either had to rapidly expand their operations to cater to the wave of traffic and sales or pivot their operations to cater to the increased volumes.
With the increased drive toward online retailing, there is a greater need for improved tech capabilities to cater to the demand. Luckily, tech companies have been on the edge of innovation and are ensuring that their products create a foundation for eCommerce stores to operate efficiently. So, we took a look at four must-haves in tech for you to streamline the management of your online store.
Cloud-Based Working
The importance of cloud working became abundantly clear over the course of 2020 as both the workforce and employee base were forced to be at home. Companies that had not started moving to the cloud by 2020 found themselves scrambling to shift their operations.
From client management and engagement solutions to basic document management and access, companies sought out quick solutions to work remotely.
One of the most poignant was the move toward day-to-day shared solutions. Microsoft SharePoint development has allowed companies to effectively and quickly migrate their vital working platforms online and to the cloud where they can be accessed remotely and simultaneously by a team. These migrations can usually cause excessive disruption in a business, however, with the right solution providers and a carefully created architecture, it can be a seamless process.
With the entire Office suite migrated to the cloud, your company can operate effectively from anywhere.
Social Media Management
Social media management can be one of the most resource-consuming activities for a business. Especially for a small or medium business with limited staff and budget to effectively manage it. Luckily, a number of platforms have been developed to manage all aspects of these marketing platforms.
Teams, for example, can effectively engage with customers in real-time and simultaneously on each platform. With the new Instagram DM API, teams can access and respond to all DMs coming in from the Instagram account. This has not been possible before, and opens up access for teams to manage customer queries, complaints and increase the conversion rate.
Various other platforms allow teams to create, schedule and post social posts across all of the platforms simultaneously. This reduces the number of hours spent trying to post across different platforms and lowers the number of errors being made in the posts.
Various other tools allow you to track the success of social campaigns. The platforms themselves, like Google and Instagram, do provide you with feedback on impressions, click-through rates and open rates. This does, however, need to be combined with data of site traffic, conversion rates and bounces to get a more in-depth look into how successful the campaigns are.
SEO Management
SEO is certainly one the most spoken about aspects of eCommerce. In order to be seen by your audience, and increase your reach, your SEO needs to be completely optimized. Luckily, there are several tools and platforms that can assist you.
Keyword research is one of the first things you need to do in your SEO exercise. Google regularly scrapes your site to understand where to categorize you and where to place you in search results. These tools allow you to search for keywords that need to be included in your site, indicate what your competitors are using, what your customers are searching for, and the variations that you can use.
SEO scraping tech is also vital. These are regular scrapes that need to be performed on the site to determine where potential problems may exist. It wades through your meta descriptions, URLs, headings, and content on your pages. It indicates areas with insufficient content, duplicate pages broken pages. Once you start fixing these issues, you will start seeing your site move up the Google ranking and start driving more traffic.
Team Collaboration
We mentioned remote working and team collaboration a bit earlier. But these tools allow teams to communicate remotely, in real-time and according to their various projects. There are some great instant team messaging tools that can be integrated with a variety of other online tools
Slack and Chanty are team collaboration tools that allow you to have real-time conversations with your team. Whether individual, team or company-wide conversations, it opens up engagement throughout the company. They also integrate perfectly with other tools, like Monday.com or Trello for example.
These tools are project management tools that provide you, your team, and your company insight into the current and future projects within the company. Team members can be allocated to tasks, deadlines set, progress monitored and changes made to each project on these sites. These workspaces work in real-time, are interactive and can be made private for access to specific teams.
Lastly, communication tools like Zoom, Teams, and other relevant video conferencing platforms have made communication easier with remote teams. These can all be integrated with the other collaboration tools, for you to easily jump from a conversation to a video conference with your team in a matter of seconds.
Wrapping Up
The development of relevant online tech will certainly not be slowing down any time soon. Billions of dollars worth of research and development are constantly being pushed into these types of platforms and solutions to grow the eCommerce industry substantially in the near future.
