Without a reliable ecommerce website builder platform, you’ll find that building an ecommerce business can be very frustrating.
Not only is it expensive to build a website from scratch, but the hours you’ll spend collaborating with your web developer can be a huge time-suck — leaving you with not much room to grow your business.
If you’re using a reliable ecommerce website builder platform, however, you’d be able to create your website in a matter of hours — something that would take you months to build if you’re hard-coding your website.
To help you find an ideal ecommerce website builder platform, allow me to share with you four crucial things that your web builder platform needs to have.
Without these, you’d be better off choosing a different platform, otherwise, you’ll run into some serious roadblocks as you start and grow your ecommerce business.
1. Straightforward Website Builder Features
Website development is a crucial aspect of building your online business because of how rapidly the world of ecommerce is evolving and growing.
New ecommerce platform tools, software, and features are constantly in development to cater to business owners and their customers’ needs.
One feature that emerged as a response to improving the usability and functionality of ecommerce sites is a website builder.
Ecommerce website builders are designed to allow the average user to build and launch a business site as easily and as quickly as possible.
For example, ecommerce solutions like BigCommerce offer a platform with website builder features that allow you to customize your online store.
With website builder features, you can modify your web pages and other elements of your site such as the themes, colors, buttons, and icons according to your liking.
Features like these let you customize your online store even if you have limited coding know-how by using the platform’s templates in designing your ecommerce site to market and sell your products.
Ecommerce platforms with easy-to-use website builder tools can help cut down on a significant amount of your time spent on building your ecommerce store, without compromising its overall quality, usability, and functionality.
2. Easy Integration
The primary goal of most ecommerce websites is to sell, but selling online is more than just displaying your products on your site.
Most ecommerce platforms come with their set of basic features and tools, but they might not offer the functionality that your business and your customers need.
With that said, it’s crucial for your ecommerce platform to offer a wide range of plugins and apps that can be easily integrated into your website to boost its performance.
Integrating plugins and apps to your ecommerce website can help boost the functions and tasks on your website, such as email marketing, contact form creation, and ecommerce SEO, among other things.
FavSEO, for instance, is an app you can integrate to your ecommerce website in updating all meta descriptions, titles, and other information.
The app offers an SEO Audit feature that you can use to check which of your products, pages, blogs, and more, need SEO improvement and optimization based on an SEO scorecard.
Also, the app has a Bulk Editor that allows you to edit your title tags, include your brand name and other keywords to your title tags’ categories, products, or pages which lets you modify them in one go instead of editing each one manually.
SEO plugins and apps are excellent tools to help you come up with conversion strategies to optimize your ecommerce website.
Plus, SEO tools like these can automate tasks and functions to help streamline your business operations such as driving traffic to your website and raising your site’s ranking in search pages.
It can be crucial for your ecommerce website platform to have easy integration of apps and plugins to allow quicker and easier processes, plus, achieve the functionality that you require.
3. Load Speed Optimization
Your website’s load speed can make or break your business. The longer it takes for your site to load, the faster it can make your potential customers leave and look somewhere else.
This makes it crucial for the ecommerce platform you are operating on to offer optimum load speed to help you lower your bounce rates and not miss out on conversion opportunities.
Your ecommerce website can grow along with your business and customer demands, so it’s crucial that your ecommerce platform has optimum load speed as your site regularly goes through many developments.
If you want to check how your website is currently performing load speed-wise, you can use online tools like Pingdom.
In the screenshot below, using Amazon.com as an example, this is what the tool came up with.
It shows the results of the load speed analysis of the website based on a performance grade, load time, page size, and the number requests.
The tool will also give specific recommendations to help optimize the performance of your website.
Aside from following the suggestions from online analytic tools, one way of improving your site’s load speed is to review the ecommerce platform’s hosting services.
If you are on a basic plan and the platform offers web hosting plans with higher tiers and faster load speed, then you might want to consider upgrading.
Remember, fast load speed is a must-have for ecommerce website development platforms since it can help lower your bounce rate and improve your site visitors’ user experience.
If you’re totally oblivious about how to improve your website’s load speed and you don’t have the time to learn the nitty-gritty of it, you can also look for affordable, yet competent freelancers over at Freelancemyway.
The platform has several web developers in its pool of talents that you can commission to help you with improving your website’s load speed.
When you put together an ecommerce website builder platform and a competent freelance web developer, you are bound to see great things happen on your ecommerce business.
4. Scalability
One of the vital aspects of running an ecommerce business is its scalability.
For instance, as the demand for your product grows, so will the need to increase production, suppliers, and your workforce, among other things.
In other words, you need to be ready to scale your ecommerce business and be able to accommodate the changes when you outgrow your operations.
This makes it crucial to operate your ecommerce website on a platform that allows you to scale your business.
A strategy you can do to determine the flexibility and scalability of your ecommerce platform is to start tracking your Key Performance Indicators (KPI).
The more measurable data you have, the more factual basis there is to make crucial business decisions on, and whether or not your ecommerce platform allows for these types of growth.
Here are some of the essential KPIs that you should measure to scale your business:
- Average order size
- Monthly sales
- Website Traffic
- Average visitor time spends per visit
- Website traffic source
- Cart abandonment rate
- Site visitor conversion rate
- Number of social media followers
- Number of email subscribers
Tracking the trends in your ecommerce site’s KPIs over time can give you insights on the next steps you can take and make better decisions for building a successful online business.
Your ecommerce website platform should be able to accommodate the growth and development of your business and not hinder it.
What’s Next?
Is the website builder platform you’re using littered with ecommerce features that can take your business to greater heights?
Or is it helping you overcome challenges such as establishing your brand identity?
With the four things in this post, you can start checking whether or not your website builder platform can answer these questions to help you grow your ecommerce business.
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