Picking and choosing an ecommerce solution to run your online business

As a follow up I wanted to write towards the ecommerce website/business owners that are out there in the crowd. When I was writing my article about “Developing your own personal website quickly and easily with WordPress ” I thought “What about the people who choose or who are choosing to run ecommerce businesses?” surely there is some confusion over choosing a system to run your online store? There are a lot of vendors developing, enhancing and selling ecommerce solutions to companies with the need to get online or streamline the ecommerce system that they have in place.

Where are you with your ecommerce website?

Selecting an ecommerce system to run your online business whether you’re a newbie or a not-so-newbie is dependent on where you are in developing your online business with an ecommerce website. For the newbies reading this, you may have run a few websites before or this may be your first website but regardless of this fact there are key areas when selecting ecommerce software to run your store that you should be aware of. And, for the “Not-So-Newbies” in the crowd, there are other concerns and considerations that need to be made because not all ecommerce software is built the same and it doesn’t work the same way from platform to platform.

For the Newbies!

If you are simply starting out and you don’t have a lot of products that you are selling online chances are that certain features are going to be beyond the scope of anything that you need to start a success ecommerce business. So you may be asking yourself “What features should I be looking for if I am starting an ecommerce business?” Here are some areas that are important to most if not all ecommerce businesses online today…

• SEO Capabilities
• Ability to Process Payments (PayPal, Google Checkout, Credit Cards, etc.)
• Ability to add items to your website
• Ability to change the design of your website
• Ability to manage your customers
• Ability to manage shipments, invoicing, etc.
• Basic reporting tools for sales, shopping cart abandonment, customers, products, etc.

For the Not-So-Newbies

If you’ve been running an ecommerce business for any length of time you may be considering changing ecommerce systems (downgrading or upgrading), looking to add new functionality and any other number of tasks that are involved in making a decision about the direction of your business. Because you are a “Not-So-Newbie” chances are you’ve tackled all the initial setup concerns and your needs are more specific and defined by the business that you operate. Some areas of interest to you may include…

• Performance of the overall system
• Features that enhance the buying experience of your customers with respect to shipping, products, search engine optimization and a lot more
• Ability to migrate your data from system to system and maintain search engine optimization efforts during the process

Selecting an ecommerce system

As I originally said, there are many ecommerce systems from Shopify to Magento and way more! Naturally these systems all have their pluses and minuses and depending on your business, the stage that your business at and how your business online operates not every ecommerce platform vendor is going to be able to meet your needs.

Luc