If you are serious about your eCommerce capabilities with today’s increased competitive marketplace, we would like you to be aware of a few trends which can assist you in evaluating your eCommerce platform’s capabilities.
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Capabilities: Check to see if you solution has a variety of must-have capabilities including metadata, image and page title tags, SEO-friendly URLs, breadcrumbs, 301 build-in redirects and a sitemap generator.
Payment Card Industry (PCI) Hosting and Security: Today’s eStore must be PCI DSS (Data Security Standards) complaint which includes an update-to-date SSL Certificate for your eStore site. Also ensure that your sites privacy policies are cleared stated and easily accessible.
Product Reviews: The old Marketing adage that satisfied customers will bring you more business and dissatisfied customers will make you loose others is more true than ever and the product review section has become a critical components of today’s eStore capabilities.
Up-Selling and Cross-Selling: eStore capabilities which allow a interested customer to easily pick the proper item and find its related product and services are also critical. Make sure that you do not loose the valuable opportunity to re-direct your customer interest to higher-end or related products.
Guided and Faceted Product Navigation: This eStore feature will allow users to filter their search results by certain product attributes such as Color, Size, price or other attributes which are applicable to your product offering.
Product Feeds: This feature is referring to the ability to provide the mechanism of supplying content through online marketing channels which are product specific.
One Page Checkout: To further streamline the eStore efficiency, research has shown that the one-page check capabilities have increased the transaction completion rates significantly.
Coupons and Discounts: As the rise and IPO of Groupon has shown to everybody, the discount and coupon capabilities of an eStore have become ever more important. To keep the site fresh and interesting, many eTailers have even begun to offer daily and hourly promotions and discounts. Having a eStore platform to handle discounted pricing levels and track the success of various coupon and discount marketing efforts if becoming quickly a critical feature for your eStore.
Alternate Payment Methods: Allowing the old-school payment methods of Visa/MC and Amex is no longer considered good-enough.Your successful eStore should include alternative methods such as Paypal, Google Checkout. Marketing Research organizations believe that by 2014 about 30% of all Internet Payment transaction will not include the traditional credit card processors.
Sales Reporting and Analytics: Needless to say, your eStore is gathering incredible amounts of marketing and sales information that can be used for a large array of purposes. Using a system which combines the capabilities of eCommerce, CRM, ERP and Accounting in a single and fully-integrated solution is extremely crucial in allowing your Management team to actual consume the information provided more easily and effectively. Specifically in this area of the required features, a single-source solution such as NetSuite will outshine any other combination of stand-alone systems.
For any assistance with your eStore, please do not hesitate to reach out to us at Sales@CBRtechnology.com.
