For the growth of your online business, an ecommerce website is a must for you. The requirement of the features is unlimited, as they can help you to streamline your business and automate the tasks.

The success of your store is not defined by the count of products you have, but it is about the sales you bring and count of satisfied customers you have. We know that you already have hundreds of tasks to handle in the backend, and that’s why we want to guide you with the ecommerce features that can automate some of those tasks. It will help you in the management of your online store and concentrate more on innovation with your business.

Must-have features for your ecommerce website

Irrespective of the size of the business, certain functionalities are the need to run an online business. Before diving more in-depth, you must do the groundwork to make your store live and keep it running for some time. Here, we will be talking about the must-have features for your ecommerce store.

• Integrated CMS: Content Management System (CMS) is the need for any ecommerce website to manage and organize all the content of your ecommerce store. If you opt for an ecommerce website builder platform, you can choose the CMS according to your choice and ease of usage. However, if you opt for an ecommerce platform, you will find CMS integrated.The need for CMS is to provide a flawless experience to all the merchants irrespective of their technical know-how. Thus, making the management of online businesses more straightforward than ever. With the help of CMS, you can modify content, design, the layout of your store, and even the users that will manage your store.

• User-friendliness: Irrespective of your choice of best ecommerce website builder or easy ecommerce platform, the solution that you opt for must be user-friendly. To offer a pleasant experience to your customers, don’t try to opt for extra-ordinary tactics only. As per the research, 76% of customers say that ease of use is much more important than the fancy looks of the website. While creating your ecommerce store, keep it simple and subtle. To do so:
  • Add a search bar in your store to let customers find the right product when they know what they are looking for.
  • Enable the auto-fill feature to fetch the shipping address and other details from the account of the user, if registered. Additionally, give the option to update it.
  • Add cart options to ease the buyer’s shopping experience and log in/sign up to let customers register and manage their accounts.
  • Responsiveness of the themes can be taken as a part of user-friendliness. At present, 50% of customers perform online transactions on a day-to-day basis. A mobile-friendly ecommerce store targets all those mobile users out there and helps you optimize your sales.
• Payment modes: When you want the visitors on your ecommerce store to buy from your store, you have to enable the integration of the payment gateways. To improve the option of conversion at your store, you must enable all the possible payment modes on your store, be it offline or online payment modes. You can accept money via debit/credit card, UPI, digital wallets like Paytm, OxygenPay, Apple Pay, bank transfers like IMPS/NEFT. To accept the amount via net banking or cards, you need to install payment gateways at your store. Before integrating any payment gateways, check whether they are compliant with PCI standards. When you sell globally, the payment will come in different currencies in your account. For such conditions, you can enable PayPal, Skrill, and others to accept and process the transactions worldwide.

• Shipping integrations: If you don’t integrate your store with any shipping service provider, your customers won’t be able to track the live status of the product. When several other ecommerce businesses are offering this service, you will be left out of the race. By comparing the shipping services, the number of pin-codes serviceable, international shipping, and quoted rates, you can select the best shipping company to integrate with your ecommerce store. After integrating the API of the shipping service provider to your online store, the shipping rates that you have mentioned will be automatically displayed to the user. As soon as the order is placed, the notification for pick-up will be sent to the registered shipping company. The order will be picked up from your location, and a shipment tracking number will be updated in the database. Thus, it streamlines one of the crucial steps in the order fulfillment and eliminates one of the tasks that you will be handled manually.

• Blog: In the ecommerce store, you talk all about the conversion, and market the features of the products. How will a customer buy a certain product, if they are unaware of the utility or reason behind the difference in the price of the product? Think about it!When you have the blog section integrated with your store, you will be able to educate your customers. You can tell your customers if a certain product is better than your other product. It is one of the best ways to upsell your products. Blogs, when adding values and sharing knowledge in the community, improve the engagement of users at your store. The increment in the quality traffic at your store will automatically improve the conversion rate of your store. For better results, try to infuse quality keywords in your blog about products you are promoting.

• Security patches: Security is one of the primary concerns of online businesses. SSL certificates are a must, especially for ecommerce sites. Though that’s not a feature, to say, it is a must-have to successfully run your e-commerce store. When your customers shop from your store, it is your responsibility to take care of the security of their data. With SSL certifications and other security patches, you keep your website secure against hacker attacks and online frauds.
• On-page SEO: To make sales from your online store, your site must have a better ranking in the SERPs like Google, and for that, your store must be optimized for SEO. By updating the meta tags: meta title, meta description, and meta keywords for your online store, you tell the search engines what your web page is about. If you are building your store with Builderfly, you will get the option to add optimize each of your web pages as well as product listing from the viewpoint of SEO.By doing so, you improve the organic ranking of your website. The stats suggest that 91% of the search results in Google SERPs are displayed based on their organic ranking. If you make your on-page SEO right, you are advancing the rank of your e-commerce store and thus reduce your efforts to invest more in ad campaigns.

• Cart abandonment: Though it is not considered as a must-have feature, we believe that it must be enabled for every store. In this competitive market, people often leave the products in the cart, when they find a better deal on any other platform. At times, customers are exploring the products online, and they navigate to different pages, but they leave as soon they find some other product more enticing. You can’t eliminate this thing, as it is the shopping pattern of customers. However, you can reduce the rate of cart abandonment by chat assistance, email reminders, and remarketing. With these tactics, you can reduce the causes of cart abandonment to a certain extent.
• Customer support: When you are building your store with the open-source CMS, you can add the customer assistance tools as per your choice and requirements. However, if you are opting for the ecommerce platform, do check with the tools they are offering for your store. Mostly, you can offer an email/telephonic support at your online store. But, if you like to offer chat assistance to your customers, check whether you can integrate third-party software to your store or not. You can add your social handles on your ecommerce store to let customers engage with your brand and connect in a better way.To offer better support to your customers, do enable live-chat support. 46% of customers prefer to opt for live chat, as it is the most comfortable and trouble-free medium of conversation. Live chat is known to improve to save 20% abandoned carts then the normal assistance ideas. When the customer queries are addressed in real-time, you will find more happy customers around. Satisfied customers are known to bring new customers to any business.

Advanced features for your ecommerce website

To take your business to the next level, advanced features can be a lot more helpful for you.

• Integration of CRM: Customer Resource Management (CRM) is essential for an ecommerce store, as it helps you retain the customers. You can feed your CRM manually and can integrate it with your ecommerce store to fetch, manage, and organize the data. This data can be further used for marketing your products and services.With the help of data that you retrive from your CRM, you can personalize your interaction with the customers and offer them the same thing they are looking for. You can integrate the advanced technology and amplify your data to target the right set of audience. It will improve the chances of conversion from your store. Also, when customers get the offers they are looking for, they are more attracted to break that deal.

• Marketing tools: The marketing options like discounts, promo codes, coupon creation, can help you improve the engagement at your store. Integrate marketing tools like email marketing, Google Analytics, and many others can help you make optimum utilization of the data you will collect with the CRM and create the marketing funnel. Unless you set the end goals for your campaigns, you will just keep spending thousands and more but won’t be able to utilize it.The integration of numerous tools at your store will help you automate your marketing efforts rather than manually managing things at every stage of your business.

• Analytical reports: The analytical reports are of great use to track your sales. When you are selling offline, there are many loopholes that you will not be able to count and calculate. With tools like Google Analytics, you will be able to track the live user behavior, demographics, interactive pages, and a lot more. The analytical reports will help you understand which products are performing better in the market, and which are not. The campaigns that are working well and the stage at which customers are leaving you in the conversion funnel. If there are any issues, you can fix them, and with the need for optimization, you can update your campaigns and promotions accordingly.

This is a lot for you to get started! We will guide you with more features that you can add to your ecommerce store to improvise the user experience. If you are yet to create a store with all these ecommerce features, you can register your business at Builderfly and customize your store as per your choice. To try on your own, sign-up now with our 14-days free trial.