People in India are now very much fond of online shopping in the past couple of years. Resulting in the increased market share of e-commerce retail in India and the opportunity is rise exponentially day-by-day.
Selling products or services online is now trending and the owner(s) of various industries are now focusing more on their online presence.
Coming from the traditional market, the owner(s) of such businesses get stuck with the question on How to choose e-commerce platform and start selling online? Whereas, there are only a few tips which need to consider when you are looking to select an e-commerce platform for selling online.
Instead of creating your website by hiring a developer and adding features and options, you can directly purchase a ready-to-use website and invest your website development cost to boost your pre-designed website. Some useful tips and guide on how to choose the best e-commerce platform and start selling online are as mentioned below:
Plans, subscriptions and payments
The first answer which you should look for the question How to choose the best e-commerce platform is its plans, subscription and payments. If you are willing to sell products or offer services, you need to study on various plans and offered features before paying.
Majority of the e-commerce platform offers monthly subscription and payment. The price of the plan will be dependent on the various factors like hosting, storage space, and many more facilities and features. It is advised to consider the advantages and disadvantages before shortlisting a plan and avoid making a decision based on the cheapest option and sacrifice a necessary feature which can act as a ladder for your success digitally.
Don't forget to check the option which will help your customer to process payment and purchase your product(s) or service(s). There are various e-commerce platforms which do not support third party integration like PayPal, Stripe, and many more. So, before searching for various options it is necessary to understand the payment mode you wish to avoid inconvenience to the buyers and result in a drop in sales.
Integrations
The next important parameter after plans and payments is the option to implement various plugins and third party integration. You need to search and check-out the necessary plugins for your business. When searching for the best platform, you need to check whether they offer such integration(s) or plugin(s). Some of the important plugin(s) or integration(s) are:
- Plugin for accounting to organize invoice generation, sales, profits, taxes, revenues, etc.
- Plugin for marketing to be in touch with your target audiences and customers via email, social media, etc.
- Option to add shipping.
- Write reviews and share comments and much more.
SEO friendly platform
E-commerce website with poor ranking in search results is not beneficial. Proper SEO of an
e-commerce website will help your customers to find you more quickly and easily.
The highest priority which you need to consider while choosing a suitable platform to be SEO friendly are:
- Feature to add blogs or articles to your website
- Ability to have a personal domain name
- The comment section for customers or readers
Smartphone friendly
More than 60% of the total internet users are from mobile devices. The user(s) often search their desired products over the phone and would like to purchase there itself. The e-commerce platform you choose should allow and be flexible enough to cater to the user accessing your website from a browser or a smartphone.
Customer assistance or support
In the e-commerce industry, the loading time of the website will directly or indirectly affect your traffic. If the website is too heavy or server is slow then it will result in an unpleasant or interrupted surfing experience to your target audience or customers which may stop visiting your website. There are also at times when the server crashes or connectivity issue between the hosting and domain server.
It is very important to understand the customer support or after-sale service of that particular e-commerce platform who can help you to ensure your website is operational 24*7 with proper speed or can troubleshoot with minimum downtime.
Internet security
With the increase in the usage of internet, online crimes are also increasing day-by-day and that's where the customers hesitate to share their personal bank or credit card details.
Majority of the e-commerce platforms now-a-days are secured with HTTPS and SSL protocol to ensure safety and security of customers’ data and transaction.
You can even cross-check their security level by asking or checking their Payment Card Industry (PCI) compliances. The level of their compliance increases with the number of transactions done annually.
Expansion
We wish and hope your business increases year-on-year but nobody can guess the growth. Nevertheless, the
e-commerce platform you choose should be easy and flexible to scale the requirement as and when required.
You should not be charged for the old facilities, storage or features. Thus, it is advised to choose a platform which can easily be scaled without much investment or fee.
I hope the above tips will answer the question of how to choose the right e-commerce platform from the various service providers available in the market.