These Seven Essential Tools to Manage an eCommerce
Managing a company or business, whatever type it may be, has never been easy. It requires dedication, effort and a lot of time. Luckily, online businesses have the advantage that their rise was amid the technology boom. Along with the emergence and maximum splendour of e-commerce, tools have also been developed that help make its management more effortless.
Nowadays, having e-commerce and not using specific tools wastes an excellent opportunity for optimizing our business without spending so many resources.
Below, we have compiled 7 necessary tools to manage e-commerce as best as possible.
1. ERP
If you want tools that help you with the global and comprehensive management of your e-commerce, an ERP is a good starting point. It is a program that helps plan the company’s resources to have a global vision and management.
With an ERP, you can see the sales figures for the last week and the stock of each product in the warehouse, and even automatically account for the invoices received and the amounts paid.
On the one hand, it helps us by providing us with tools that assist us in our efforts. For example, by unifying the database, the process is optimized, time is saved, and communication is improved.
On the other hand, it also includes tools that directly automate and perform tasks for you. In this way, the time and resources we save exponentially increase.
It is, in short, a tool that simplifies our business’s management and internal processes and is also responsible for taking off the workload.
Implementing an ERP will mark a before and after in the history of your e-commerce.
2. CRM
The latest trends in terms of policy and trends in e-commerce point towards total customer satisfaction. They have become the most essential element, and everything must revolve around them.
We must ensure that their experience is satisfactory and that they receive quality service. To offer a service that makes customers want to return, it is necessary to use a CRM.
A CRM, or customer relationship manager, is a tool that helps us manage our entire customer portfolio simply and comfortably.
However, it is not a simple contact database. A CRM collects all the information each customer provides us, along with a record of all contacts, purchases, and preferences.
We will thus have a complete profile of each client, while at the same time, we will be able to have a global vision of the characteristics of the entire clientele.
Therefore, they help us analyze the set of clients and be able to use this information for marketing strategies, for example. At the same time, they help us have all the information immediately available to offer quality customer service.
3. OCR
Although many businesses do not know this tool or think it cannot help manage their e-commerce, it is because they have not opened their sights and discovered its true potential.
OCR software is a program responsible for analyzing and optically recognizing the characters in a text. In other words, it is responsible for recognizing texts in photos or image files and transforming them into editable texts.
This way, from a scanned photo or image, we can extract a 100% editable, readable and digital document, like any other created in a word processor.
An online business implies a more excellent digitalization process than conventional stores. We can afford to operate 100% digitally without needing files in physical or paper format.
To achieve this, an OCR is responsible for digitizing the documents so that we can find and archive them based on their content. For this, the content must be digital and readable.
The best OCR software also has additional functions, such as recognizing the document type and detecting important information. In this way, if we scan an invoice, the OCR program will detect the relevant data and dump it directly into the management or accounting program with which it is integrated.
4. Email Marketing
Although marketing from a more global point of view is necessary and almost essential for the success of your business, different practices can be particularly beneficial for online businesses.
Email marketing is a practice that has been around almost as long as emails have existed. However, their use and abuse have caused them to be associated with SPAM and unwanted email.
Even today, we continue receiving thousands of emails that we do not remember signing up for, with information or offers that do not interest us.
However, another type of email marketing is more associated with newsletters and personalized emails. These are email lists to which customers voluntarily sign up to receive relevant information and offers that may interest them.
These emails have a less commercial tone, include benefits for customers and help strengthen the relationship between them and the brand.
Managing and launching online campaigns using the appropriate email marketing software is very simple.
These programs allow us to personalize the content in each email and send the campaign in just a few clicks. In addition, they include reports that can help us analyze whether the campaign was successful and bore fruit or, on the contrary, few people opened the email or clicked on the links.
5. Cloud storage
Previously, we have mentioned digitalization and how working and selling through the Internet gives us a certain ease when further digitizing our business.
Not having paper documents helps safeguard the environment and facilitates the filing and saving of documents. It is much easier to search for any type of document in a search engine than in a physical file cabinet, no matter how detailed and organized.
However, it would help if you stored them somewhere. Physical storage devices are adequate but limited. They need to be transported and are susceptible to damage and breakdown.
There is a more comfortable and complete solution, which is cloud storage. We can have all the documents we need anytime and from any device.
This also makes file transfer as easy as possible. Only with a link we can access all the information we need in a few seconds.
Cloud file storage is definitely a revolution when it comes to e-business management.
6. Internal communication tools
Just as communication with clients is essential and must be adequate, internal communication between team members must be even more so.
It is essential to have a comfortable and effective method that allows us to be in contact with the right person or people when we need to be.
It is not always possible to communicate in person and directly with whoever we need, so using tools that facilitate communication is essential for e-commerce today.
These programs work on all devices and allow us to contact our colleagues quickly and directly.
Whether it is a written message, a file or even a meeting of the entire staff, these tools allow us to carry them out without problems and, above all, without having to all be in the same room.
In addition to helping us have more fluid communication, these programs facilitate remote work, allowing us to increase the comfort of our work and dedicate more time to our private lives and less to work.
7. SEO
We have previously talked about marketing, and although SEO can be part of our e-commerce marketing strategy, it deserves a separate section.
SEO is optimizing our store or website for localization by search engines. In short, we can carry out different practices to make it easier to find each other. To learn more, look at this article on SEO for online stores.
There are several SEO tools that, from different points, help us improve the positioning of our website, from analysis of the market and our website to making personalized suggestions to keyword monitoring to see if another one can give better results.
These programs are elementary to use and allow us to understand and ensure, without prior knowledge, that our website always appears among the first search results.
