For businesses retailing online, having a good ecommerce platform is absolutely vital. While professional site design will draw in potential customers, utilising a high quality platform will ensure that site sales are managed successfully.
Despite its importance, many business owners will be unaware of the most crucial features that a good ecommerce system must have. Here are a number of those aforementioned features that a business owner should look for when choosing a good ecommerce platform:
- Is SEO-friendly - It is important for site owners and administrators to have the ability to decide on title tags, meta descriptions and keywords - being able to do this will enable site owners to ensure their retail site is optimized correctly, thus increasing potential search engine referrals. A good ecommerce platform should ideally generate XHTML 1.0 compliant URL's based on product names relevant to that particular site.
- Provides solid Analytics and Reporting features - A platform that allows integration with analytics software will provide business owners an effective outlet to monitor performance.
- Includes a product review feature - Products reviews are extremely useful. Even bad product reviews are known to help sell a product more effectively than those without one at all; posts have to be reviewed by an administrator before being posted - so any particularly harsh reviews can be monitored. Having a platform that includes a product review feature is ultimately hugely beneficial.
- Has a Catalog Management feature - The majority of retail websites will have a huge range of products. A platform with a catalog management feature will simplify the start-up process, allowing the bulk of stock to be offered from the off. The majority of platforms will allow product cloning - to ease the often-lengthy process of uploading products to the site - image resizing - to ensure everything looks professional - and inventory management - to allow stock levels to be easily monitored.
- Include a product feed support - Product feed support will ensure that products featured on a businesses website can also be uploaded to a shopping comparison website (also referred to as a shopping search engine). Many will allow the flexibility for varying feeds to be produced for different search engines - allowing products stronger on a particular search engine to be targeted as such.
- Has integrated shipping - Integrated shipping will calculate the shipping rates, as provided by the major shipping providers, thus improving the overall customer experience.
- The platform is safe - Online retail sites will be accepting online payments on a regular basis; therefore they have to be PCI (Payment Card Industry Compliant).
Companies, merchants or ecommerce platforms processing credit card information must be both PCI and DSS (Data Security Standards) compliant; if they aren't, large fines can be incurred and the ability to process credit card information taken away - a potentially damaging blow for an online retailer.
These features should certainly not be underplayed in choosing a high quality ecommerce platform. Utilising a platform without any of these features is extremely risky and could impede not only system functionality, but also overall sales and reputation.
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