E-Commerce Tools Every Small Business Needs to Start the Right Way and Develop E-Commerce Niche

Starting your small business the right way is crucial for its’ success, but you need a plan and the right tools. These are tools that every online small business needs from the start:

1. An E-Commerce Platform

The first essential tool to start an e-commerce business is to have a strong platform for it. WooCommerce is one of the most popular and best solutions for e-commerce. It is an open-source, customizable platform, and with it, you can build your e-commerce site just as you like.

You can set up your business in minutes by adding the WooCommerce plugin to a WordPress site. This platform is customizable from A to Z. From its’ Market place you can add strong features, and with official extensions significantly improve the functionality of your e-commerce business. Manage and run your business even if you are not at the office with its’ mobile app.

WooCommerce can interface with any service and is also a developer-friendly tool because of its REST API. You can have a complete store designed, extend an existing one, or add just some product to a WordPress site.

WooCommerce is translated into 24 languages. It has multilingual content, and product prices can be set and calculated in multiple currencies, so it is a fully customer-friendly and global platform for successful e-commerce businesses.

2. Payment Processing Systems

You can transform and harden your business with payment processing digital systems by managing payments directly on your site. WooCommerce platform, as an e-commerce store, can integrate payment solutions you prefer. It already has the capability for accepting leading credit cards, bank transfers, and cash upon delivery

On top of this, it has 140 getaways, which are region-specific, to integrate with, like WooCommerce Payments, PayPal, and Amazon Pay. In addition, this platform completely supports Google Pay, Apple Pay, deposit, and subscription solutions. All payment processing systems that you can integrate WooCommerce with our secure payments and very flexible ones.

3. Handling Shipping

The shipping process is one of the main features of every e-commerce, and it needs to be secure, reliable, fast, and customer-friendly. WooCommerce Table Rate Shipping PRO plugin is a perfect solution.

This plugin comes with exceptional features that will allow you to carry out all shipping issues for e-commerce. The plugin is available in the free version, too.

Shipping rules are so advanced that you can create ones based on item count, the order’s weight and the possibility for using and combining shipping rates and zones is unlimited. You can have a shipping rate plan that will fit your business completely.

Logged-in Users Rules will allow you to create ones that approve special rates for logged-in users. You can control, with location rates, how shipping fees are charged on products you sell, set up by countries, states, or ZIP/Postal code.

Calculate your shipping charges by “ship by item,” “ship by weight,” or other settings, and with this, you will have complete flexibility with applied charges. You can add a handling fee optionally to be included as an extra part to the already calculated shipping fees. There is an option to include multiple shipping methods like standard, express, freight, etc.

Another great feature of this plugin is the possibility of choosing the layout of shipping amounts with Min/Max/Sum. The shipping method can be hidden or displayed for specific items based on the cart content with Hide shipping methods. Sophisticated shipping rules of this plugin are Force shipping method, Change shipping label and Set the Shipping Order.

4. Advanced Analytics and Tracking

When you set up your e-commerce and start your business, you will need to have analytics and ways to track customer engagement on your site. It is important to have information about the performance of your business to import strategy and sales. Google Analytics will measure your advertising ROI, and you will have access to simple and basic analytics tools for SEO and marketing purposes. Kiss Metrics enables automation of customer behavioral engagement, and with it, you will more easily understand your customers purchasing preferences.

While tools like Fyle can automate your expense management process, ensuring you can keep track of all your business expenses and receipts from one unified dashboard.

Those are basic tools, but a great one is surely the WooCommerce Order Export PRO plugin. Also, the plugin is available in a free version.

In short, we will explain the potential of this plugin. First, you can export all data you have in your WooCommerce site with this plugin in CSV format that you can use in Excel or Google Docs. It has so many filters. You can filter your data by anything related to e-commerce and have just the ones that you need at a time. You can set date ranges of orders to include in export; format and output of your report; export new orders only; filter and use metadata; select fields you would like to export.

After setting this all, with a Preview button, you will see how this export will look and which information is in it, and you can quickly export it with a click if you are satisfied.

It is weary important to export and arranges data as you wish and at the exact time you need them so you can have the full picture of your e-commerce to analyze. That is why this plugin is the best, easiest, and very efficient solution for WooCommerce. Just to mention, all of these exports can be planned ahead of time, giving you more time to focus on your business.

5. Checkout

Checkout for e-commerce is a final step for your customer. It simply means that this is the process of buying items in a shopping cart. Checkout flow must be simple and optimized to get a full, positive customer experience of your site.

In the checkout process, customers will need to insert and choose certain details about the purchase: delivery options, payment options, authorized payments, etc. Buyers can abandon a complete purchase if this process isn’t fully optimized, like not allowing them to use the payment option they prefer or not using your e-commerce site as a guest checkout.

For your WooCommerce best option is to use Direct Checkout for WooCommerce.

This plugin simplifies the whole checkout process with the “Add to cart” button within each product, which will redirect the user to the checkout page directly. Buyers will find it simple to shop, and cart abandonment will be much decreased.

That will increase sales of your e-commerce by speeding up the checkout process. You will be able to remove fields that slow down customers, like completing and filling unnecessary fields. Remove order comments, shipping address, policy text, coupon form, and terms and conditions. It offers a “One-page Checkout” so users can edit items in their cart straight on the checkout page. A Quick purchase button will redirect users promptly to the checkout page without adding products to a cart. It will speed and improve user experience and indeed increase your sales.

6. Coming Soon Page

A great tool to have while building your e-commerce is UnderConstructionPage and Coming Soon & Maintenance Mode plugins for WordPress. These plugins are easy to use and set up. They have a simple Drag-and-Drop Builder with all necessary options to build a page very fast. When you need a quick solution, just choose one of 290+ page templates that are offered, insert or change the text you would like to be displayed, and that is it.

Use the full potential of these plugins, build hype about your e-commerce, and all of this while in the background you are setting your online shop and making sure that all tools you integrated into it are working properly.

Conclusion

The tools we discussed are excellent for you as an e-commerce business owner and for your clients to be delighted with their purchasing experience and to record excellent outcomes. But, don’t forget about your employees too, so improve the skills that allow you to make paystubs easily.