If you’re planning to sell online, then you’re probably going to need an e-commerce platform to do it. Depending upon just how much you’re selling and how big a part of your business it is, you’ll have quite a few options here, but we’re going to assume that you need more than just a buy now button for an item or two that you have on your website. We’re talking about handling lots and lots of products. Taking care of user and order management, accepting payments, working with shipping and returns, and all the things you would expect from today’s online stores. As with most things, you have the option of building something from scratch, but there are so many good options already out there, that unless you’ve got a really good reason not to, you’re likely going to end up going with one of the buy options here.
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Online Buy and Sell
Again, there are lots of offerings that range from free to pricey, and each one differentiates itself on the features it offers. There are options like Magento, osCommerce, OpenCart, Zen Cart, Volusion, bolt-ons to CMS’s like WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla, and solutions aimed more at the enterprise that include SAP’s Hybris, Demandware, IBM’s WebSphere Commerce, Oracle’s ATG Web Commerce, and Magento’s Enterprise Edition.
First, these platforms are typically creating content and pages for you. Each product, category, subcategory, each special, each coupon, or merchandising list, can be used as a marketing asset in your different campaigns. For example, if you’re advertising a sale on men’s clothing, rather than sending a click to your homepage, you can send them directly to the men’s clothing category page, and since the e-commerce platform is building out pages, it can also host other scripts and tags. Things like analytics code that can tell you what products people are looking at, which are being put into shopping carts, and ultimately which ones people are checking out with.
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Lots of advertising tracking pixels that will help you understand how different campaigns are performing will also need to be embedded here as well. Next, the e-commerce platform keeps an accurate, complete, and up to date set of data around all the products you offer. Why is this important? Well, advertising channels like search engines, shopping comparison engines, retargeting platforms, display advertising solutions, and more, rely on what’s known as a product feed. This data stream includes all kinds of product information, all formatted inspecific ways so that it can be used in these other channels.
Selling Online
Of course, we can’t forget about the back office. When something is sold virtually, there’s a very real transaction that’s taking place. These e-commerce platforms can interact with payment gateways to accept different forms of payment, they can interact with shipping and logistics services, they can integrate with inventory, accounting, and finance systems, and they can evenpush transaction data to customer records that can then feed other marketing activities.
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Your e-commerce platform can grab your central inventory, create and serve pages dedicated to each product, produce a product feed that publishes all kinds of information about those products, and house tracking code that can be used to understand how people are interacting with the products. Let’s take this example. A product feed is used to create a product listing ad on a search engine. A user does a search that prompts the ad, and they click on it. They’re then taken to a product page on the e-commerce platform, and that tracking code, or an analytics package, is recording that the product was viewed.
When the product isn’t actually purchased, the retargeting platform adds that user to a list of people to start advertising to, and it uses the product feed to dynamically build an ad, specifically for that product that wasn’t purchased. It then interacts with the various DSPs and advertising platforms to bid on advertising space to show that ad to that specific target audience, and ultimately a click on one of those ads brings the user right back to the e-commerce platform. Last, while e-commerce platforms will do a great job of reporting on which products are being purchased, and how much money is changing hands, the data around the user experience can really be enhanced with web analytics.
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These tools go further to help understand how users are arriving at the e-commerce experienceover lots and lots of visits, which of your campaigns are the most impactful in the purchase process, what the purchasing funnel looks like, what features they’re using, and which aren’t working so well. You can even see the granular details around how specific products are performing across each of those different stages of the checkout process, and you canunderstand which of your merchandising lists are the most effective. If you’re serious about selling online, putting an e-commerce platform into your technology stack, and connecting itsinputs and outputs can be an incredible way to drive your digital business forward.
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