ARE YOU SUFFERING FROM THIS?
Let’s say you are just starting out with a very simple eCommerce site. You’re selling a handful of products, uploaded some beautiful product images, wrote some enticing product descriptions, and connected it to a shopping cart and you’re off to the races!
You promote your store using a variety of marketing techniques and people start to notice and visit your site. You’ve discovered that your visitors love what you have to offer, and they are purchasing! You’re now in business!
As your sales start to grow (which is just awesome!), you’re starting to get really, really busy.
You have to keep managing and growing your sales channels (how many social media networks are there again??), you have to create new marketing material, answer (sometimes angry) support emails, manage your inventory and working capital, shipping, analyze your sales reports, handle taxes, and the always dreadful bookkeeping.
Your family and friends are asking why you’ve disappeared, your kids want you to play with them, your spouse / significant other is wondering if you have a new love affair with your computer…
O-M-G…. what do you do??
WHY YOU NEED A TOP ECOMMERCE PLATFORM
This is where a top eCommerce platform comes into play.
The best eCommerce platform allows you to keep adding tools to your online store not only to help your business grow, but just as importantly, the tools can free up significant portion of your time so you can focus on other more important things (personal and professional).
The conventional website builder, while great and has some good eCommerce tools for you to use, more often than not, doesn’t have a solid platform for you to keep advancing your business to the next level.
This is not to say that these website builders are no good – let’s just say that they are designed to help an online store only to a certain point. Once you reach that level (which is awesome), you will need a more advanced and flexible ecommerce platform to help you climb to a higher place.
MARKETPLACE – EXTENSIONS AND APPS
Some of the best eCommerce platforms, such as, or, have marketplaces where you can pick and choose additional functions to “bolt on” to your online store.
Some platforms call them extensions, some label them as apps. For the sake of simplicity, let’s just consider them the same things as they are created to make your life easier.
There are a number of categories of functions that you can add to your online store, including:
- Sales & Marketing
- Shipping / Fulfillment
- Inventory / Order Management
- Customer Service
- Accounting
- Reporting / Analytics
Here are a few real examples on how apps / extensions can help save you time and energy:
Accounting App
An accounting app can integrate your store with specific accounting software. So you don’t have to manually export data, put them in the proper format, and then import them into your accounting software.