Choosing an eCommerce Platform
Choosing an eCommerce platform is one of the most important decisions that any eCommerce business will make. Without the right eCommerce platform, eCommerce businesses set themselves up to struggle unnecessarily as they try to deal with technical problems that should not exist. Here are four of the things that can go seriously wrong if you make a poor decision about the eCommerce platform that you select.
Choosing an eCommerce Platform: Horrible Site Layouts
Ideally, an eCommerce solution should offer a variety of different designs for webpages, which are generally modified from the backend by installing templates. Some of them also allowed changes to the layout of the site to be made manually, by altering the CSS, JavaScript or HTML that makes up the pages.
Without this flexibility, there’s always the chance that whatever layout comes with the eCommerce solution will be completely unsuitable for your business. For example, if you have an eCommerce business that sells a great many goods, you’ll need a platform that is capable of providing a template that has suitable navigation so that clients can find their way through the site.
Choosing an eCommerce Platform: No Scalability
When your business first gets off the ground, it will likely be one of the most exciting and trying times you ever have as a business owner. Remember that some of the biggest challenges, however, are still to come and they actually have more to do with success than failure.
If the platform you choose isn’t scalable, meaning that it is not able to grow incapacity along with your business, you’ll quickly find yourself under powered to run your site. This could mean horrible performance, the inability to add more items to your inventory and worse. Be sure that your platform can scale up with your business.
The last thing you want is an eCommerce platform that stops your business growth in its tracks. You not only lose money by having to switch platforms again, you lose the momentum you had and can actually start from a weaker position. You could lose current customers during the juggling process until you can grow again.
Choosing an eCommerce Platform: Losing Customers at the Checkout
Shopping cart abandonment is one of the biggest problems that eCommerce businesses face. This usually occurs because the checkout process is not intuitive or, in some cases, because it requires so many steps that customer simply abandoned their cart and go somewhere else. The eCommerce platform you choose should integrate with a good shopping cart that allows you to streamline the checkout process, so people can get what they want and go.
Choosing an eCommerce Platform: No Capacity for Mobile
Consumers are quickly adopting mobile technology as a preferred way to surf the Internet and to do their shopping. In order to accommodate this, you need to be using an eCommerce platform that allows you to serve a mobile version of your site to customers when they visit.
If you don’t have this, you might find yourself unable to reach out to an important demographic of customers – and an increasingly large one – who want to do their shopping from a mobile device rather than from behind a desktop computer. Make sure the platform you choose is mobile friendly, or you may end up paying for it later.
Provided you choose a scalable, well-designed and forward-looking eCommerce platform, you should not be held back in any regard by the technology your store uses.
Finestshops.com offers managed e-commerce for medium and large stores based on Magento or X-Cart Shopping Carts. Find out more at www.finestshops.com
