Running a successful eCommerce store is growing increasingly difficult. Independent retailers have to deal with challenges on all sides. On the one hand, big names like Amazon, Walmart, BestBuy, Zappos, and others, dominate large sections of the market. Often, it can be difficult to compete with these well-known brands on price and service.
On the other hand, an ever-increasing number of smaller eCommerce businesses are springing up. This has resulted in higher ad prices, more competitive search terms, and the saturation of social media with shopping ads.
One way for retailers to gain a competitive advantage and grow their eCommerce presence is by building an integrated, powerful tech stack. In this post, we’re going to look at five tools that will help you reach new customers, improve your customer experience, and, ultimately, drive more sales. Let’s dive in.
Ubersuggest is an all-in-one search engine optimization tool and one of the best online marketing tool. Users have access to an array of dedicated eCommerce features to help them to grow their presence on Google. These features include keyword research, rank tracking, competitor analysis, site auditing, and more. The interface is intuitive and easy to use, and no technical experience is required to leverage the tool fully. It’s also a great option if you have more than one site, as the dashboard allows you to add multiple web properties.
Ubersuggest offers a number of competitive pricing options along with a “forever free” plan, which allows for a limited number of keyword searches and analysis of one-hundred-and-fifty site pages. While the free option will likely be unsuitable for most retailers over the long-term, it’s an excellent opportunity to sample the app. A lot of businesses are incorporating eCommerce websites to their business strategies – and that massively helps with ecommerce valuation afterwards.
Wedding Photography And Films is using ubersuggest from the last couple of years and it helps them with 23% improvement in the web traffic. Check out his complete review, here.
Top features: Keyword research, rank tracking, SEO site auditing and analysis.
Plerdy is a conversion rate optimization platform for SEO specialists, marketers, UX experts, and website owners. With Plerdy, it’s easy to track, analyze, and convert visitors into buyers.
It allows studying different aspects of user behavior to get a full picture of how people navigate your website. You can record user sessions, collect clicks, scrolls, or other interactions, track specific actions, detect conversion bottlenecks, and more. Plerdy also offers automated SEO analysis for websites that need to enhance their search ranking. It helps you both engage more visitors through organic search and nudge them into conversion with optimized web design. You can also measure sales performance by learning how every website element affects purchases.
Plerdy offers dozens of useful reports that summarize the data automatically collected with the tool. They are highly intuitive and highlight the points to improve and valuable statistics. The Plerdy team also offers a blog with valuable information for marketers.
This tool has a forever-free plan and premium subscriptions. You can use Plerdy for a small business with moderate needs (starting at $23/month) or choose the enterprise plan with custom pricing and capabilities.
Top features: Heatmap, PopUP Forms, SEO checker, Session Replay, Event Tracking, Sales Performance, Conversion Funnel
JetOctopus is a technical SEO tool meant to make technical SEO audits, analysis, and reporting easy. It’s a comprehensive tool that helps you track and improve your website’s SEO health — crawling, indexation, logs analysis, etc.
With JetOctopus, you get a complete picture of your website’s SEO issues in the form of clear visuals, so you can prioritize the best optimization opportunities for quick results. Its Crawler and GSC Keywords tools help you resolve duplicate content issues, 404 errors, keyword cannibalization issues, define Hreflangs, and a lot more. And the Log Analyzer lets you minimize your crawl budget waste, increase the number of valuable pages visited by Googlebot, and boost your website’s indexation.
It is one of the fastest (up to 250 pages per second), most cost-effective, feature-rich, and user-friendly website crawlers and logs analyzer tools you can find. The Crawler tool starts at $30 per month to crawl 100K pages monthly, while the Log Analyzer tool starts at $60 per month to log up to 100K pages monthly. The GSC Keywords tool starts at $60 per month as well. You can buy each of these individually or go for the All-Inclusive bundle (at $120 per month) which includes all these tools plus training call, onboarding, and support. Feel free to give it a spin with their full-feature free 7-day trial.
Top Features: Crawler, Logs Analyzer, GSC Keywords, Content analysis, Google Search Console integration
Yotpo brands itself as an eCommerce marketing platform. It’s best-known, however, for its reviews feature. Retailers can leverage Yotpo to quickly implement a review infrastructure that allows them to collect, organize, and display customer-generated content across their sites, and on social media channels, in the most effective way possible.
Features include automated review request emails, customer question-and-answer widgets, an extensive form creator, options to give customers review incentives, like coupons, and more. Few other tools even come close to offering the level of functionality provided by Yotpo. There is also an excellent free plan so that new users can familiarize themselves with the platform before diving in.
Top features: On-site review widgets, multi-channel review tools, email marketing.
Picreel is a lead generation and conversion rate optimization popup tool for eCommerce businesses and marketers. You can easily create and display beautiful popups at the perfect moment to website visitors to boost leads and sales.
With an easy-to-use popup editor and a library of 100+ customizable templates, anyone can get started with popup marketing in minutes using Picreel. You can customize your popups the way you want to create unique and engaging overlays. Using smart targeting options and trigger rules, you can choose exactly when to display and whom to display the popup. It helps in presenting the right offers at the right time to the right audience for maximum conversions. What’s more? You also get detailed analytics and a built-in A/B testing module to test the performance of different popups.
The user-friendly and cost-effective tool comes with a 30-day free trial. Post that, you can opt for a feasible pricing plan that starts at $14/month.
Top features: Personalization options, A/B testing, smart analytics, integration with 700+ tools.
Google Analytics is the most widely-used analytics tool on the web. It’s also one of the most under-utilized. Few marketers take full advantage of the feature-set provided. And retailers are often unaware that Google Analytics includes a dedicated set of eCommerce tools. Businesses can leverage the platform to track website traffic and behaviour at a very detailed level, generate in-depth user interest reports, set up and monitor conversion goals, and even gather data from eCommerce apps. The data can be effectively used to communicate with your visitors, alternatively, you can use communications platform software.
If you’re not already familiar with some of the more advanced analytics functionality, then it’s worth spending some time learning how to use the platform effectively. Many free training programs are available.
Top features: Traffic analytics, user interest reports, dedicated eCommerce tools.
AdEspresso is an ad management tool for Facebook, Instagram, and Google. As a retailer, you likely utilize all of these ad networks to drive traffic to your store. Managing numerous campaigns on three separate platforms, however, is time-consuming and resource-intensive.
AdEspresso overcomes this problem by providing a centralized ad dashboard, enabling you to manage all your eCommerce ad campaigns from one central place. Features include automation tools, split-testing functionality, and import tools for quickly setting up campaigns using your existing data. The analytics tool is also excellent for gaining a birds-eye overview of all your ad activity. All plans are very well-priced and have a free trial period. Enterprise-level options are also available.
Top features: Ad management, automation tools, in-depth analytics.
Customers no longer want to be sold to. They’re constantly looking for engagement, value addition, and personalization in their e-commerce experience that static content cannot provide. And that is where interactive content comes into the picture. Outgrow is a no-code SaaS platform that allows you to create interactive content like e-commerce recommendations, calculators, quizzes, chatbots, and much more. It is easy to use, quick, and visually appealing. The platform has a wide range of premade templates that make your task even easier.
Moreover, Outgrow’s e-commerce recommendations allow you to give product recommendations to your audience based on their choices, preferences, and requirements. They not only help your audience make the right choice but also make them aware of your products/services. This ultimately increases the purchase intent because of the personalized solutions users get.
With Outgrow, it is possible to engage, interact with and educate your users at the same time. All the plans are very well-priced and have a free trial period also. Moreover, there are a lot of flexible plans for freelancers, mid-level as well as enterprise-level businesses.
Top Features: Ecommerce recommendation quizzes, chatbots, lead generation and segmentation reports, in-depth analytics, no-code tool
Bonus Tool: Aura
If you’re selling on Amazon too (which you should), make sure to use an Amazon repricer like Aura. With the use of automatic Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, Aura maximizes your time in the Amazon Buy Box, increasing both sales and profits for FBA sellers. Feel free to check it out.