Ecommerce Apps That Could Dramatically Improve Your Business

The ecommerce industry before smartphones and tablets was nothing like the ecommerce industry after smartphones and tablets. In only a few years, the industry moved from a PC-first to a “mobile-first” environment and dragged every successful player in the market with it. The change wasn’t driven by governments or the businesses themselves: instead, it was driven by consumer habits. Research shows that over the last holiday season, more than 70 percent of customers used their smartphones to make purchases.

Just a few years ago, ecommerce retailers considered apps that helped their business a luxury. It was something only the biggest players in the market could afford. Now ecommerce apps are a necessity to help get the job done.

Consolidate Different Platforms

The creators of Shopify realized that the old model where companies just sold through their own sites, like Amazon, was falling by the wayside. These days, internet consumers rarely take the time to carefully type in the address of the ecommerce company website and browse their products. Instead, they’re looking to buy through multiple channels on multiple platforms, like social media. For businesses, this used to be a nightmare. Keeping track of transactions across multiple platforms was difficult and time-consuming.

But thanks to apps like Shopify Mobile, it’s not a lot easier. The app allows companies to capture payment information and product orders across multiple channels, meaning that they can track sales from a single location. This means no more flicking between platforms to communicate with specific customers.

Search Ranking Apps

Ecommerce businesses are obsessed about their ranking in Google search. They know that the higher they rank, the more likely they are to get clicked on when a customer types in a related keyword. The problem is that figuring out how to rank better is actually tough. Ranking calculations are complex and based on numerous factors.

Now, though, there are a bunch of apps out there which are looking to make things easier for small businesses. One app, called SemRush, allows users to analyze the websites of their competitors and find out which keywords they are targeting. Tools like this help businesses save lots of time and money, tweaking their own keyword parameters.

These tools also help you see where your competitors are getting their backlinks. This will help you know which blogs to target as well as which linking domains have the most authority.

Packaging Apps

Calculating shipping expenses is difficult. Currently, both FedEx and UPS are employing a complicated dimension weighting system where the dimensions of an item, not its weight, determines how much it costs to ship. If e-commerce companies want to accurately price their shipping, they need some sort of app that takes this complicated pricing structure into account. Fortunately, there are now FedEx and UPS DIM calculator apps that solve this problem. Just punch in the dimensions of your boxes, and it’ll give you the price it costs to ship.

WordPress App

WordPress is fast becoming the favorite website platform for small businesses, thanks to its many features. But what if you want to edit your site on the fly when you’re out of the office? Fortunately, WordPress has developed a solution. The company has developed a mobile web editor app that allows you to update your site with photos, blogs, and breaking news. What’s more, the app itself is very straightforward to use, unlike many other template-builder apps.

Social Media Marketing Managers

E-Commerce businesses live and die by their online exposure. As a result, many use social media to advertise products and gain new customers.

Social media, however, is time-consuming and hard to keep track of. Every day, thousands of comments are generated on social media across dozens of platforms. Without the right help, it’s hard to keep track of them all and respond to every single comment.

Apps like Hootsuite promise to transform ecommerce marketing. They merge with all your social media accounts, consolidating all activity into a single app. This means you can see your tweets and responses across all your social media platforms in one place. One of the cool things about these apps is that fact that they prevent you from missing comments about your company. In other words, you get to track everything that is said about you.

There are other benefits too. For instance, social media aggregator apps will often allow you to schedule when posts go out, meaning that you don’t have to be sitting in front of your social media account all day, ready to press the “publish” button at the opportune moment.