To sustain your online shop, you need to find ways to market your products to your audience, convert leads into customers, and cultivate relationships with them to turn them into long-lasting advocates of your brand. Not to mention, you need to track your sales and manage your financing to ensure that your items and earnings match up to your inventory and profits.
Running your retail business by yourself by following the process above without any prior experience is not ideal. You end up spreading yourself thinly and end up not doing enough on all. Even with help from your team, there is still a risk of getting things wrong, which is something that you want to prevent from happening if you are still starting out.
Therefore, focus on growing your online store in the most efficient way possible by using these amazing tools at your disposal.
Vend
If you are running multiple shops in different locations all at once, then it must be a pain to collect and compute each of their finances. Instead of compiling all transactions from various stores at the end of the day, Vend will help you funnel all sales down a central system so no store transaction will slip away from you.
Related: Practical Tips on Selecting Payment Options for eCommerce Sites
The POS tool accepts any form of payment from customers for an easier sale and better chances of conversion. It also lets you reward customer loyalty for their continued patronage of your products to help you build customer relations and engagement. Other features include product management, robust reporting, and more.
Zendesk
One of the biggest culprits of loss in retail sales is the inability of the store to provide customers with efficient support for their questions. Without proper customer support, potential customers leave in frustration, never to purchase from your shop again.
Zendesk helps retail stores prevent the loss of clients by establishing a customer support system that will answer to all their needs. All potential buyers will do is chat, place a ticket, or call any of the customer support online at the moment with their questions.
Whether your retail business is just starting out or has grown beyond your imagination, Zendesk also provides flexible pricing for any support you need.
GetResponse
Email marketing is big in e-commerce. By building an email list of leads and interested buyers, you can send them highly targeted email campaigns that will bring them down your sales funnel, if not convert them to become your customers.
GetResponse is the perfect email platform for retail business owners without any experience in launching successful email campaigns. The drag-and-drop feature in creating newsletters and personalized emails for mass sending lets you focus on crafting your message instead of worrying about the layout and appearance.
Unlike other email platforms, GetResponse allows you to create landing pages optimized to build your mailing list. You can launch an A/B testing on your pages to see which version converts the most.
Due.com
If you are managing lots of people with your retail store, you need to track and monitor the hours they put in work so you can bill them appropriately. Due.com allows your employees to enter their hours from the tool’s beautiful interface. The tool also lets them define their tasks so their performance reflects on the report they will send to you.
The calendar summary feature allows you to view what lies ahead this week or month, whether it is receiving an invoice from your people or completing a project with them so that you can prepare ahead of time.
Mixpanel
Consumers make their purchases from different devices, whether from a desktop or a smartphone. While there are freemium analytics tools that let you gain insight from customer activity on your online store, there may not provide the data you need that will help you improve your sales from customers on their devices.
Mixpanel aims to solve this problem by specializing in mobile analytics of your site. You can segment your data according to different factors so you can develop actionable items. You can also visualize and customize your report so you can drill down data relevant to your needs.
Wrapping it all up
There are a lot more tools that can provide you results in growing your online shop, but the tools above should get you started. With a mix of central POS, marketing, and analytics tools, you can get a better understanding of your customers that will only help you learn the things you need to improve your shop.
More importantly, you can focus on finding ways to make your retail site better and let the tools do the dirty job for you!
Author: Christopher Jan Benitez
Freelance writer for hire by day. Heavy sleeper at night. Dreams of non-existent brass rings. Writer by trade. Pro wrestling fan by choice (It’s still real to me, damnit!). Family man all the time.
Damon Burton says
November 3, 2016 at 8:01 pmThis is very helpful especially for those starting their online business. These tools here can really help make easier to track the retail business. This is very informative article.