You can find online e-commerce systems on the internet easily such as Prestashop, osCommerce, Magento, and Zen Cart among others. Knowing the best system to use can be quite hard considering the many different systems available out there. However, it is essential that you choose one that perfectly suits your business. To ensure that you make the best choice possible, here are five key features that the e-commerce system you choose must have.
Catalog management
One of the most important aspects of eCommerce solutions is catalog management. It helps manage all the products you are selling under one roof. If you intend to upload many products on your site, this is a very important feature to use. It helps reduce valuable time through enabling you to download or upload your products in mass in the server. It helps ensure that you don’t waste a lot of time as you would when doing the uploading manually. A good catalog should make managing prices easy for your products. It should also feature a scheduler for automatic scheduling of prices.
Promotion and marketing tools
For an eCommerce site to be successful, it will need to promote its products occasionally and undertake marketing campaigns that will help ensure visitors keep coming back to the site and make a purchase. Ensure that the eCommerce system you decide to use make it possible for you to create as well as manage discount coupons and create pricing rules for both members and non-members. There are some powerful tools that allow you to cross sell and up-sell your products and play a very essential role when it comes to customer retention.
Shipping & delivery features
Your eCommerce site should have a well designed module for shipping and delivering your products to the customers. This is essentially the most important feature which the end customers are more interested in. A good system will allow the visitors to choose the best delivery option for their order. The system must also be capable of calculating the charges of shipping automatically. You must have a thorough knowledge of international carriers and also integrate them in your system as well.
Payment modules
This is a very important feature that every eCommerce must have. The main aim of any eCommerce site that sells product is of course getting paid. Ensure that the eCommerce system you decide to use supports all the main payment gateways such as 2checkout, PayPal and Worldpay. You should be able to give your visitors an option of being able to choose their most preferred option of payment.
Search engine optimization
Finally, SEO is a very important feature that any eCommerce system should have. SEO plays a crucial role in all products, services and eCommerce sites, which must be indexed and crawled by the search engines. Nobody will be able to find the products you are selling without SEO and it will be able for customers to land on your site. By keeping all these in mind, you should be able to find the best eCommerce system to use for your site.