How A 360-Degree Ecommerce Website Builder Can Help You Future Proof Your Business

Are you planning to take your business online? 

If your answer is yes, we hope you also know the importance of the very first step - finding the best ecommerce platform that aligns with the present as well as future needs of your enterprise brand.

Why?

Because you wouldn’t want to lose your customers to the competitors. Surprising as it may sound, a restricted and one-size-fits-all ecommerce platform with its limited features can mar your business in more ways than you can possibly think of.  

As a brand out to win the ecommerce game, you sure would want to secure your business with a future-ready,  360 degree ecommerce solution provider.  After all, you need nothing but the best for your brand. And here are just a few reasons why you should not compromise on your ecommerce solution:

Benefits Of Choosing The Best Ecommerce Platform For Your Business

Let's look at some of the proven benefits of choosing the best ecommerce platform for your online business:

• Get a one-stop solution to all your ecommerce needs: Your ecommerce platform should not just be a tech solution provider. It should also offer complete solutions for everything you are going to need to sell online. Right from secure payment gateways to dynamic marketing tools, pre-integrated logistics services, etc, it should provide you with all the tools needed to run and grow your business. After all, you want to focus on growing your business not managing random third party vendors

• Built on advanced and future-ready technology your ecommerce platform enables your brand to build high-performance stores

• Helps you create a seamless user experience on all devices and across different channels thus increasing the conversion rate.

• Building tailor-made solutions for your brand becomes possible with easy customizations

• You get a mobile-ready ecommerce website builder to leverage mobile commerce.

• Security is ensured right from the start

• You get a fully hosted and managed ecommerce platform that frees you from the worries about the up-gradation or maintenance costs

With an enterprise ecommerce platform at your disposal, you open up new possibilities for your business. With the rich set of features, tools and battle tested solutions you get better freedom to experiment, explore and build out-of-box solutions.

Challenges Faced By Enterprise Brands Not Having A 360-degree Ecommerce Solution Provider

While we just discovered a host of benefits, let us also unravel the challenges faced by enterprise brands in the absence of a 360-degree ecommerce solution provider -

Failing To Meet Buyer Expectations

The first question to ask yourself before going online is, “ How is my brand going to meet the customers’ expectations throughout their journey?

Well, the answer is you would need to meet the following buyer expectations:

1. They expect your online store to provide them with repetitive discounts and coupon codes 

2. They want a safe and secure payment method

3. They like to be heard and valued, they expect you to offer a proactive customer service

4. They want a personalised shopping experience

And when you are unable to meet those standards, your customer base starts falling out.

Chaotic Order Management

Once customers make a purchase from your brand, the way you go about managing your inventory, orders, and logistics, speaks a lot about your business. It becomes vital to keep your customer satisfied as an unhappy customer is a roadway to low conversions. 

Difficulty In Personalization

45% of the customers are more likely to shop from an ecommerce site if they offer personalisation. In the absence of the right solution provider, it becomes difficult to implement personalisation through checkouts, discounts, buyer journeys, notifications, etc. This in turn will eventually lead to your customers being poached by your competitors.

Inability To Offer Seamless Experience Across Channels

Online buying is no longer linear. Customers keep hopping in and out of different channels and they expect same experience across channels. With a dated ecommerce solution enterprise brands can at-best offer siloed multi channel experiences. This ultimately takes your business south as a major chunk of customers drop your brand.

Why Is Future-Proofing Essential For Your Online Business 

To achieve your long-term goal of building a successful online brand with a constant flow of customers, you must be able to anticipate the future trends and be ready with solutions to stay ahead of the curve. Ecommerce is changing rapidly and so are the business models. To build your own successful brand you need to be prepared with innovative solutions to match pace with upcoming trends.

Top Ecommerce Solution Provider Features To Future Proof Your Business

Here is what you should be looking at a 360-degree enterprise ecommerce platform for your brand:

1. Technology That Keeps You Ahead Of The Curve 

Are you tired of dealing with some or other technical issues with your enterprise ecommerce platform on a daily basis? Well, time to consider migrating to 360-degree ecommerce solution provider that offers futuristic solutions for your brand. This is the era of rapid tech-changes and the changing market dynamics make future-ready technology a necessity.

Who could have thought even a few years back that 73% of online sales would come via the mobile channel? Moving ahead, we have already entered ecommerce 3.0 and now your ecommerce website builder needs to have the capabilities to make new-age customer touchpoints commerce-able.

The best ecommerce platforms of our age need to be powered with flexible and agile technology that quickly adapts to change. StoreHippo ecommerce solutions powered by MACH architecture give your brand the freedom to experiment and innovate. With the inherent agility, flexibility, and scalability of the MACH architecture, enterprise brands can turn their ideas into reality and build out-of-box solutions to disrupt the market.  

With StoreHippo’s decoupled headless platform, personalization and customizations can be implemented faster and with better creative control. Building hybrid marketplaces, designing personalized landing pages, creating and managing location-specific stores, and offering personalized prices and discounts, all become easy with headless solutions for ecommerce. 

Along with this SPA makes it possible to build high-performance, lightweight sites that help in engaging, converting, and eventually making customers loyal to your brand. By choosing a technologically advanced enterprise ecommerce platform, you can make your brand future-ready and keep your business ahead of trends.

2. Efficient And Automated Product And Order Management System

What does a customer expect from a brand? 

Quality products, easy ordering process, quick response to their queries and streamlined fulfillment. 

Whatever be the scale or size of your business, this is the basic requirement to keep your buyers happy. And this process is already streamlined in offline stores.

So what happens when they land on your online marketplace? They look for a similar or better experience. However, things are different in the digital set up. The customers do not have the privilege to look and feel the products. Also, they need assurance that their order is paid for through secure channels and that they will receive timely delivery. 

While this process is easier with small stores managing your enterprise brand and scaling it to millions of users requires top notch order and product management solutions. Imagine a scenario where your ecommerce website builder does not have right tools to display a 360-degree view of your products. Now even if customers order, there would be high chances of returns and refunds as your buyers could not see and understand your products. 

Similarly, in lack of an automated and simplified order management system, managing orders, shipping, invoicing, refunds, abandoned cart follow up etc. would be a pain. Once your customer places an order, your order and inventory management go a long way in solidifying your brand image. With a hassle-free buying and delivery experiences, your customers become your best brand ambassadors and promote your brand by sharing their positive experiences. 

StoreHippo enterprise ecommerce platform provides an end-to-end product and order management system that saves your time and makes your processes faster. With a gamut of automated features at your disposal, you can manage your products, orders, and fulfilment cycles with much ease. Such comprehensive solutions allow you to have lots of free time and data-driven insights to streamline your business strategies. 

3. Simplified And Low-Cost Logistics 

All online brands want to keep their customers happy, right?

An end-to-end simplified and automated logistics help you achieve just that! 

Managing your shipping and fulfilment manually is not the right way to move forward. Tedious manual labelling and individual order management is not possible in the long-term. 

Manual fulfilment increases the  probability of human errors. And with issues like late or wrong packages being delivered, your customers become reluctant to place an order again from your brand. 

Managing reverse logistics along with your brand’s regular order becomes even more taxing in a manual set up. As the business scales rapidly, manual shipping and returns management can create a chaotic environment detremental to busienss growth . 

So, what is the way out of this mess? 

Well to start with, look for an ecommerce website builder that enables you to automate and simplify your shipping. An enterprise ecommerce platform that comes with built-in solutions for logistics and fulfilment management can help you reduce your return and refunds with timely and damag-free order fulfilment. By offering integrations with trusted logistics partners, they save your time and money in finding fulfilment partners. Also, with multiple shipping partners at your disposal, they help you optimize your shipping costs.

According to Statista, 63% of the customers said that they would abandon online shopping due to shipping charges and 36% because of delays in shipment. With brands like Amazon and Myntra providing same-day or next-day, customers’ expectations are sky rocketing.  

Now, wouldn’t it be wise to power your brand with a solution provider that can help you do away with all your shortcomings and scale up your platform at any given point in the future with minimum to no disturbances to your business operations? 

StoreHippo, the best ecommerce platform provides you with hassle-free and efficient automated logistics for your online business. With 30+ integrated shipping providers and logistics aggregators, StoreHippo not only helps you in automating your logistics but also optimizes your shipping costs. You can pass on the cost benefits to your clients and thus gain their loyalty. 

4. Win Customers With Multiple Secure Payment Options

Do you know the secret way to win your customers? Well, it’s quite simple - offer them a secure payment option. Let them know you value their money.

A seamless checkout process is the most crucial ingredient of a successful brand. Although there multiple digital payment options today, not all are trusted by the online buyers. Stats suggest that it is ideal to have a handful of secure payment options at the checkout for your customers to choose from. It leaves an impression that you value your customers’ money and their choice of payment. 

Apart from this, there are various other reasons why having multiple secure payment options adds value to your brand. With multiple payment options to choose from, buyers are more confident about the transaction they make on your platform. 

With each transaction, there is a slight possibility of a failed transaction, which then leads to a loss of sales. You certainly don’t want to be in such a situation. 

Multiple payment choices not only help you retain customers, but also help you tap more sales from customers loyal to the payment brands. Payment brands collaborate with enterprise ecommerce brands and offer certain discounts, cashback or offers to customers using their payment channel during checkout.  Nowadays,  lots of gateways also allow your customers to complete a purchase on social media, which helps you go omnichannel. It's time to be innovative.

An enterprise ecommerce platform like StoreHippo lets you choose from over 60+ secure payment gateways. With StoreHippo you can add multiple gateways in your checkout to personalize your checkout for different customer groups, locations, multiple currencies etc. By making payments frictionless you can ensure more orders for your brand and also scale to new domestic and international markets.

5. Leverage Benefits Of M-commerce

Did you know that more than 51% of customers prefer mobile web apps to other shopping channels claiming these web apps to be more convenient? 

Mobile has changed the shopping behaviour today. Smartphones have the power to give not only the customers what they want but also the marketers what they need to run targeted campaigns. With the data collected from in-app browsing and by sending real-time push notifications, brands can engage and convert customers better. 

With M-commerce brands can have a wider audience reach, better order volume, boost brand awareness and loyalty, and offer multi-channel engagement. The question here is does your ecommerce website builder allow you to leverage the benefits of mcommerce? 

Well, to leverage m-commerce efficiently, brands need an enterprise ecomemrce platform that not only builds mobile-ready stores but also makes it possible to build PWAs and mobile apps. 

StoreHippo mobile-ready ecommerce platform enables you to create Android and iOS apps directly from your dashboard without any time-consuming coding. Also, all stores built on StoreHippo are PWAs, which means they work like hybrid apps when opened in a browser. 

Here are the m-commerce benefits brands get with StoreHippo:

• Easily create sub-store shopping apps for segmented customers

• Provide a better mobile shopping experience with beautiful device-specific themes

• Leverage push notifications to convert your audience into potential buyers

• Update your app easier and faster with real-time sync

Isn’t this the way forward to future-proof your brand? We bet it is!

6. Sell Omnichannel 

Modern buyer journeys are no longer liners. Customers hop on different channels during their purchase journey and wish to have a “BUY” button on all their preferred channels. Enterprise brands seeking fast-growth need to react strategically to these changing trends. This is possible when brands future-proof their business by going omnichannel. 

Wonder why your brand needs the omnichannel approach?  For starters, you are able to bridge the online and offline gap, leading to better conversions and increased customer retention. 

Attracting new customers is an ongoing process for any thriving business, but retaining the existing customers needs a strong omnichannel approach. New-age customers conditioned to shop on multiple channels will not react well to your brand’s absence on one or multiple channels. 

To understand how an omnichannel approach works, let us take the example of a customer looking to purchase a laptop. When he shows interest on your sites and social channels, you can send him a personalised e-mail asking him to visit the physical store. Once he visits and makes up his mind about the product, you ask him to order online from your website using mobile. When you deliver the product, you also ask them to review your service online. This is what a successful omnichannel strategy looks like. 

So the question here is, are you able to sell omnichannel on the provided ecommerce website builder? StoreHippo is built on headless architecture, making it easy to add new customer touchpoints using the same API and backend logic. By going omnichannel you can also gather valuable business intelligence about the best-performing channels. This enables you to maximize ROI from each channel by identifying which channel works best for various markets and audience groups. With such data-driven analysis and inputs, you not only make your brand future-proof but also position it to grow manifold. 

7. Drive Your Strategies With Data

Every business wants its graph to keep moving upward, right?

But it is only possible when you are able to keep a tap on the performance and analytics. When you use data to outline your business strategies, you have the power to better understand the performance and set goals for the future. Also, it helps you keep an eagle eye on your business. For example, with a sudden drop in sales, you could investigate different sessions, say transaction, cart, checkout, etc. 

Not having access to detailed business insights and reports, you are ill-equipped to plan strategic business moves or plug gaps that exist in your system. You might set unrealistic goals or leave profitable channels under-tapped in lack of detailed reports.  

Let’s understand this - Do you think you will be able to target your Facebook ads to the correct audience until you know the metrics and performance of your last ad campaign. When you know your customers and their behavioural insights; you plan better, and you get conversions better. And as your marketing stack gets bigger, the need to focus on data grows manifold, you can’t just randomly go on planning your business moves. Now, whether your enterprise ecommerce platform provide you with data and insights or not is the concern here.

StoreHippo comes with a host of such performance reports and analytical tools buil-in your dashboard. To name a few, the software provides you with top customer reports, top-selling products reports, store performance reports, and visitor tracker reports. You can also compare your brand's performance based on date, months, and year in one single click and thus strategize your marketing plans for the future.  Also, you can integrate with the best-in-breed analytics tools to get micro-level insights about your brand and buyers. Well, to sum it up, StoreHippo prepares your brand for proof-based growth strategies. 

8. Win Your Buyers With Discounts And Promotions 

Almost 93% of shoppers use a coupon or discount code throughout the year. After all, it's tough to resist a good discount at hand, isn't it? Leveraging discounts and other promotional coupons are a powerful tool to scale the business. But first things first, your ecommerce website builder must have a powerful discount and promotion engine to help you plan your promotions.

When you have a powerful discount engine at your disposal, you can get more sales by implementing a variety of discounts strategically. However, merely offering a lower price does not necessarily mean that your sales are headed north. It is imperative to be mindful while planning your discounts, say, products with higher margins can be put on sale with greater price cuts. In place of fixed discounts, calculate your margins and put on mixed discounts like coupon codes and flash sales on items. 

StoreHippo enterprise ecommerce platform comes with a built-in discount engine. Its built-in discount engine helps you offer personalised discounts and coupons to your buyers. Along with discounts and coupons StoreHippo also offers integrations with the best marketing tools to help you promote and grow your brand. With a variety of marketing tools available on one platform, your brand is ready reach new customers and markets easily.

9. SEO Ready Platform For Higher Reach

Today the buying decisions of your customers are majorly influenced by what they see and read online. Your position on the search page is directly proportional to your brand’s visibility. Surveys point out to the fact that the majority of users are likely to choose from one of the five top suggestions on the result page. So you need to have a strong SEO game to win the market and boost your conversion rates. To reach out to new customers, you have to leverage content optimization. 

SEO done right not only increases your reach and visibility but also adds quality to your website. With an enterprise ecommerce platform that facilitates you to plan and implement your SEO strategies well you can grow your reach, traffic and conversions dramatically. 

For the SEO strategies to work well you need some serious content optimization. Your website content, say blogs is essentially a contributing factor. Also, you need to regularly add new pages, optimize them for metadata, define canonical URL, add alt tags etc. All these efforts need to be streamlined with built in tools on your enterprise ecommerce platform to speed up your SEO processes.

StoreHippo SEO-ready best ecommerce platform comes with all the above tools to help your brand rank better on SERPs. Its powerful blog engine helps you build a brand with personalized content for different audience segments. With customizable design themes you can build wow stores that are also well optimized for spiders and crawlers. 

Well isn’t that spot-on with your plans to future-proof your enterprise brand. 

10. Support For Diverse Business Models 

A brand becomes a family name only when it lives up to customers' expectations. And their expectations have evolved today with the extreme flow of customization and personalization. When it comes to personalization, your business model doesn’t matter - the customer is the king and their satisfaction is what drives the sale. 

To model your brand to your customers’ preferences you need an enterprise ecommerce platform that helps you change quickly and easily according to market trends. It should give  you the freedom to pivot to any business model or create your own hybrid model depending on your customer’s needs and behavior. You must be able to create personalised buyer journeys for the new-age buyers easily.  

Does your ecommerce solution provider give you the liberty and space to choose the business model that fits your needs? If not, its time to hop on to a better ecommerce website builder. 

The next-gen enterprise platform, StoreHippo comes with full support for a variety of business models. It helps you to adapt faster to new and hybrid business models, leaving behind the limitations of monolithic ecommerce platforms. StoreHippo’s flexible ecommerce platform is designed for B2B, B2C, D2C, B2B2C, quick commerce, multi vendor marketplace, location-based stores omnichannel as well as any out of box hybrid business models.

How Can StoreHippo Help In Future-Proofing Your Business?

With cutting-edge MACH architecture, and inbuilt features to support diverse business models, StoreHippo ecommerce website builder offers 360-degree next-generation solutions. With seamless integrations, StoreHippo helps you curate tailor-made omnichannel solutions across 35+  industry verticals. For building the most innovative ecommerce solutions for enterprise brands and solving the biggest challenges in digital ecommerce, StoreHippo offers 300+ inbuilt features, 300+ API endpoints, 120+ built-in integrations, and customizable device-optimised themes. The power of leading cloud infrastructure lets you grow immensely without a tint of worry about scalability.

In simpler words, if you think of it, StoreHippo builds it! 

StoreHippo - Your 360-Degree Ecommerce Solution Provider 

With all the challenges mentioned above, you have nothing to worry about when you have the ease of extensive customer-centric solutions with StoreHippo. The enterprise ecommerce platform helps you create personalised buyer journeys with next-generation technology like -

• Headless commerce helps you build personalized experiences faster
• MACH architecture gives you the power and agility to experiment

These ecommerce features combined together make an ecommerce brand future-ready. Since the future of your business depends entirely on your choice of ecommerce platform, choose the one that offers you well-rounded solutions to grow your brand. Get ready to build a successful brand, and explore the amazing features that help you do so. Start your 14-days trial now.