20+ Best E-commerce Tools for Emerging Startups

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If you are an emerging startup, one of the first steps, before you go public, is to find and choose the set of e-commerce tools that suit your business. Those tools will help you manage your business activities and will keep you up to date with important details.  Since the number of e-commerce tools is increasing daily, there is quite a lot to choose between.  

🚀Read Ecommerce Guide – Introduction & How to Start an Ecommerce Business? 🚀

What Ecommerce Tools Startups Need?

There are numerous e-commerce tools that can help you improve your site. Mainly they fall under 5 categories:

1. Website tools
2. Research tools
3. Business tools 
4. Marketing tools
5. Analytics tools

Each category has an important function in your business. Combined with a smart marketing strategy, the right e-commerce tools can help you grow your online store – fast. Also, there is a quite important thing to notice while choosing a set of e-commerce tools you are going to use in the future. E-commerce CEO said it well:

“To choose an e-commerce website tool or platform, keep in mind your technical skills and budget as well as factors like SEO, mobile-friendliness, onsite search (a good site explorer) and scalability which makes it easier for users to find your site and for your business to grow. And don’t forget the importance of an e-commerce blog for your store. Having a blog is a great way to demonstrate authority and credibility, flex your SEO muscles, and heighten customer acquisition for your online business.”

So, if you don’t know where to start, take a look at the list of 20+ best e-commerce tools for emerging startups! 

E-commerce Website Tools

BigCommerce

BigCommerce is a leading e-commerce website builder. With its bunch of features, it helped almost 100,000 people to build their own online store. It lets you set up your store, add products, and make money through your website. BigCommerce is easy to use and perfect for beginners that have no technical knowledge. 

Besides that, it offers great support, mobile integration, customer loyalty, easily manage returns, quick set up, user-friendliness and many more things.

Magento

Magento is an advanced e-commerce platform on the market and it is used by some of the largest companies in the world. It should be a priority for businesses and individuals who want to develop a long-term professional e-commerce website. And it is an ideal platform for fast-growing small businesses.

Plus, it is built on open source technology and it is free.  Also, it offers powerful marketing, catalog-management tools, and search engine optimization.

Prestashop

If you need a solution to create, manage and grow your online business, use Prestashop. It is great for many reasons – free platform, easy to use, has a bunch of features, it is used by 300,000 shops worldwide and it is available in 75 different languages.

Some of the default features are visitor statistics, unlimited listings, SEO capabilities, customer email automation and more. Simply, it is one of the best open-source e-commerce tools with out-of-the-box features that make it a strong ally in your e-commerce battle. 

Shopify

Shopify is a commerce platform that enables you to start, grow, and manage a business. It is a great choice when you don’t have tech skills or resources to hire someone with tech skills.

This platform offers numerous templates for different niches and multiple features such as search engine optimization. Shopify integrates with more than 70 payment gateways with checkouts in more than 60 languages. That makes it easy to sell products to customers anywhere in the world.

Shopify also offers free tools such as a free logo maker, a business name generator, and a QR code generator. Read more about free online logo makers in the WebsiteSetup article.

You can try Shopify free for 14 days, and after the free plan expires, you will be able to see if this platform is the right fit for your needs. 

Squarespace

Squarespace is a simple website builder and web host for all types of businesses. From stores, restaurants to e-commerce and independent web editorials. It is easy to use because there is no coding required, and it offers several options and templates that empower businesses with different functionalities. 

So, the process of creating a website itself is simple. Such as editing content, choosing templates or dragging and dropping items. Possibilities for editing templates are wide. Also, one of the best things about Squarespace is the quality of the templates offered.

WooCommerce

For everyone who loves WordPress, WooCommerce is a perfect choice.  It is a flexible, open-source e-commerce solution built on WordPress. And it is one of the most popular ways to build an e-commerce store for sites. It gives existing websites the ability to sell online.

Some of the reasons why people choose – it’s free, extensible, work on all devices and it’s secure. Since it is easy to extend, WooCommerce lets you customize your store to meet your needs. Also, there is a free WooCommerce mobile app (Android and iOS) for store management on the go.

Relevant: 12 Best WordPress Plugins for Excellent User Experience

E-commerce Research Tools

Ahrefs

Ahrefs is a marketing and SEO tool that offers different features such as keyword researching and rank tracking. For example, if you do the research for keywords, Ahrefs gives you what is a key difficulty for a specific keyword, its search volume, return rate. And everything else you need to know about keywords. And for backlinks, it shows you which backlink you should or not use on your sites.

It is essential for your content and SEO as it shows you which content is relevant. This tool is also relevant to analyze the competitors and build a link building methodology.

BizStats

If you need a free online source for small business statistics, choose BizStats. It collects and adds value to public data, delivering it without cost.

As they said: “BizStats select raw data to develop value-added calculations and publish the results in an easily accessible format for business owners and professionals. You can spend hours or days tracking down raw versions of much of the information we offer – but we do the legwork for you.” 

JungleScout

Jungle Scout is an Amazon product finder and research tool. It is designed to search product ideas, niches, and keywords in Amazon.

The Ecommerce CEO said it well: “If you are selling on Amazon and from your own site, it’s an intelligent choice for product research. Pricing for the app ranges from a $29 monthly subscription which lets a single user track up to 40 products to a $197 one-time fee for the app’s Chrome extension that provides details on profit margins, item trends, monthly revenue, and more.”

It also helps us determine what products to sell, how many we need to sell to get to the first page. Most people say that the chrome extension is their favorite part of this tool.

SEMRush

If you are looking for a tool that will let you see your page performance, this tool is perfect for that. Or even insight into competitor site where you can then compare sites. SEMRush tracks more than 18 billion keywords and tracking more than 710 million domains.

Then, it offers solutions for SEO, PPC, content, social media and competitive research. It can be used for both natural and paid SEO with a lot of features.  

SimilarWeb

Have you ever wondered how your competition generates traffic to their website? If yes, then SimilarWeb is a platform you should consider.

It aggregates traffic statistics of any website and displays them on very clear dashboards. It allows businesses to gain valuable insights about their website performance. Apart from that, this information provides a solid ground for developing new plans and strategies.

Besides website data, SimilarWeb provides information about mobile app industry, competitor keywords, email and social media traffic, conversion funnel pages, etc.

IO Scout

IO Scout Product Database gives access to over 150 million products on the platform – analyze the niche by applying filters, including revenue, stock status, sales, and reviews. Get accurate data within seconds and choose the most successful items to perform on the platform. Find an answer to the question, “What can I sell on Amazon to make money?”

SurveyMonkey

Collecting feedback, opinions and criticism from your customers can mean the world for optimizing your business. This is where SurveyMonkey comes in. It’s an online software, which helps you create and run surveys.

SurveyMonkey offers 31 survey templates, numerous question options and, most importantly, an analysis feature. It enables you to follow survey results in real-time.

E-commerce Business Tools

Asana

Asana is a tool that allows you to create different tasks for each team member, create plans, mark projects and task as completed, assign specific employee for specific tasks and other possibilities. It is very useful when you have deadlines to create a schedule of tasks. It greatly improves productivity when you know what you need to do in a day, week or month.

Plus, you can integrate it with Google Drive apps, so you can easily import already existing documents.

EcomDash

This software is built to help you save time and sell more by simplifying multichannel inventory management, order fulfillment, and more.

EcomDash offers a bunch of features ranging from activity tracking to inventory optimization, order processing, and sales reporting. Integrations include BigCommerce, Shopify, and WooCommerce carts as well as QuickBooks Online for financials.

Sourcify 

If you wish to manage and organize your entire production process within a single, then Sourcify is the best choice.  It is a manufacturing platform that directly connects customers with factories overseas.

Sourcify reduces the risk associated with the manufacturing process by vetting their manufacturers. The service provides a money-back guarantee if store owners aren’t satisfied with the final product.   Also, it provides project management tools to smooth the production process and provides users with bids from three manufacturers for each project.

Tickspot

Tickspot, time management software makes keeping projects on a budget an easy task. Users are able to track the amount of time spent on each task, to take notes, and jump between multiple timers based on the task they are working currently. 

E-commerce store owners can make use of TickSpot’s report functions to keep an eye on project budgets and productivity, assign tasks to members of their team, or set recurring projects from within the app. 

E-commerce Marketing Tools

AI Trillion

AiTrillion is an AI-powered e-commerce marketing platform. It offers an all-in-one marketing cloud that boasts a customer base of a whopping 55M customers spread across 175 countries.

With Aitrillion, companies can orchestrate campaigns across channels like push, email, in-app messaging, and, auto-optimization towards higher conversions powered by machine learning.

Their AI product leverage predictive analysis and data-driven algorithms to generate quick sales, automate marketing and provide insightful engagement with customers & visitors.

Active Campaign

Active Campaign is a business marketing application designed for small companies. Accordingly, it’s used by over 100,000 people globally, and it is to be one of the most affordable providers for SMBs. Plus the quality of their software is great. 

This application provides a convenient set of emails and messaging features. As a result, it features links to the marketing automation platform. So, this software has all the tools you need to boost your business from marketing automation. Along with built-in CRM and sales automation functionalities.

BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo is a social media analytics tool. It provides access to the social media search engine. Consequently, you have the opportunity to see which content performs best in each niche you’re interested in. This tool analyzes the entire internet and scales the content based on the numbers of likes and comments they’ve received.

In this way BuzzSumo can save you a lot of testing and time, while approaching a certain audience via a certain channel. Apart from advanced data filters, this tool offers data exports, content creator’s details, social media analytics, etc.

Buffer

If you need a tool for managing your social media accounts – meet Buffer. It is a popular tool that lets you save time and schedule your post on social media accounts. You can track your content performance on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest.

Tracking your social media audience’s interest in topics, planning your social media calendar, and boosting engagement is easy with the Buffer app.

MailChimp

One of the largest email service providers and marketing automation software. It allows you to stay in touch with your customers via email. Packed with templates that are easy to customize and use, MailChimp is a go-to email service for many e-commerce marketers.

Also, this email provider helps you design email newsletters, share them on social networks, integrate with services you already use and track your results.

Search spring

SearchSpring is the right solution if you want to collect better search data, provide relevant search results, optimize auto-complete or drive search conversions. It helps you to develop a better search experience with the advanced site search.

Some of the largest e-commerce brands like Stanley Black & Decker have used SearchSpring for their advanced website search and category navigations.

Proved

If you are full of ideas that you wish to test with your target audience, Proved is a tool for that.

Write down your idea and Proved will generate a smart and professional questionnaire, and then direct your idea to the required demographic. Then, in just a few hours, you’ll get a smart dashboard with your idea’s scores, including explanations from respondents. 

Unbxd

Unbxd is a one-stop product discovery solution that gives marketers and merchandisers the tools to optimize their site search and product recommendations. This tool lets you see a report on how users are finding out the right products. You can use Unbxd as a plugin for Shopify, too.

According to Econsultancy – “Over 30 percent of site visitors will use the site search and according to one study, visitors using site search converted at 4.63 percent compared to the site’s average of 2.77 percent — over 1.8 times more effective!”

So, you can see that site search is highly important for e-commerce sites as it is the part of the customer experience.

Cyfe

Cyfe is a popular tool, which enables you to monitor your online presence. It provides an all-in-one business dashboard where you can keep track of your social media, sales, support, infrastructure, etc. What is most, it integrates with numerous other applications and business systems.

Through its powerful and intelligent dashboards, end-users can get a full overview of how their business is doing. Cyfe therefore provides ample information for data-driven decisions and it is a great indicator of a company’s marketing efforts.

Ecommerce Analytics Tools

Google Analytics

We can say that Google Analytics is still the number one powerful analytical tool. With it, users have the ability to track traffic every step of the funnel. It is a free tool that can help you optimize your site and product descriptions as much as to improve conversions on PPC ads. Plus to track visitor behavior on your store. So, Google Analytics is a must-have for any e-commerce business.

Also, if you haven’t previously used this tool or you are having troubles with it, Google offers free training to help you learn this tool.

Neatly

If you need an app that will allow you to easily track and set your goals, to organize your days and to deliver insights about marketing, then Neatly is a perfect solution for you. With attractive and user interface, this app allows you to see all of your data in one place.

Neatly integrates with more than 45 top e-commerce apps, including Shopify, MailChimp and Google Analytics.  It allows you to track KPI‘s and let you set monthly goals. Then, Neatly will use these goals to provide you with personalized insights to help you achieve your goals.

You can create weekly or monthly reports that can be delivered directly to your email.  And also, you can create multiple companies from one account and invite team members as required.

Mixpanel

With Mixpanel you can get valuable customer insights and then make smart decisions based on how customers use your product. It has some similarities with Google Analytics.

Logaster, online branding tool explained it well: “The difference is that data points are connected to users. This not only allows you to identify your users but also to personalize your marketing or relational campaigns. It is also possible to send push notifications to all users who abandon their shopping cart; to send an email to all the people who bought more than X products on your site/application and who have visited such landing page.”

Optimizely

If you want to test the effectiveness of CTAs on your website or landing page, you can use an A/B testing platform like Optimizely. Everyone should have this software in their toolbox. Its interface is WYSIWYG, which means you can use this tool without having to put your hands in code.

Also, Optimizely has two different product levels: Optimizely Web, and Optimizely Full Stack. So you can choose which suits your business better.

VWO – Visual Website Optimizer

VWO is A/B testing and Conversion Optimization Platform that offers a bunch of features that go well beyond just analytics. Such as heat maps and click maps that can help you optimize conversions or visitor segmentation for running targeted tests. 

It integrates well with most major e-commerce platforms and allows you to test, analyze, edit, and target campaigns. For example, integration with Google Analytics helps you to create different versions of your webpage in VWO, and then to do the analysis of an A/B test in Google Analytics.

Final Thoughts

We hope you will find a platform that suits your business the best. As soon as you find the right one, it will be easier for your startup to accomplish goals. Remember to plan carefully and invest in where it counts.

Have you already used some of these e-commerce tools? Tell us what you think in the comments!