The Essential eCommerce Toolkit – Must-Have Tools for 2024

Choosing additional tools to spend money on for your eCommerce business can be a daunting, and often even a repulsive task. You can’t be completely certain about any of them before you try, but trying (in a large number of cases) requires subscribing.

We understand your position. After all, we are a business as well, and we have been in the same shoes. For this reason, we want to create a short & curated list of tools we think can be of help on your eCommerce journey.

One note before we start — here you won’t find suggestions such as “using a popular eCommerce platform (eg. Shopify)”, or “using a payment gateway” for secure processing of online transactions. The reason is that almost everyone knows about them, and they are more or less a base requirement for getting your foot into the eCommerce game. 

In this article, we will focus on slightly less popular choices that (we think) can make a difference.

Let’s start!

Customer Experience (and Engagement) Tools

These are tools you can integrate with your digital products/platforms and utilize them to smoothen your customers’ purchasing journey. This means utilizing strategies such as omnichannel engagement and creating personalized interactions.

What this boils down to is simple, really. Your users don’t want to be spammed with (from their point of view) useless products, they want no unclear situations (and when such a situation occurs, they want quick & reliable assistance), and they want their feedback to be heard. 

In return (if you fulfill all the aforementioned criteria), you will get a larger percentage of loyal customers and it will become significantly easier to retain them. This is because each time visitors and customers have an overall positive experience with your online store it is like laying a brick in your brand’s foundation.

One crucial thing to have in mind is that this is not a one-and-done type of effort. Nurturing relationships, especially profitable ones, with your customers requires time and effort. The idea is that, if you do it right, it will return to you in multiples.

Our top 3 picks in this category are:

Zendesk

Zendesk is a comprehensive CX solution that offers all the necessary features and integrations for providing your customers with a purchasing experience that will keep them coming back to your store. Messaging, Live Chat, Analytics & Reporting, and many other features are a part of the package you get when using Zendesk. 

Intercom

Create a help center, reach your customers through numerous channels, define workflows, send outbound messages – the list goes on and on. Besides an extensive list of features, Intercom also offers a large number of integrations. 

Hubspot

Hubspot’s arsenal of solutions goes beyond customer experience. They also have offerings for inbound sales, marketing, and various analytical features. When it comes to CX, all the standard and expected features are present. From knowledge bases, ticketing systems, and omnichannel messaging to call tracking and feedback management, they seem to have it all. 

Inventory Management Tools

The larger your inventory, the higher your need for a reliable & efficient inventory management system. 

For smaller businesses, these solutions may be too expensive. This is why it’s completely fine to consider utilizing them after you have achieved a certain amount of growth first.

For larger businesses, on the other hand, if you don’t have an in-house or a custom-developed solution, you should definitely consider incorporating an inventory management tool in your workflow.

What does a good inventory management tool look like?

This solution needs to be able to keep up the pace throughout all the stages of the inventory management process. Starting from purchasing, across production, stock control, and order management, to sales & reporting.

The three primary benefits you can get when using inventory management tools are:

• Optimized inventory levels – reducing the chance of overstocking or stockouts, and minimizing the risk of excess inventory costs or lost sales opportunities.
• Higher order accuracy – these tools minimize the chance of orders being unfulfilled or returned due to human error.
• Improved efficiency – this is mainly related to less manual work (and thus less chance for error) on inventory-related tasks such as stock replenishment, order fulfillment, and inventory audits.

When it comes to our suggestions, they are as follows:

Zoho

Zoho’s inventory management suite offers features such as multichannel selling, order management, and warehouse control. With integrations for various e-commerce platforms and shipping carriers, it can help streamline operations, automate workflows, and provide real-time insights through detailed reports. The suite also supports batch and serial number tracking, making it easier to manage inventory across multiple warehouses.

ClickUp

ClickUp’s inventory management suite is designed to streamline inventory tracking and management. It includes the following features: customizable fields, real-time updates, and reporting capabilities. ClickUp allows teams to manage inventory efficiently by offering integrations with other tools and generally by providing a centralized platform for all inventory-related tasks.

inFlow

inFlow Inventory has an intuitive inventory management system and it’s marketed towards businesses of all sizes. When it comes to features, it has everything you need: order tracking, inventory control, and reporting. Also, it supports integrations with various eCommerce platforms. The main benefits it brings are the simplification of the stock management process and enhancing operational efficiency.

Marketing Automation Tools

If there’s a repetitive task, there’s (almost always) a way to automate it. If there’s a field where repetitive tasks are present, it’s marketing. 

Sending a newsletter, for example, encompasses in all cases a large number of the same, ever-repeating, time-consuming steps. The same goes for social media management, and the same goes for many other areas that fall under the marketing umbrella. 

What a good marketing automation tool can do for you, besides saving you time (and nerves), is making it possible to set up rules for communicating differently to different audiences based on the parameters you choose.

You want to engage cart abandoners one way, and your loyal customers in a completely different manner. You can look at these possibilities as a way to increase the return on your communication efforts with your customers and prospects.

When it comes to specific suggestions, here are three:

HubSpot

This is the second time it appears, and as you may have guessed – it’s a pretty solid tool. When it comes to marketing automation, Hubspot offers essentially everything you need to create forms, optimize and personalize emails, and even create ad campaigns. It also has an analytics section so that you may see if what you’re doing brings any results, what to focus on, and what to discard.

SalesForce

SalesForce is much more than a marketing automation tool. However, when it comes to it, SalesForce offers a set of tools that covers all the fields a marketer needs for efficient automation, but it doesn’t stop there. Besides automation, SalesForce also offers various other personalization, analytics, and loyalty tools.

MailJet

As its name suggests, MailJet is focused mostly on solving email automation problems. Compared to the other tools, it doesn’t offer as comprehensive set of solutions as they do. However, when it comes to email, it offers the possibility to automate emails (which is why it’s on this list in the first place), create landing pages, use templates, perform A/B tests, and much more.

Analytics & Reporting Tools

In eCommerce, data drives decisions. Or, to put it differently, making decisions that will enable your business to grow requires data, in almost all cases. In a vast majority of cases, gathering data will require one of (or a combination) the following measures:

• Tracking your visitors’ behavior on your website, 
• tracking your campaign performance,
• tracking sales of your products.

Data gathered from these sources can be used to: 

• optimize your customers’ experience, 
• improve your RoI on your marketing & sales expenditures, 
• identify trends, patterns, and ultimately opportunities.

This list is far from finite, but it serves to underline the importance of high-quality data-gathering & analytics tools. 

This field is perhaps the most competitive one when it comes to how many tools there are on the market. This is why gathering the top 3 was not an easy task. This is why we have decided to include some of the more thoroughly market-tested and verified offerings.

Google Analytics

A staple in every marketing person’s toolkit. It is almost synonymous with tracking the behavior of your website’s visitors. The free version is suitable for a vast majority of businesses and websites. It requires placing a tag in your website’s code, which can be done either manually or through Google’s Tag Manager. Once that’s done, data will start populating and you will be able to run a plethora of different reports and gain insights into what parts of your website work and which ones do not.

Hotjar

Hotjar is an analytics and reporting tool that provides insights into user behavior on websites. It offers features such as heat maps, session recordings, and surveys. It can visualize user engagement and help you collect feedback from those same users. Also, it offers various other reports and insights when it comes to user behavior on your website, and it also requires installing a tracking code.

Microsoft Clarity

Clarity is a tool predominantly aimed at tracking and analyzing user behavior on your website and individual pages. It requires installing a tag on your website, just like most analytics tools do. Its most prominent features are heatmaps and session recordings. Besides that, it also provides information such as a number of sessions, users, and clicks (and their types) during a certain date range. 

Social Commerce Tools

Social commerce tools help integrate touchpoints on your social channels with the rest of your customer experience infrastructure. These tools make it easier for you to manage social media storefronts (eg. Instagram’s shoppable posts) and help drive purchases directly from your social media channels. 

To simplify things, if you want to sell something through social media, you’ll likely make good use of these types of tools.

In most cases these tools can make it possible for your customers to make purchases without leaving the social platform they found you on. You may think – but I want them to visit MY website! We understand that, but hear this – chance is, without the social media platform they likely would not have found your store anyway. Also, it’s not so black and white. Some of them may actually visit your website. Some may remember it for later purposes. And yes, some may make that one purchase and never think about your store again.

The bottom line is that you need to think of these tools as complementary to your existing strategy. They help you tap into customer segments that you most likely otherwise wouldn’t be able to.

Another benefit of these tools is that they are one more building block towards a real omni-channel experience for your customers. In the long run, being present on various channels helps build brand awareness & loyalty, provides MUCH more customer insights, and makes it easier for you to engage with your customers. 

And just to clarify, by engage we mean educate your buyers, adjust your messaging, and place your products in front of them.

Here are our picks from this category:

Soldsie

Soldsie offers solutions that help you drive traffic from your social profiles to your website, and boost sales & revenue in return. Its core feature is the customization of your ‘Link in Bio’ link, enabling you to both personalize your offerings and present your brand in the way you want.

Shoppable

When it comes to social commerce, Shoppable can help you embed TikTok videos with your products in it, in your online store. You may then enable your customers to purchase all the products mentioned in the video and create a 1-click-experience for them. 

Tagshop

Tagshop helps you turn user-generated content with your products into shoppable posts and galleries. Genuine good feedback on your products and proof of people using them is one of the best sales drivers there is. 

Conclusion

Whether you are just starting off, or have been in the eCommerce industry for some time, an overview of these tools can always come in handy. Checking off the basics, revisiting the fundamentals, and comparing various tools is never a bad thing. 

One common thing with all these tools is that they help you keep your customers front and center when it comes to your overall business strategy. They provide easier ways to reach them, make their experience more enjoyable, track their behavior, and more. 

Doing all this, in turn, can benefit your bottom line by positively impacting your sales and revenue. 

A few years ago, tools such as these could perhaps be considered a novelty. Now, they are a necessity. One thing you can be sure of is that much more likely than not, your competitors are using some, if not all of these tools, and utilizing them for their own goals.