Choosing A Perfect Enterprise Ecommerce Platform For Your Business - An Ultimate Guide

Irony is a form of Paradox. A paradox is what is good and great at the same time.

While ecommerce managers across all verticals have a similar thought on the important factors for the growth of an ecommerce business, there is always one thing that is given the highest priority - More Sales. But here is where the problem lies. The biggest irony of high-volume ecommerce stores is that, selling more can be its own enemy. The problem is quite clear - Increase in complexity.

As the sales of an online store increases, the organization scales, resulting in a huge surge in the complexities. All of a sudden, out of nowhere, your strategies and systems breakdown. They just don't work anymore. In order to combat these breakdowns and handle complexities companies steady themselves to solve one of their major issues. They face a dilemma of whether to move the online store to another ecommerce platform or not.

At first, it seems like a pretty straightforward job. They know the functionalities, their navigation board, product catalogs and shopping carts. But it is these common and expected features which constitute a complex set of capabilities which are required in a best-in-town ecommerce store. The slight difference between the capabilities of an ecommerce store or an application can determine the site's success or failure. Thus it is very important that you pick your ecommerce platform wisely and here are a few considerations that needs your special attention before you make a choice.

The most critical aspect of choosing an ecommerce solution is its ability to integrate with the other software that you use. Starting from the platform's extensions and add-on libraries to modules and plugins, you need to determine whether the software is readily available for use. While fraud management tools and solutions such as email marketing are a few integrations to be considered, always be sure of everything you need. Your ecommerce store needs to protect itself from potentially harmful orders and should be capable of responding quickly when the fraud occurs. Your enterprise ecommerce platform should integrate well into your fraud mitigation stack and the fraud management server.

Filling the Order: An authorization concerning to the merchant and the consumer is forwarded to the payment gateway. The payment gateway then transmits this to the interface to process the payment. This seemingly lengthy process typically takes a few seconds at most.

Deposition: The store owner then submits the approved authorizations in a batch to his bank for the final settlement. The bank then deposits all the approved funds to the owner's account.

Search

If your customers can find what they want easily, you clearly stand out from the rest. This is where the tiny search box at the top of your site comes into the picture. Not long ago, expectations from this little box were quite low. Today, the first thing users tend to click on, is the search bar. They expect this little search box to not only find what they are exactly looking for, but also guide them in a better way. This search experience that works in favour of your customers can play a huge role in increasing your revenue. However, it is just not your site but also the external search engines like Google who have to find your products. The dynamic ecommerce pages cause headaches as the Google spiders and other external search engines might misinterpret the content on a dynamically generated page. And there is nothing worse than a frustrated customer who has searched for something he wants and is unable to find it even when he knows it is on your store.

When looking out for an enterprise ecommerce platform, certain questions can help you figure out the search puzzle.

How easy is it to integrate an ecommerce search tool on my store?

Can I know what product attributes do the customers search for?

Based on their search, can I learn more about my customers?

What exactly happens when a customer searches using a similar term but not an exact match? And how do I deal with spelling mistakes?

How easy is it for the external spiders to index my dynamic site?

Reports and Analytics

The information or the data about your customers that your ecommerce store holds is as valuable as its features. This information about your customer behaviour and their preferences is a treasure you can't afford to lose. But businesses today find it really difficult to leverage the value that this information holds. The data can help you launch campaigns targeted to a specific audience to generate higher revenue. But you cannot afford to configure the entire site based on this information especially if the data is from a plethora of sources. Thus when evaluating an enterprise ecommerce solution, keep in mind to have a rich insight on your customer data and how effective the platform can be towards it. From the ability to track both historic and behavioral data and offering the report on a dashboard to monitoring various business metrics like conversion rates and providing a multichannel view of the business, your ecommerce platform must have it all.

Budget

This is an other very important fact to consider especially with the variety of pricing structures that accompany an ecommerce platform. When budgeting for an ecommerce solution, you need to be careful and make sure that you do not look only at the surface like most of the other companies do. While companies worry about things such as licensing and hosting fees, set-up and development costs, they fail to notice the other costs involved such as maintenance cost or the costs that come with development contingency or other integrations. Also, it is important that the budget for your enterprise ecommerce solution also includes indirect costs and a strategy for a post-launch road-map.

Changing platforms is a very big deal for a business. And when there are so many ecommerce solutions with the same set of features, the real difference is only visible when you examine the fine print. Once you have a good idea of what factors in an enterprise ecommerce platform will benefit your business, and how your team want it to be structured, it is time to hit the ocean and do your research on the platforms available.