The great thing about online retail is that it offers the seller a lot of flexibility in terms of doing their job. At the same time, online retail can be an overwhelming space. The sheer scale with which sales take place, the pace of the competition and the brand vulnerability that social media enables can be extremely stressful. To survive in this field, where the speed with which you make decisions and the efficiency with which you implement them become crucial, it is always helpful if you have the right tools for the job.
If one utilizes technology in an innovative manner, it can be very easy to focus on worthwhile problems by delegating mundane tasks to a tool. Not just that, technology also gives us the benefit of being able to see the world differently. It provides ways to analyze complex data that help us in our decision making processes. It would be safe to say that in the world on online retail, it is good to have a few well chosen tools under your belt. In this post, we will talk about 5 tools that are essential for online sellers. We recommend that you at least get acquainted with them, and try to incorporate them in your day-to-day process as an online seller. It can work wonders for your business.
Essential Tools for Online Sellers
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Google Analytics
It shouldn’t be surprising that Google Analytics is at the top of this list. After all, this analytics engine is the most widely used service of its kind on the web. What Google Analytics essentially does is that it provides you with detailed insights about the footfall on your website. Who is visiting your website, where are they visiting it from, which products are they interested in, how many times have they visited the site before – all these are valuable questions for the online seller. Google Analytics enables you to find answers to them. Google Analytics can also be integrated with Google AdWords, which means that finding relevant keywords and search terms becomes even more organic and easier. Google Analytics must be a staple for a smart online seller.
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MailChimp
We all know how important email marketing is, but we have also seen it go horribly wrong. MailChimp is a service specifically designed for sending emails – it can be integrated with small or large scale enterprises or even individual needs. This sort of scalability makes MailChimp extremely versatile at what it does. If you are in the business of sending spam emails, you know that you have to make them as catchy as possible. MailChimp is well aware of this, due to which they have tools that assist you in designing a compelling email or newsletter. It can be seamlessly integrated with web and mobile platforms and other tools and services that you might be using.
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HootSuite
A key point we need to understand about online retail in the context of social media is that the gap between marketing and customer service is virtually non-existent now. This is because social media provides instant gratification for the customer to approve or disapprove of the service you provide, which in turn reflects upon your brand identity. Just ask any online seller who has been defamed on Facebook. Essentially, this means that you need to be on top of your social media game. A great tool that assists you in doing so is HootSuite. HootSuite is a social media manager that lets you manage your Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Youtube, Google+, LinkedIn and other social media platforms from one portal. Through HootSuite, you can engage with your customers more efficiently, collect and analyze patterns across all your social media platforms, establish clear channels of communication with your customers and even manage your new marketing campaign that you thought of because you didn’t have to worry about these other things we just mentioned.
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Asana
Asana is a tool that works great for every office – be it online retail or anything else. This is because at the heart of Asana’s design is the idea of a team. It enables people to work together, look at each other’s ongoing work, manage deadlines, schedule meetings, basically anything you need to do while working together. Working as an online seller, it gets difficult to manage all the aspects of the job at the same time. Asana is a great tool for delegation and makes it easy for people to communicate while collaborating on a job. Another great thing is that it becomes easy to track a project – to see its progress and how it is affecting the company and make changes on the fly.
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Browntape
Browntape is a dashboard that is specifically designed with the Indian online seller in mind. You can use Browntape in two ways, you and your team can use the software and get all your online orders from multiple channels integrated in one place, or you can outsource the job of setting up your ecommerce channels to experts from Browntape. This way, it is very easy to manage everything from listing the products on the online sales channel, performing daily sales operations and communicating with the warehouse. Browntape also becomes a nifty assistant while packing and shipping your products, by printing invoices and bills of sale, helping you locate the product in the warehouse via SKU codes, and automatically informing your customers about the status of the product. In essence, Browntape has the capability to become the nervous system of your online sales enterprise.
These are a few must-have tools if you are seriously getting into online sales. To know more, get in touch with Browntape. We are India’s leading e-commerce solutions company, and we are always happy to help!
