The eCommerce wave started in early 2000 in India, but today it’s prevalent in the entire country.

Check out this infographic on the history of India eCommerce

From larger manufacturers to the smaller retailers, everyone wants a piece of the fortune pie, hence the use of e-Commerce platform’s increasing to build online websites.

Building eCommerce Website?

The best shot you have is using a SAAS eCommerce platform to build the online store.
Although, if you are planning on your own e-commerce website and going online in 2 months down the line, consider one of Zero, Shopify, & Shop2Grab, which are best platforms for building the eCommerce website.

e-Commerce platforms offer remarkable advantages to the online retailers gaining the edge in today’s highly competitive market.

1. Easy Product Catalog Management

   An eCommerce store builder offers fully customizable e-Commerce product catalog. These catalogs are designed specifically to increase the sales conversions and can be re-structured to fit any branding virtually.
   They ensure a seamless customer experience by managing the product catalog for eCommerce website which is a daunting task when you don’t have the right eCommerce platform.

   These platforms make sure that the processes are flexible to create, choose and configure the variety of products you want to offer your customers. It also leads the advanced search functionality helping users to find the product they are looking for.
   

   
   The centralized content manager interface in various platforms enables managing the catalogs efficiently across your entire store by price, title or stock level; hence making it a user-friendly channel for maintaining the pool of information. Product details like pricing, image, and other specifications are editable by just a click on the specific button.

2. Multi-Store Customization

   E-commerce platforms have the best interactive feature of Multi-store catalog, to create and manage multiple eCommerce stores efficiently.

   Look for these features when selecting an eCommerce website builder:

• • Mapping multiple eCommerce stores on one or multiple URLs
  • Facilitate the sharing of multiple product catalogs across the stores
  • Share departments or categories across product catalogs
  • Liberation to create different pricing and promotions
  • Ease of setting a unique profile for each store
  • Access to customer accounts across the stores
  • Flexibility to create unprecedented templates/themes for each eCommerce website

3. SEO & Online marketing

   SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is one of the most important strategies used by successful online businesses to drive traffic to their online stores. The more traffic you’re able to generate, the more customers and sales your business will convert.

   An eCommerce platform offers a powerful out-of-the-box SEO tool that includes SEO capabilities and effective practices like managing 301 redirects, custom title tags, static URLs, meta description, meta keywords, analytics code, text-based navigation, etc.

   Additionally, building an online store with the eCommerce Platform offers a complete full-packaged professionally carved portfolio templates that help improve edges of branding without the need of any third-party designer.

   It helps to make your online store SEO friendly, enhancing the marketing and promotional activities by spreading awareness amongst the potential buyers making it easier for the keen customers to find your online store. Further, you can customize the content critical to high page rankings, increased site traffic, and increased sales.

4. Customer Insight

   Being the owner of an online store, having fast access to the whole customer history and other info in your online, offline, or physical operations will influence your work in a positive way and you can refer the past views as well as purchases of your customer and potentially up-sell from an automated system. eCommerce platforms provide advanced analytics capability, based upon the industry standard Google Analytics, which will allow you to review your site traffic in microscopic detail and help you to fine-tune both your SEO efforts and to help better shape the online shopping experience.

5. Effortless Promotions with coupons

   eCommerce platforms allow you to create coupons to manage promotions for online store seamlessly. As a result, you can share the promo codes with your customers that they can use while checking out. These promo codes can be created for flat rate shipping, free shipping, occasions, special hours, or for certain size ranges. you can set an expiry time for the coupons.

6. Improved Efficiency
   

   The eCommerce platforms increase productivity by neglecting manual code development for the website and the required functions. As it fully automates the essential processes such as category creation; organization of new product listings; amount calculation and generation of payment receipt for each item including taxes and shipping expenses that are computed based on product class, country, state, and more.

7. Social Media Integration

   The eCommerce platform allows you to stay tuned and connected with your prospects and customers via social media integration (including Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest) of your online store. It also in easy sharing of product updates and other news related to the store like discounts, special offers, updated terms & conditions, and much more. Further, with the integrated social reviews, your online shoppers will have the ability to share their ratings, reviews, questions, answers, and experiences.

8. Payment Gateway Integration

   eCommerce platforms present a variety of payment methods to your customers, including credit cards, cash on delivery, PayPal, Google Checkout, purchase orders and more.

   Major payment gateways supported are PayPal and Authorize.Net. Also, they allow you to easily extend the payment system to connect to other gateways. The online payments via a secure portal or gateways help the buyers to make the payments directly from their bank account inconvenient way. Further, to avoid the barriers of country and region, these platforms support a unique functionality of Multi-Currency that enables the customers to pay in their own currency.

9. Automated Sales Confirmation

   The automatic email notification system of the eCommerce platform keeps the customer in touch with the online store with regards to their purchase. This automated email contains the important details regarding the order placed by the buyers which include a “Thank You” message for order confirmation, order number, price, order delivery time, payment details, etc.

   These facts help the customers to instantly track the order fulfillment as well as shipping status from anywhere at any time.

Hence, if you are to building an online store and searching for an eCommerce platform, the top solutions are Zepo & Shopify, to find other good options available check the top 13 Saas eCommerce platform. You can additionally opt for a free consultation with our eCommerce Software Analyst, for Free.
Which is the best eCommerce platform according to your requirements for your Online Store? Do share your views and experience via comments.

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