An e-commerce store that puts all its efforts into only building traffic is as fragile as a house of cards. That’s because, with the variety of options available to any customer, you need to capture their attention immediately and keep them engaged through their entire experience. Only when you successfully engage with visitors can you nudge them to convert into customers.
While choosing ecommerce tools, It is not just about using a tool, it is about using the right tool combined with tools that complement each other and work together towards a common objective. Check out these tools you need to engage and delight your visitors and customers.
51 best e-commerce tools you need for your business
Before you select tools for your ecommerce store, you need to have a complete understanding of the different tools available to run your business successfully.
There are over 1000 tools that are available to help you kickstart and run your ecommerce business. But you need to choose the right ones to power your company. Here are the 50 best tools, grouped into seven major groups you can choose from depending on your business size and needs.
→ Website tools – To help run and manage your store online.
→ Marketing tools – To create brand awareness, increase traffic and boost conversion.
→ Social Media tools – To get insights into your social media profiles and to understand your competitors.
→ Customer service tools – To deliver a better customer experience and delight customers.
→ Business tools – To help manage your daily business functions and keep track of it.
→ Analytics Tools – To analyze the effectiveness of your strategies and efforts and to get a complete analysis of your business’s performance.
→ Project Management tools: To ensure seamless communication between teams while working on a project.
→ Other tools – To ensure smooth business operations and to be ahead of the competition.
Website tools
1. Shopify
Shopify is one of the most popular ecommerce tools to help you kickstart your website. It is effortless to set up and has thousands of plug-and-play templates to help you get started.
Features
- It is suitable for any organization, from start-ups to SMBs to enterprise-level businesses.
- It supports a wide range of third-party applications, including social media channels, analytics tools, messaging apps, customer service software and other software to keep up with your growing business.
- You can get insights to manage orders, shipping, and payments from a single dashboard.
- The templates have intuitive settings which allow you to customize your storefront.
- It supports SEO best practices like meta tags, customizable title, and H1 making it easier for your customers to find your store using search engines.
Pricing
- Free plan: 14 days free trial
- Basic: $29/month
- Shopify: $79/month
- Advances Shopify: $299/month
Recommended for: Shopify is best suited for businesses that are looking to grow their business online or beginning their digital transformation journey.
2. BigCommerce
BigCommerce is another full-service ecommerce tool that enables you to set up your online store. It offers many preloaded native features which will help you scale and grow your business.
Features
- This tool is an industry leader when it comes to security, page loading time, and uptime.
- No coding, drag and drop solutions let you launch and edit your site pages easily.
- It offers excellent tools for SEO, conversions, and inventory management.
- You can easily integrate your website with marketplaces and social channels like Amazon. eBay and Facebook, Pinterest, and more.
Pricing
- Free plan: 15 days free trial
- Standard: $29.95/month
- Plus: $79.95/month
- Pro: $299.95/month
- Enterprise pricing is available upon request
Recommended for: If you are a large and growing business, then BigCommerce is the right tool for you. Their impressive features aid in the growth of your online business.
3. Wix
Wix is a simple website builder which lets anyone build a new website quickly without any coding or tech knowledge. It helps you develop high-quality websites with rich media, including images, videos, and more.
Features
- With innovative drag and drop, you can choose from 500+ designer-made templates to build your website.
- It offers customizable options for your storefront and shopping cart.
- It lets you connect all your social media accounts in a single place.
- It offers tools like SEO Analytics, Visitor Analytics, Email Marketing to boost engagement and understand visitor behavior.
Pricing
- VIP: $39/month
- Unlimited: $27/month
- Basic: $23/month
- Enterprise: Available upon request.
Recommended for: Wix is best suited for small businesses that are just getting started with ecommerce business.
4. WooCommerce
WooCommerce works differently compared to other ecommerce tools. It is not a complete ecommerce solution. You will need a WordPress Website to plugin WooCommerce and add ecommerce functionality to your website.
Features
- It is fully customizable, and you can design your homepage, menu, site structure to bring the look and feel of your brand.
- It offers hundreds of free and paid extensions with which you can easily integrate your third-party apps.
- With translations of up to 24 languages, you can offer multilingual content and pricing plans in multiple currencies.
Pricing
- WooCommerce has no monthly or set-up charges. However, you will have to pay for every transaction and extension that you add to the plug-in.
Recommended for: WooCommerce is best suited for businesses that are just getting started, share details of their offering online, and not looking to make huge online sales immediately.
5. Squarespace
Squarespace is a popular ecommerce tool in the creative industries. Their award-winning templates are well suited for photographers, designers, and artists.
Features
- It offers automatic inventory management, excellent product display, and a shipping rate calculator for selling products.
- With ecommerce integrations, you can easily integrate your website with other tools and software.
- It has built-in tax tools to make compliance simple.
Pricing
Their annual plans start at
- Personal – $12/month
- Business – $18/month
- Basic Commerce – $26/month
- Advanced Commerce – $40/month
Recommended for: Squarespace is best suited for businesses who want to build smaller websites, online stores, and blogs that look visually attractive.
Marketing tools
Identifying the right marketing tool mix depends heavily on understanding your customer behavior and how they prefer engaging with your brand. Here is a list of tools that you can choose from to help you do that –
Freshchat is the ultimate marketing tool that you will need to engage with your visitors and convert them to customers. With proactive and personalized messaging, you can boost lead engagement and customer acquisition.
Features
- With customer targeting, you can choose from default conditions or set up your own to send targeted messages to your visitors.
- Proactive campaigns let you send personalized, proactive messages to your customers. These help with better engagement and nudges your customers to make a purchase, thereby bringing down your cart abandonment rates.
- Visitor intel offers insights on visitor behavior, navigation, and more to initiate meaningful and personalized conversations.
- With email campaigns, you can engage with prospects and customers outside your product experience.
- You can get complete analytics of your campaign performance with campaign insights.
- With Freshchat marketplace integrations, you can integrate your website with third-party applications to offer a seamless experience and access to all tools from a single interface.
Pricing
- Free plan: 21 days free trial / Sprout: Free for 100 agents
- Blossom: $15/month
- Garden: $29/month
- Estate: $45/month
- Forest: $69/month
7. Campaign Monitor
Campaign Monitor is an email campaign automation software. It offers email marketing and automation tools to connect with your audience easily.
Features
- It offers hundreds of professionally designed templates to create engaging emails that drive results.
- With automation, you can send triggered messages based on the subscriber’s geography.
- With analytics, you can gather insights into the performance of your email marketing programs.
Pricing
- Free plan: Send email to 5 subscribers.
- Basic: $9/month
- Unlimited: $29/month
- Premier: $149/month
8. MailChimp
MailChimp is also an email marketing software. It offers more competitive pricing than other email marketing tools in the market.
Features
- It offers pre-designed templates and a drag and drop builder to create engaging emails.
- The customer journey tool helps build customer relationships and lets you reach the right customers at the right time.
- With real-time analytics, you can keep track of all your campaigns.
Pricing
- Free: Up to 2000 contact
- Essentials: $10.49/month
- Standard: $15.66/month
- Premium: $313.24/month
9. Google Adwords
Google Ads are one of the most successful ways to promote your ecommerce offering. Adwords help increase your brand awareness and product exposure. It helps you craft campaigns to drive more traffic to your website.
Features
- Auction insights offer insights on the performance of your paid advertisement and help compare it with your competitors.
- With Google Display Network Targeting, you can set when and where your ad should be shown based on your target audience. This will help show your ads on relevant sites and pages.
- With Dynamic retargeting, you can show ads to a specific audience based on the products they interacted with. This lets you craft specific messages to your audience based on their interests, thereby boosting sales, generating leads and preventing cart abandonment.
- With Dayparting, you can schedule ads for a specific day or time in a week to reach your audience more effectively.
- Dynamic Search Ads (DSA) on Google Adwords helps execute your campaigns more effectively, increasing conversions and bringing down your cost per acquisition.
Pricing
- Free to use and pricing differs for the ads you run on Google.
10. Omnisend
Omnisend is an easy-to-use email marketing platform to increase sales and revenue. It’s packed with features that cater to the specific needs of anyone who wants to sell online.
Features
- The templates are customizable and help create stunning emails without any coding.
- With predefined workflows in their Automation library, you can send welcome and cart abandonment messages based on the customer journey.
- With omnichannel marketing, you can combine email, SMS, and other channels in a single platform.
Pricing
- Free plan: 15000 emails/month
- Standard: $16/month
- Pro: $99/month
- Enterprise: Custom pricing
Freshworks CRM is a full-fledged sales and marketing software that suits businesses of all sizes. It bridges CRM, marketing automation, and AI capabilities to deliver a unified experience to your sales and marketing teams.
Features
- Auto Assignment Rules automatically assigns leads to the sales agents based on lead-routing rules.
- It connects all your channels, including email, SMS, phone, chat, WhatsApp Business, Apple Business Chat, in a single interface.
- Within automated workflows, behavioral engagement, and end-to-end personalization, you can easily engage with your audience.
- With Freddy AI, you can boost the productivity of your salespersons.
- Get action-oriented insights to get a deep understanding of your performance and metrics with visual reports.
- You can also integrate it with other Freshworks products such as Freshchat and Freshdesk to ensure seamless data transfer between all your data systems and minimize the number of vendors/partners for you to juggle. If you would prefer to stick to partners in your existing tech stack, the Freshworks Marketplace offers expansive integrations with leading providers as well.
Pricing
- Free plan: Forever free plan for startups
- Growth: $29/month
- Pro: $69/month
- Enterprise: $125/month
12. WordPress
WordPress helps create engaging blog posts to connect with your potential customers and audience. It is the best tool to explore if your online store doesn’t have a blog category.
Features
- It offers thousands of customizable themes to design your blog webpage.
- You can simply drag and drop media files, including images, audio, video, and more.
Pricing
- Premium: $8/month
- Business: $25/month
- Ecommerce: $45/month
13. OptiMonk
Optimonk is a conversion optimization tool that helps convert traffic to sales. It helps create exit-intent popups to engage with potential customers before they leave your website.
Features
- You can target visitors based on their geography and behavior on your website to send a message.
- It offers different types of messages, including pop-ups, full screen, side messages, and more to engage with your audience.
Pricing
- Free plan: 3.000 page views
- Essential: $29/month
- Growth: $79/month
- Premium: $199/month
- Master: Custom pricing
14. Optimizely
Optimizely creates digital experiences which help you make data-driven decisions and experiment and innovate every step. It offers A/B testing and multivariate testing tools to boost conversions and improve the visitor experience.
Features
- It lets you experiment with test imagery and different text copy without any coding.
- Segment your audience based on persona, industry, and other categories to deliver a relevant experience.
Pricing
- Optimizely pricing plans are available upon request.
15. Exit Bee
Exit Bee increases conversions and subscription rates by targeting customers when they exit a website using behavioral psychology. With most premium placements, your visitors can see and engage with your online ads.
Features
- With a relevant and timely pop-up, Exit bee increases your CTR by 30 times by engaging with your customers when they complete a visit.
- All the pop-ups have a clear call-to-action which ensures every click is quality traffic to your webpage.
Pricing
- Pricing plans are available after a 14-day free trial.
16. AVADA
AVADA is a marketing automation platform that helps ecommerce businesses connect with their audience with the right messages. It enables you to automate your marketing workflows to reach, engage and convert your visitors into customers.
Features
- With pre-built automated email workflows, you can send emails straight to your customer’s inbox at the right time.
- The abandonment cart emails let you remind your customers and recover lost sales with series of emails.
- With advanced reports, you can analyze which automation workflows deliver the best results. It helps you track the performance of your email marketing with comprehensive reporting.
Pricing
- Free plan: Basic features
- Pro: $9/month
- Enterprise: Custom pricing
Social Media tools
Suppose social media is a significant channel for your business for sales or support, in that case, you should have a dedicated social media management tool to keep track of your social activities. Here are a few that you can choose from:-
17. HootSuite: Hootsuite helps schedule, manage and report social media content. It manages all your social media activities in one place and enables you to leverage the power of ads.
It helps curate content, search hashtags, keywords to make it easier for you to share trending content. You can maintain a social content calendar and fill in the gaps to ensure that your social feed does not go barren. It offers a 30-day free trial, and the paid plans start from $49/month.
18. Facebook Ads: With Facebook Ads, you can launch campaigns for specific targeted audiences and drive them to your ecommerce website. It is inexpensive and a great way to connect with new customers and to boost your ecommerce business. It offers simple self-service tools to run campaigns and easy-to-read reports to track performance.
19. AdExpresso: AdExpresso helps create and track all your Facebook, Instagram, and Google Ads. You can manage all the campaigns from a single place. You can create simple A/B testing to understand how your ads are performing. AdExpesso offers a 14-day free trial, and the paid plans start at $49/month.
20. Buffer: Buffer is the ultimate social media tool for small businesses. Right from planning, boosting engagement, and tracking your performance, Buffer makes all your social media efforts easily manageable. You can also track audience behavior and get insights into their interests. It offers a free plan, and the paid plans are available from $9/month.
21. Bulk.ly: Bulk.ly is a social media automation tool that enables marketers to schedule their social posts. It helps create, organize and also repurpose social updates to automate post-publication. It offers a 7-day free trial, and the paid plan starts at $19/month.
Customer service tools
Customer service is significant for any business. Having the right support tools plays a vital role in defining your customer experience. Here are a few tools to help ace your support and a few bonus tools to boost customer engagement.
Yes, this is the second time we’re mentioning Freshchat, but hear us out. Freshchat is a live chat tool that helps you engage with existing customers in real-time and quickly resolve their queries. Loaded with features that allow for real-time customer service, it enables you to engage via the web, mobile and social messengers.
Features
- It helps you reach out to your customers on their preferred channel of choice with popular messaging channel integrations, including WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Apple Business Chat, and more.
- With chatbots, you can offer 24/7 support to customers and automate routine queries.
- Live translate enables you to offer support to your customers in 33+ languages.
- Canned responses let you respond faster to queries with predefined replies for common queries.
- It automatically assigns conversations to the right agents based on agent load, skills, and expertise with intelligent assignment rules,
Pricing
- Free plan: 21 days free trial / Sprout: Free for 100 agents
- Blossom: $15/month
- Garden: $29/month
- Estate: $45/month
- Forest: $69/month
Freshdesk is a help desk software with comprehensive tools and features to help businesses offer support to customers. Hosted on AWS, Freshdesk is an easy-to-use and intuitive product that leverages proven, reliable cloud infrastructure. With Freshdesk on AWS, customer support agents can instantly access customer data from anywhere. You can scale your business with lower costs and higher efficiency using AWS solutions such as Amazon Event, Bridge AWS Lambda, Amazon SageMaker, Amazon DocumentDB, and Amazon Connect. Powered with smart automation, it also boosts agent productivity and helps get things done faster.
Features
- With omnichannel capabilities, you can unify and manage your customer queries from different channels, including phone, email, chat, website, social media, and more from a single platform.
- Collaborative ticketing lets you share tickets with your teammates to discuss and resolve issues.
- It helps increase your team’s productivity with automation such as intelligent ticket assignment, closing tickets, and more.
- It helps you create an insightful self-service experience for customers, with a knowledge base and forums to enable them to solve queries on their own.
- With Freshdesk Analytics, you can analyze your customer support data and make data-driven decisions to delight your customers.
Pricing
- Free plan: 21 days free trial / Sprout: Free for unlimited agents
- Blossom: $15/month
- Garden: $35/month
- Estate: $49/month
- Forest: $99/month
- Estate Omnichannel: $79/month
- Forest Omnichannel: $139/month
Bonus
24. Chatbots powered by Freddy
Chatbots powered by Freddy is a unified bot builder available in Freshchat and Freshdesk to enhance your support functionalities. Powered with AI and ML, these bots are capable of resolving routine customer queries without human intervention.
Features
- These chatbots understand content of customer queries and instantly respond with the most fitting answer from the knowledge base.
- It can engage your customers with small talk without sounding robotic. It is capable of detecting intent and follows up with relevant conversational flows to delight customers.
- When integrated with Freshworks CRM, it learns from CRM data and offers insights, predictions, and recommendations tailored for your business.
- Social Signals scans tweets mentioning you and alerts your agents to respond to them immediately. This helps you stay on top of your social media mentions.
Pricing
- Sprout- Free plan
- Blossom- $15/month
- Garden – $29/month
- Estate – $45/month
- Forest – $69/month
25. Yotpo
Yotpo turns customer content into sales by engaging users with reviews and social proof. It encourages customers to give their feedback and incentivizes customers to review after they buy the products.
Features
- It lets you curate, customize, and showcase the best reviews making sure that the customers are engaged and interested.
- It breaks down customer feedback into actionable data, making it easier to gauge good and bad reviews.
- It helps reach users on Facebook and Instagram, helps leverage brand discoverability through a Google search, and brings quality traffic to the store.
Pricing
- Yotpo offers a free plan, and the premium plans are available upon request.
26. LeadChat
LeadChat is a tool to help engage with your visitors in real-time on your website. It focuses on identifying leads and converting them to customers.
Features
- It helps you offer 24/7 support and chat service to your visitors.
- It helps you create the perfect knowledge base to answer your visitors’ questions.
- Their expert agents capture 3x the leads and respond and qualify your visitors.
Pricing
- Starter: $99/month
- SoHo: $279/month
- Max: $399/month
- Challenger: $579/month
Bonus tools
27. Smile.io: Smile is a loyalty management software that offers reward programs for businesses across the globe. It helps you drive more sales and improve customer loyalty by offering loyalty programs to your existing customers.
28. Qualaroo: Qualaroo is a customer feedback software that enables you to survey specific users when engaging with your brand, service, or product. This helps you understand your customer journey and behavior better.
29. Thankbot: Thankbot is a tool that lets you send personalized, handwritten thank you cards to your customers. Once you have submitted your message, they’ll send it via post to your customers.
30. Nicereply: Nicereply is a customer satisfaction survey tool for your support teams. It helps you measure your CSAT, CES, and NPS through surveys.
Business tools
Running an eCommerce store is easier if you have the right inventory and delivery management tools. Here are a few tools to help you manage your ecommerce business smoothly:-
31. Sourcify: Sourcify is one of the fastest-growing sourcing platforms that connect companies with product manufacturers and manufacturers with the right clients. It keeps track of your inventory so customers don’t face issues with stock availability. Their pricing plans are available from $399/month.
32. Veeqo: Veeqo is an omnichannel inventory management system. Designed for small businesses, it helps keep track of your selling on multiple channels. This enables you to keep track of your orders and stock availability. They offer a free trial, and their paid plans start at $159/month.
33. Shipping Easy: Shipping Easy is a shipping software solution to make your shipping, tracking, product, and inventory management easy. With over 50 integrations and 75 features, it helps make your shipping process seamless. It offers a free trial for 30 days, and its pricing plans start at $5/month.
34. Wave: Wave is a free invoicing and accounting software for small businesses and businesses that operate online. It helps manage your income and expenses and enables you to keep track of payments, invoicing, and payroll.
Analytics tools
Measuring the performance of your business is as important as running your business. Here are a few tools which help you analyze your performance, measure yourself against your competitors, and offer insights to make data-driven decisions to improve your business along the way.
35. Google Analytics: Google Analytics is a popular web analytics tool that tracks the performance and engagement of your website. It helps keep track of page views, bounce rates, conversions, page sessions, and more. It offers a freemium plan for small businesses, but you would have to opt for the paid plans if you want more advanced features.
36. Kissmetrics: Kissmetrics is another marketing automation tool that helps you keep track of your website and app performance. It uses behavioral analytics to provide insights into your visitors and customers. Their pricing plan starts at $299/month.
37. Metrilo: Metrilo is a growth marketing platform for ecommerce analytics, CRM, and email in a single software. It offers KPI dashboards, product performance, funnels, marketing channels, and revenue breakdown reports to monitor and analyze your performance. Metrilo provides a 14-day free trial, and the paid plans begin at $119/month.
38. Visual Website Optimizer: VWO is a testing and optimization tool that enables analysts to run A/B testing and create targeted campaigns. It offers heat maps and clicks maps to understand user behavior and optimize conversions. The pricing plan for Visual Website Optimizer starts at $199/month.
39. Optimizely Analytics: Optimizely takes analytics to the next level with its Stats Engine. It evaluates performance with sequential testing. It offers custom pricing, and a free trial is available for the web experimentation tool.
Project Management Tools
Project Management tools come in very handy when you need to collaborate with different teams and get your work done within deadlines. Here is a list of tools that you can choose from to make your communication and project management seamless:-
40. Slack: Slack is a business communication platform that helps you stay connected with your teams. It offers integration which makes it easy to handle your workflows and also lets you communicate with third-party vendors.
41. Monday: Monday is a task management platform that helps manage workload, track progress, and collaborate with your team. It helps visually plan your projects and centralize your communication in a single platform.
42. Zoom: Zoom is a modern video communication software for enterprise-level businesses. It is a cloud platform for video, chat, and audio conferencing and also for webinars.
43. Tickspot: Tickspot is a time tracking software that helps manage your projects. It allows you to keep track of time spent on a particular task. This is extremely useful while working on-budget projects and tracking team/individual productivity.
44. Asana: Asana is a task management tool that helps assign tasks, organize, schedule, and track. You can view the tasks of all your team members in a single shared interface. Asana is available for both businesses and individuals and offers free trials for the ones who are just getting started with project management. The paid plans with advanced features begin at $10.99/month.
Other tools
Apart from the tools mentioned above, there are specific tools like website makers along with other tools that you can use to make your business and customer experience even better. Choose a mix of these tools to offer an enhanced website experience to your customers.
45. Photoshop: Photoshop helps create high-quality professional images that you can use on your website to improve traffic and boost sales.
46. Canva: Canva is another graphic design tool that helps you create captivating images to drive more engagement. This tool is easy to use and does not require any design or technical knowledge.
47. Social Media Channels: All social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and more, are opportunities to explore marketing, customer support, and engagement. These are the most inexpensive platforms to boost sales when you have the right strategies.
48. SEMrush: SEMrush is one of the best tools to track your website performance and keep an eye on your competitors. It offers you the top keywords and also competitor keywords that you can leverage for your SEO efforts.
49. Ahrefs: Ahrefs is another critical tool that helps you understand your competitors’ marketing strategy by offering insights into their backlinks. This is the best tool to invest in for SEO research.
50. Klarna: Klarna is an ecommerce payment solutions platform that helps customers with safe and secure transactions. Klarna has integrations with leading ecommerce brands like Etsy, Macy’s, Lenovo, Sephora, and more.
51. Spin-a-sale: Spin-a-sale is a tool that helps you create discount wheel pop-ups to embed on your website. You can customize the experience entirely and can be used as an exit-intent pop-up.
Final thoughts
These tools will help you engage the visitors that come to your website. You just need to make sure that the channels don’t overlap one another. Optimize the timing of each tool to provide users with a fantastic user experience!
