Useful tools in e-commerce

By Laure Gabrielle Chatenet and Ousama Jaâfour

E-commerce is a fast-growing sector, which continues to expand steadily with the accentuation of the covid 19 crisis. Coronavirus-imposed confinements have caused online sales to explode and helped boost the e-commerce sector.

To benefit from this event, there are a plethora of tools you can employ to develop a professional e-commerce site and increase the profitability of your online sales business. Such is the example of CMS (Content Management System), interface design tools, A/B testing, etc.

The 3 most popular CMS

Shopify

Shopify is a trending software for creating e-commerce websites. It is a powerful tool to launch your online store and expand your business to reach more customers.

This platform helps you manage and grow your e-commerce. It helps to increase the reach of your products online, thanks to its features:

Shopify offers a complete toolkit to sell your products worldwide (online, in-store, in outlets, or wherever your customers are located) and across channels: social networks and third-party marketplaces like Amazon and eBay, etc.
Shopify a centralized platform that integrates all your sales channels in one place, with the goal of making it easier to manage your e-commerce store and foster your interactions with all consumers. With this unified platform, you can focus on your core business and audience development and let Shopify take care of your order and inventory tracking.
This tool is a handy ecommerce cms that offers over 70 responsive themes to customize your store to your liking.

The Shopify CMS ensures better credibility of your transactions, thanks to the secure payment and compatible with all mobile terminals.

WordPress

WordPress is a free open source software that ensures powerful features to develop beautiful websites, blogs or applications. This CMS offers unlimited options to create and customize your site with ease and without being a coder first.

You have all the tools in hand to develop your site to your style: testimonial blocks, carousels, photo galleries, etc. You can adjust these components as you wish, until you get the layout that convinces you.

The effectiveness of this website builder tool is mainly seen in its responsive themes, which are suitable for all business areas and website types. You have a wide choice between free and paid themes to stand out from the competitors.

The power of WordPress also lies in the expanded palette of plugins that contains thousands of extensions to facilitate your development. You can install an extension to create a contact form, improve your SEO, create a multilingual site, develop your e-commerce store, etc.

Woocomerce

WooCommerce is the totally free e-commerce plugin for WordPress. It is a fully customizable extension, which you can add to your wordpress site, to create and configure your e-shop quickly and easily.

To expand your business, you can enrich and increase the features presented by your e-commerce platform, using various extensions offered by WooCommerce, such as: Google Ads, Stripe, Paypal, etc.

Since it is a wordpress extension,you can download the WooCommerce mobile app to monitor your store from your phone. This app allows you to:

follow the statistics of your e commerce site in real time, including the best-selling products, the number of orders placed, the revenue earned, etc.
Recover data about your customers.
Track your sales details. In an effort to make the dialogue with the platform more attractive, the system sends you festive-looking notifications to celebrate each sale made.

The WooCommerce plugin is an easy to use and very useful e-commerce solution to propel your online business. It is supported by self-help communities, such as WooFrance to exchange ideas and find solutions to problems encountered.

Publer: an interesting direct mail tool

Publisher is an effective publishing tool to manage the publication of your posts on different social networks, from a single platform. With Publer, you can schedule the publication of photos, videos, on your Facebook pages and other Instagram,Twitter, LinkedIn, Google My Business accounts, etc.

In fact, social media represent important breeding grounds for unearthing leads and boosting your sales on a larger scale. Social selling or selling on social networks is a trendy business strategy that is gaining ground lately, especially because of the COVID-19 health crisis. To take advantage of it, you need to be always active on these networks, regularly posting eye-catching and quality content.

It is in your best interest to use Publer to drive the social media accounts associated with your e-commerce store at the same time, using its various features:

Automatic scheduling through a publishing calendar that allows you to organize your posts over a set period.
Bundled or mass scheduling.
Real-time collaboration. You can invite your partners and assign them roles and access rights to moderate your social accounts.

This tool also allows you to evaluate the engagement reach of your posts and make deliberate decisions to increase the visibility of your posts.

5 effective A/B testing tools

A/B testing is a popular method for testing the effectiveness of a web page in terms of conversions, clicks, sign-ups or purchases. It consists of comparing the profitability of two slightly modified versions of the same web page (the homepage, a product sheet page, a call-to-action, etc) by a sample of users.

There are several A/B testing software that you can employ to tease out the most profitable pages that increase the chances of online sales.

Optimizely

Optimizely is an effective solution to perform powerful A/B tests in an intuitive way on a desktop or mobile device. This tool offers a simple and easy to handle dialog interface, which helps you create and manage different versions of a web page, at the same time and according to different criteria.

This software provides advanced features, such as Split URL and multi-variate testing that allow for more in-depth testing that goes beyond simply comparing two versions of a web page.

Optimizely is compatible with other third-party tools like Google Analytics to track traffic to your e-shop and release the most engaging version.

You can build a summary report using Optimizely to further analyze the effectiveness of your interfaces.

VWO (Visual Website Optimizer)

Visual Website Optimizer is another great A/B testing software. It is also easy to use, like Optimizely, thanks to its intuitive and easy-to-use visual editor. Because of this, you don't need to have any knowledge of code or statistics to use it.

Like Optimizely, VWO also allows you to evaluate the profitability of your A/B test campaigns and it can work with third-party tools, like Google Analytics. In addition to this, there are two interesting features:

Heatmaps and clickmaps that allow for a more in-depth analysis of user behavior.
A questionnaire sent to testers to gather their feedback in full transparency.

CrazyEgg

CrazyEgg is an effective solution for tracking visitor behavior, using heatmaps. Thus, this software allows you to determine the areas in a page that attract the most visitors and generate the most clicks and those that go unnoticed.

So, to provide a detailed mapping of visitor interactions with your e-commerce site, CrazyEgg offers the following heatmaps:

classic heatmap: which allows you to determine the most visited areas that receive the maximum number of clicks (also called hot spots). Generally, they are marked in red. In addition, this map sheds light on the parts that need to be improved to boost their traffic.
Scroll map: this scroll map informs about the parts on which visitors stay the longest. As a result, you can detect the sections, paragraphs and texts that attract the visitor's attention and optimize those ignored.

Hotjar

Hotjar is an ideal tool to optimize the performance of your ecommerce platform, through the analysis of the visitor journey, with the aim of understanding their needs and expectations of your site. In order to fully understand the visitor journey, Hotjar offers these features:

Heatmap: this map is used to identify areas that attract the attention of more visitors who don't hesitate to click on them to find out what they are about.
User Session Recording: this feature consists of recording a video of the visitor's navigation on your site. You can observe the visitor's behavior and build up an idea about which areas are easy to interpret and interact with and which ones the visitor is not interested in.

Abtasty

AB Tasty is among the leading A/B testing tools in France. It is fully customizable and provides powerful testing features:

A/B classic test.
Multi-page test: it consists in preparing a generic test and subtests for each version.
Testing by redirection: it corresponds to tests for different page versions with different URLs.
Multivariate Testing (MVT): consists of modifying several components of the interface in order to determine the best association.

Based on the metrics obtained, you can decide on the best technique to attract consumers to the conversion funnel and consequently increase your online sales.

2 must-have prototyping tools

Figma

Figma is a powerful tool for interface design (web and mobile) and system design creation. It also presents itself as a must-have prototyping solution, through which, you can create interactive prototypes. The tool provides you with a set of transitions and subtle interactions to link your screens and thus create a hyper-realistic prototype.

Figma is a flexible tool that comes in both web and mobile app versions. In this way, you can access your files from your desktop or mobile device. The success of this UI design tool is due to several reasons, such as:

Its simplicity: Figma is fully accessible online, from a web browser. So, it does not require any installation to use it.
its various impressive features, such as versioning that ensures solid consistency between versions of the mockups produced. This avoids duplication and misplacement of source files and optimizes collaboration between stakeholders. It is always possible to save a version (make a backup) before proceeding with a modification.
His online collaborative space that allows for harmonized collaboration between the various team members involved: PO, designers, web developers, marketing, etc. It is an agile tool that allows all stakeholders (even if they are geographically dispersed) to work on the same versions of files and share them with each other, through a simple sharing link, in real time. In particular, the web integrator can directly retrieve the CSS code related to the interface designed by the designer. As a result, he can gain in productivity and advance more quickly in his work. The client can also intervene to add his comments on a model or directly modify its textual content.
The creation of a unified component library, or Design System, to standardize components and styles. This asset allows you to reuse these elements on a large scale and consequently save time and productivity.
Easy integration of multiple plugins to create and customize your prototypes with flexibility.

Invision

Invision is a powerful UI design tool for creating interactive prototypes that give a clearer idea of what the final rendering will look like and how the interface will work in the future. It is a web application accessible from a desktop or mobile device.

It is an online collaborative tool that involves making designs on a whiteboard and sharing them with all stakeholders. All stakeholder team members work interactively on a unified platform that provides a user-friendly online workspace.

With the liveshare feature, each speaker can invite other speakers, leave comments, make changes to the model in question and discuss it with colleagues in real time, without the need to travel.

In addition, Invision offers mobile simulators to test mockups on different resolutions and ensure that the result will be perfectly responsive.

Thanks to this tool, the client can constantly monitor the progress of work on the interfaces of their project and intervene instantly to express their preferences and propose rectifications, if necessary. The designers can make the required changes as they go along. The comments left are archived in order to ensure a better follow-up.

Capian: a powerful tool to boost your e-commerce

Capian is a UI and UX assessment tool for digital interfaces. This solution promotes teamwork by providing a centralized platform to detect issues raised on your online retail site interfaces, with the goal of rectifying them and optimizing the visitor's online shopping experience.

Capian provides a simple, easy-to-use dialog interface to perform the following tasks:

capture the area that reveals a usability flaw (such as a promotion price that is unclear, a Call To action that is not perfectly readable, or a product name that is wrong) using a chrome extension.
Create your UX audit project, without having to leave your online store, because Capian is a centralized tool that consists of doing all the work in one place. This way, you can capture optimization opportunities, organize them in your report, and evaluate them according to standard (like Amélie Boucher's criteria) or custom evaluation grids, without leaving the interface to inspect. You can also add a description to the detected defect, as well as optimization recommendations, and choose a severity score for the problem in question. Once you have completed your assessment, you can save and update it at any time.
Share your UX audit report with other members of your team to review your e-commerce store interfaces together in real time. You can discuss and prioritize findings and decide on possible improvements, immediately and from wherever you are.

The Capian tool is useful for improving the browsing and shopping experience on your ecommerce site. Indeed, it is perfect for:

ensure easier communication, regarding the planned improvements, between all the actors involved: UI/UX designers, UX writers, web developers, product managers, etc. This guarantees a successful acceptance, without going through long and sometimes useless meetings.
Easily detect optimization opportunities that can make your products more visible and interesting, so that they attract the visitor and evoke their curiosity to discover them. This consecutively promotes conversion opportunities and encourages the visitor to make the purchase and fill their cart.

Conclusion

The worsening global health crisis is the primary reason for the rapid growth of e-commerce. This trending acquisition channel has become a necessity to maintain your customers and acquire new prospects.

Faced with the profusion of tools required to develop an online sales site, it is advisable to base your choice on the needs of your project and the profile of your intended target.

In addition to the inevitable tools for designing, creating, and testing an e-commerce store, like Shopify, publer, and Figma, the Capian UX & UI assessment tool joins this list to complete the work done and deliver functional and visually pleasing interfaces. Indeed, it's a guarantee of an impactful user experience.