E-commerce platforms have become immensely popular over the years. Not only are shoppers increasingly leaning towards digital buying, but businesses also often prefer to conduct their sales through e-commerce for higher profits. In fact, small to medium businesses find it more cost-effective to have an e-commerce store compared to a physical retail space. Besides, it’s easier than ever to set up an online store with a wide range of e-commerce platforms available.

What is an e-commerce platform?
E-commerce stands for electronic commerce, a type of business model where sales or any type of sales transaction happens online. The earliest e-commerce transactions used to take place through e-mail and telephone. Then came e-commerce websites and platforms with readymade templates, plug-and-play shopping carts, endless product catalogs, and automatic payment gateways. Consumers can access these through any device, including desktops, tablets, and smartphones.

An e-commerce website is like a virtual storefront and has all the features and functionalities that make it easy and convenient for consumers to buy services or products, like clothing, appliances, footwear, groceries, and even meals.

A business can build these digital storefronts using e-commerce platforms, which are content management systems and commerce engine websites. These are like software solutions. So, to build an effective virtual storefront, a business must choose an e-commerce platform that has a host of features enabling the business to seamlessly incorporate within their website’s features to manage product catalogs, record all the sales, carry out omnichannel marketing, track digital operations, and much more.

Features to look for in e-commerce platforms

1. Content management system
Commonly known as CMS, content management systems are digital platforms for creating, editing, publishing, and managing a website’s digital content. With a CMS, a business does not really need anyone with coding expertise. This is especially useful for brands that have to produce regular content frequently. With a CMS, the business has a central and unified platform for creating content and publishing it in different channels, including partner websites and social media handles.

2. Product information management
Along with the CMS features to manage content, an e-commerce platform must also have product information management or PIM modules. These are used for managing product information and publishing correct catalogs across various digital channels of the business. With a PIM, a business can conveniently store product descriptions, including photos and videos of each product. Besides, the PIM can be used to add consumer-generated content such as reviews, how-to tutorials, and unboxing videos.

3. Shopping cart
An important detail that sets a generic non-commercial website apart from an e-commerce website is the presence of shopping carts. To include this in an e-commerce website, businesses must choose a platform that has the shopping cart feature. With this, potential customers can easily create a product list of items they are interested in buying. This list is further saved to ease the checkout process. Besides, the shopping cart feature can be useful during future purchases, as it is capable of storing a history of each customer’s purchases. So, during each subsequent checkout, the shopping cart can remind customers of their previous purchases and ask them whether they would like to buy these products again. In addition to this, the shopping cart creates a seamless transition from the checkout page to the payment gateway. Plus, an analysis of shopping cart data can help identify abandoned carts, which can help create marketing campaigns to retrieve these lost sales.

4. E-mail marketing
Another fundamental feature that e-commerce platforms must have is e-mail marketing. With this plugged in, businesses have a direct channel to communicate with their existing as well as potential consumers. Besides, the e-mail marketing tool can be used to maintain the e-commerce website’s subscriber list. Based on this list, the business can launch personalized campaigns for consumers across different demographics and categories.

5. SEO
While an e-commerce platform does not have any direct search engine optimization (SEO) tools, it needs to have features that provide a strong backdrop for the SEO marketing strategies of the business to be effective. These features include the capability to build a scalable and simple website, incorporate high website speed, develop canonical and customizable URLs, optimize pages for mobile, and create clear sitemaps for search engine spiders to crawl without any disruptions. All of these can help to get the e-commerce site rank, facilitating its reach to the right target audience.

6. Payment processing
Some of the top e-commerce platforms offer a wide range of options for payment processing. Most of these solutions have the capability to connect with well-known payment gateways. With these, a business can offer popular payment options, including cash on delivery (COD), credit card, digital wallet transactions, and more, to its customers on its e-commerce website.