It is a great time to be an online retailer, simply because most consumers could not function properly without online shopping. This March, the software company, BigCommerce in partnership with Kelton Global, conducted a survey of more than 1000 US adults that examined online purchase habits of US citizens. The survey revealed that 96% of Americans are spending at least five hours making online purchases and allocating a one-third of their shopping budgets to eCommerce every week. What’s more, online shopping ranked ahead of GPS and streaming media as a basic essential US consumers could not live without. In the last few years, shoppers started dedicating more and more of their time and budget to eCommerce shopping, and retailers now have a great opportunity to reach more shoppers by opening their business to new channels.

While it is true that money can be an issue, especially when you are starting out, you can easily create a professional-looking website using WordPress – 76.5 million people have already done it. Nonetheless, starting, developing and growing an eCommerce store comes with several challenges, such as executing a good content marketing strategy, building customer trust and optimizing your website for mobile, to name a few. Thankfully, there are great software tools on the market that can make your job way easier. In order to help you overcome some key challenges, we are going to outline four marketing tools that you should consider using.

Easy Digital Downloads

Easy digital downloads provides an easy way to sell digital content and professional services.  Inbound Now actually uses this eCommerce tool to power their own marketplace. Easy Digital Downloads provide a handful of extensions that will empower your store such as integrations with variation payment processors.

For those looking to sell tangible products, Woo Commerce is a great plugin alternative.

BuzzSumo

Content marketing has three main objectives – engage customers, boost brand awareness and drive sales. When implemented right, content marketing can be quite beneficial, but according to Altimeter, 70% of professional marketers lack a consistent content strategy. BuzzSumo is a tool that makes things much easier for you by taking out the guesswork by allowing you to search for keywords and helping you find popular content based on the number of backlinks and social shares. This helps you focus on successful topics and to discover the top social influencers in your niche.

Yieldify

Every online retailer is missing out on potential orders, and it is well-studied phenomenon – according to a Baymard Institute study, more than 65% of customers abandon their shopping carts during checkout. This basically means that your sales one-third of what they could potentially be. So what you need is a remarketing tool like Yieldify that will convince your potential buyers to go back and finish their purchase. The app has great email remarketing software, and it is fully customizable, so it can fit any market across multiple web, social and mobile platforms. The software will also generate traffic, lead and sales reports and help you tailor Yidldify’s implementation for better results.

ZenDesk

You are nothing without your customers, so never forget to appreciate your regular customers. According to a recent Econsultancy report, roughly 70% of marketers agree that acquiring a new customer is much more expensive than retaining an old one. Therefore, keeping your customers satisfied and resolving any issue they have should be your number one priority. And if you are working on a tight budget, ZenDesk will help you offer great customer support services. You’ll be able to offer customer service through every channel imaginable, for a price every owner could afford – their lowest plan starts at a dollar per month.

Conclusion

The more complicated your challenges become, the more eCommerce tools will you have to apply. And while it may be confusing to know which exact tool you need for which challenge, we hope that this list gave you a solid start. While it is true that at the moment you may not need some of these tools, but as your business continues to grow, you will definitely need them at one point. So why not test them out, so once you finally do need them, you’ll be able to use them, and execute your plan flawlessly.