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Your job doesn’t end once a customer makes a purchase.

Of course, the marketing work you do pre-purchase plays an important role in establishing a well-rounded shopping experience, but there's a world of tactics to employ after your customer hits the “buy” button that can help you entice first time shoppers to make a second purchase.

Remember that without designing an inclusive experience that encourages customer retention, you may struggle to create a solid growth path for your business. If you want to keep new customers coming, reengage past shoppers, and reduce returns, here are six tips for delivering an outstanding post-checkout experience. 

6 Ways to create a better post-checkout experience for your customers

1. Offer amazing customer support
2. Make the most out of your confirmation email
3. Make delivery dates and next steps clear 
4. Stay in touch later with remarketing
5. Enhance the “unboxing” experience
6. Ask for reviews and follow up after the item arrives

1) Offer amazing customer support

First and foremost, let’s make sure you’re offering great customer support before we explore other options for improving your post-checkout experience. While you might already be doing everything you reasonably can to ensure your customers don’t experience disruptions or problems after a purchase, sometimes hiccups happen. It’s not so much about avoiding problems entirely but rather how you deal with them when they occur. 

Sometimes your shoppers will reach out to you after a purchase with questions about their item’s delivery or how to return something. (This is much easier with the right returns management and order management software.) And they may be frustrated or impatient. Make it easier for them (and ultimately better for you) by offering ways to contact you on the channels they prefer. Also, offer proactive customer service in the form of FAQ pages and clear return policies to confusion (and save your agents time).

For instance, if your analytics tell you that your audience is most active on Facebook, make sure your page makes it clear how to reach your support team. You can do this by including the relevant links in the About section and of course, be turning on a chatbot function. 

Caption: Dollar Shave Club offers multiple options for contacting their support team in their page’s About section

But even so, customers may make contact simply by posting on your page or commenting on your posts. Employ a catch all approach by integrating your Facebook page to your Gorgias helpdesk and you’ll be able to automatically publish personalized answers in the comment threads.

And if you don’t have one, get live chat on your site! Gorgias can also help with that by allowing you to seamlessly integrate a live chat into your website, with also a list of customizable rules. The live chat button will show consistently on all pages of your site, both on mobile and desktop. 

Your customers don’t need to hunt down a special contact page or dig up an email address. They always know exactly where to go when they need help. Also, using live chat is useful to create a personalized, human-centric, accessible, and fast shopping experience, which the value of can’t be discounted!

2) Make the most out of your confirmation email

While the confirmation email should always include basic information (think an order summary and delivery timeline), you can add a few extras to empower your customer to make the most out of their experience with your brand. 

If you’re working with a recommendation engine and already produce editorial content, this would be a great opportunity to attach one or two relevant blog articles to the lower third of your confirmation email. Not only serving as a helpful encouragement to spend more time on your site, but sending relevant content helps to reinforce the idea that you are an expert in your field. 

Caption: The order confirmation email from Warby Parker includes tips on how to be sure you’ve picked the perfect frames for you 

You may also wish to consider including a promo code as a thank you for ordering - it can be a small expense that ensures a customer returns. 

3) Make delivery dates and next steps clear 

Once your customer purchases an item from your site, you would benefit from having a system in place that allows them to review their item’s delivery status. This could be as simple as a “vanity” order confirmation page that appears once the purchase is confirmed. Show a simple timeline that displays where they are at in the delivery timeline starting with an origin destination and ending with their home address.

Even if they didn’t register on your site and never return to this page, showing them such an order tracking timeline leaves a good impression on your customer by reinforcing the concept that what they’ve purchased really exists and is on its way. 

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4) Stay in touch later with remarketing 

You may have been under the misconception that setting up remarketing ads was reserved exclusively for your bounced traffic. While that’s certainly an effective way to recapture lost traffic, you can also use them to remind previous customers about your products when it makes sense to do so for you. 

For example, let’s say you’re a cosmetic company and you’ve just launched a new moisturizer. By setting up a remarketing ad that targets those customers who purchased a similar product from you three months ago, you’re finding them again just as they may be in need of restocking. This helps place customers who may have otherwise forgotten about your brand back into your marketing funnel with the goal of getting them to buy from you again.

5) Enhance the “unboxing” experience

Let’s embrace the fact that we’re living in the age of social media by applying it to your shipping experience. Make your orders feel like the gift that they are by packing your product in a customized box and filling the empty space inside with fun, yet recyclable fillers like crinkle paper or business cards, personalized notes with instructions on how to leave a review or something simple but enjoyable like brand stickers. When relevant, you may also want to consider including a sample of an upcoming item into your box, or a flyer advertising its existence. 

When you create an “unboxing experience” you’ll not only trigger those loyalty-building positive emotions in your customer’s brain but you’re also encouraging them to post about your brand on their social feeds - free advertisement to a similar audience of future customers!

6) Ask for reviews and follow up after the item arrives

Reviews are one of the most effective ways to increase sales and encourage new customers to shop with you. You need them to grow your business. But not everyone, even happy shoppers, are hardwired to follow up a purchase with a review. In this instance we like to follow the simple manta: ask and you shall receive. 

Asking for reviews doesn't have to seem desperate (even though we all desperately want them). Start by building a review request into your post-checkout email workflow that automatically delivers a request to review the purchased product after delivery occurs. Play around with the sound of your email and don’t be afraid to employ a curious but humble tone that expresses your genuine desire to know that they enjoyed what they bought or how they like to see it improved in the future.

We hope you find these six tips useful when it comes to making the most out of your post-checkout experience. As always be patient and in time, you’ll reap the rewards of a job well done. Keep an eye on your retention rate to measure your post-checkout success.

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Ecommerce product categorization is an excellent way to streamline the online shopping process and optimize customer experience. But if your ecommerce company offers more than just niche products, then separating those products into different categories can be time-consuming — and your team's time is better spent on tasks that tie directly to revenue generation.

To help you organize your product listings to make it easy for customers to find the types of products they are looking for, let's take a look at everything you need to know about ecommerce product categorization.

What is ecommerce product categorization (taxonomy)?

Product categorization, also called product taxonomy, aims to create an organized and searchable shopping experience by breaking products down into intuitive categories and subcategories. 

Why is product categorization important in ecommerce?

Product categorization isn't usually a concern for ecommerce stores that offer just a handful of products. But stores with large-scale catalogs of different products need a way of organizing them so that it's easy for customers to find what they need. Product categorization can also be strategic: Your product taxonomy can promote certain product types (e.g. “Accessories”), occasions (e.g. “Father’s Day”) boost average order value (e.g. “Best Sellers”), and more.

Today, the process of ecommerce product categorization is often done using machine learning and natural language processing (NLP). When fed with the right training data, these algorithms allow ecommerce platforms to categorize products based on their descriptions and customer behavior — without having to organize their catalog manually. We won’t go too in-depth into these advanced tools in this post, but will recommend additional tools and reading if this is the kind of information you’re looking for.

Overall, proper product classification and categorization create a better user experience — which, as we know, is mission-critical for any brand. Customers can easily find similar products, search for products using common keywords, and enjoy a more organized and streamlined shopping experience. Some of the top benefits of ecommerce product categorization include:

Organized ecommerce sites with clean organizations sell more

Create a path of least resistance for your customers. Better organized ecommerce sites make it as easy as possible for them to find what they’re looking for. When you can eliminate obstacles that might otherwise keep them from buying, you have a better chance at generating more sales.

Plus, effective product categorization can act as a kind of upselling or cross-selling strategy. If customers are looking for adorable earrings, for example, they’re more likely to buy two or three pairs if they see an entire category page full of great options. 

Product organization and categorization enable better search functionality

If you have a search function on your store (and you should), then organizing and categorizing your store's products improves its functionality and accuracy. 

Along with optimizing your website's search functionality, proper product categorization can help optimize your website for search engines like Google and boost its SEO. While the number of product searches that originate from search engines instead of marketplaces is shrinking as marketplaces like Amazon and eBay have come to dominate the ecommerce space, it still accounts for 19% of all product searches.

Product categorization helps with monitoring data

Breaking your products down into categories enables you to monitor which category pages get the most visits and which ones have the highest conversion rate instead of doing this for product pages alone. This provides additional data that you can use to generate more insights into customer behavior. If your ecommerce store uses Shopify, you can pull these metrics out of your Live View analytics:

Product organization creates a streamlined shopping experience for your customers

Imagine walking into a department store to find products scattered randomly with no organization: dishware next to gardening supplies, cosmetics on the same shelf as cat food, sports equipment on the same aisle as canned goods. Organizing these products into categories helps users find what they’re looking for quickly or discover new products based on their interests or the occasion. For example, tech accessory brand has categories based around collections (on top of more standard categories), which could catch a browser’s eye and draw them onto a product page:

A step-by-step guide for ecommerce product categorization

If you want to organize and categorize your store's products in a way that will create an optimized shopping experience for your customers, here are the steps that you should follow:

1) Collect essential product data

Product data includes any information that can be used to organize your products: brand, material, size, color, and any other important product attributes. If you don’t have updated product information from which to source this data, you can request it from your suppliers. 

Once you have gathered all available product data, a Product Information Management (PIM) system like Jasper PIM (available as a Shopify app) lets you organize and analyize product datasets automatically and provides a centralized environment for managing product data over time.

However, before you dive too deep into your data, take a step back and brainstorm some taxonomy structures that might work for your shoppers.

2) Create potential categories for your products

Creating a baseline for product categorization is pretty straightforward. Before diving into a teched-out process, put yourself in the shoes of the shopper and brainstorm ways But if you have a wide range of products for sale, it can get a little tricky. Here are a few tips for creating great product categories: 

• Look at established ecommerce sites for inspiration
• Avoid being so specific that you end up with an excessive number of product categories
• Navigate your online store yourself to get a feel for the experience that your product hierarchy create
• Create clear and easy-to-understand titles for your product categories — remember, clear is better than clever

3) Use keyword research for product category/page optimization

Putting carefully chosen keywords in your product descriptions and category pages can improve your store's product search functionality. It can also improve your site's SEO, bringing in more traffic from search engines. 

You can find the best keywords for your store using keyword research tools like SEMRush, Google Keyword Planner, and Ahrefs. These tools let you see the search volume for common keywords and provide keyword suggestions based on your input. 

4) Categorize your products based on user behavior

Based on our analysis of data from 10,000 ecommerce merchants, sorting your product categories based on user behavior (like past purchases) using tools like Crossing Minds and Wiser can increase revenue by up to 10%. 

Here are a few examples:

Merchology, a corporate apparel brand, uses customer data to create “Gifts” and “Ideas” categories for products that are commonly purchased for specific reasons. They sort by user behavior by categorizing products into “Top 10s” for many occasions:

Similarly, Adika has a category called “Best Sellers” to promote its products with the highest conversion rates: 

5) Scale and iterate your product categorization efforts

Categorizing your products based on user behavior is an excellent strategy, but user behavior sometimes changes over time. Therefore, don't be afraid to adjust and rearrange your product categories over time based on what your metrics tell you.

On top of your standard categories, you can also include “facets,” which operate more like tags that categories. Facets are details about a product that may not be in the product title or significant enough to be its own category. For example, the cut of or material of a dress:

Facets act like keywords to give your shoppers another way to browse your store and find the exact kind of item they want. As your store grows (and your products change), keeping up with facets — especially because it’s difficult to anticipate all the ways customers might go about searching for products. 

Check out AWS’s post on how natural language processing can scale your brand’s text classification beyond what’s humanly possible.

As you scale your categorization efforts, it’s also important to be careful not to overcomplicate your store’s navigation. New products may require new categories, but it may also become necessary to combine and condense some categories to avoid overwhelming your shoppers.

Product Information Management (PIM) systems, which we mentioned earlier, will also likely offer automation and other features to manage product data and keep your store up to date. For example, you can use your PIM as a single source of truth for listings across your ecommerce platform (Shopify, BigCommerce, Magento, etc.) and marketplaces like Amazon and eBay. That way, you can iterate on product descriptions and categories in one place, rather than changing them in the backend of each platform. 

Ecommerce product categorization best practices

As you go about organizing and categorizing your ecommerce products, here are a few best practices to keep in mind:

Adjust your product categorization based on geolocations

You don't want to show products to customers who can't purchase them. If you don't ship certain products to certain states or countries, then you will need to categorize your products based on geo locations using a product like Advanced Store Localization or Geo Targetly. 

Shakti is one Gorgias customer that uses Advanced Store Localization to adjust their product categories based on the customer's location. Because Shakti doesn't ship all of its products to all countries, they use the tool to hide certain products from viewers in those countries.

Avoid using "other" as a category

Instead of creating an “other” category (which will only confuse your shoppers) simply put products into the category where they fit most naturally. Use keywords to ensure that customers can easily find them — even if it isn’t all that clear which category they should search.  

Keep products limited to one category at a time — except special categories

Having products appear in multiple categories often makes for a confusing product catalog that is difficult to navigate. Instead, keep products limited to a single category at a time. While this can sometimes be a little tricky for products that could fit in multiple categories, assign the one that fits best and use keywords within the product description to make up the difference.

The only exception to this is special categories, like Best Sellers, Valentine’s Days, Last Chance, etc. These categories aren’t based on product or customer types, so overlap won’t be confusing. 

Product categories should all be unique from one another

Keep your product categories as simple as possible to avoid overlap and confusion. For example, having an "athletic apparel" category and a "sports apparel" category is redundant and unnecessary — choose one or the other. There's no benefit to having a larger number of categories, so don't feel the need to force them if they don't already cluster naturally.

Keep branding tone in mind while creating product categories and descriptions

But branding doesn’t just apply to color schemes and company logos: It’s your messaging, too, so keep it in mind when developing your product categories and product descriptions. 

Categories and descriptions need to communicate key product information above all else, so be sure that you aren't sacrificing clarity for the sake of branding. Include the basics (color, dimensions, materials, size, and any other relevant descriptive information) and use simple, jargon-free language. ASOS product descriptions do this particularly well, balancing their conversational writing style with clear, useful keywords.

Consider adding a product quiz to help customers find the right product

Ninety-three percent of marketers agree that interactive content like product quizzes are effective at helping educate customers. Product quizzes designed to identify a customer's tastes or needs can be great tools for further helping customers find what they're looking for. 

Dr. Squatch is one example of an ecommerce company that uses these quizzes effectively. If you want to create your own branded product quizzes, consider using a tool like the Product Recommendation Quiz app.

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Building a category tree for your ecommerce store

Large catalogs of ecommerce products are typically separated into different categories and subcategories to build a hierarchical category tree. For a pair of women's sneakers, the level-categories might look like: Clothing & Apparel > Women's Footwear > Women's Sneakers.

After separating products into different categories and subcategories, you can further break them down with product attributes and facets. 

Going back to our last example, the pair of women's sneakers might be assigned product attributes like size and color. You can then assign values to those attributes (7, 8, or 9 for the attribute "size," and red, white, and black for the attribute "color").

Jaxxon’s online store, which sells mens jewelry, is one example of a great category tree. There you will find numerous product categories, subcategories for each, and attributes that allow customers to filter their search further. For example, Rings breaks down further into Best-Selling Rings, Tungsten Rings, Iced Out Rings, and Wedding Bands:

Take care of your ecommerce shoppers with Gorgias

With the right tools and strategy, you can create a categorization system optimized for customer happiness and revenue generation.

With Gorgias' industry-leading customer insight tools, you can fine-tune your ecommerce store to give your shoppers exactly what they want. On top of product categorization, you can provide self-service resources like FAQ pages, Help Centers, and automated Quick Response Flows so customers have more answers, faster. 

Providing instant, self-service answers to customers is how customers like Loop Earplugs lift revenue by up to 43%:

“We’ve seen 43% increase in revenue from customer support since we launched pre-sales flows. Quick response flows give us the ability to build trust with our customers and that’s priceless. When customers get a quick and honest answer, they often end up buying more than one product in a short span of time. Seeing customers live the life we’re aiming to create for them in Loop Earplugs is extremely rewarding for us.”

- Milan Vanmarcke, Customer Service Manager at Loop Earplugs

Get started with Gorgias to get on track to an organized ecommerce store that converts more shoppers into buyers.

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Whether you’re a small business owner or part of a large ecommerce business, you know that shipping and fulfillment are a significant component of your brand. And you’re here reading this because you want to craft a stronger shipping and fulfillment strategy.

We’ll get to that soon enough, but first, take a minute to think like a consumer. Take off your business-leader hat and put on your internet-shopper hat.

Got the right hat on? OK, good. Now think about your last experience as an ecommerce customer.

How did you approach your last purchase? Did you purchase from the absolute cheapest source, some obscure company you’ve never heard of? Or did you stick to brands and platforms you already know — ones you know you can trust to deliver?

If you’re like most ecommerce customers, you picked something reliable. Because we all know that price is important — but getting what we need when we need it is even more important.

And that’s exactly why it’s crucial for your business to create an ecommerce shipping and fulfillment strategy that works well for you and your customers.

What is ecommerce shipping?

Ecommerce shipping is the process of getting products purchased through an ecommerce storefront or platform from wherever they are to the customer’s specified delivery address. It is a multifaceted, complex process with many touchpoints, dependencies, and moving parts, and its core goal is a crucial one: getting the items people bought delivered to them accurately and on time.

Because of the myriad complexities involved in ecommerce shipping, many companies rely on external partners for some or all of their shipping and fulfillment needs. And all companies, once they reach a certain point of growth, rely on some combination of software and apps to keep shipping, fulfillment, and inventory running smoothly.

How your shipping strategy impacts your bottom line

To the uninitiated, shipping seems like a commodity good, something to spend as little focus and resources on as possible so that teams can stay focused on the real work of the business.

But experience and real-world statistics say otherwise.

A cohesive and realistic shipping strategy is highly valuable to any company that ships products to people because it is part and parcel with your brand image. ShipStation’s second annual national consumer study found that 84% of ecommerce shoppers identified package delivery as the touchpoint that “stands out most in the ecommerce customer experience.”

In other words, get people the stuff they bought quickly, accurately, and with good communication, and you’re telling them something about your brand and company health. Fail to do so, and you’re still sending them strong messages — just not the messages you want them to receive.

While your brand image matters, shipping strategy affects your bottom line more directly too. An even higher percentage of consumers in that same study — 92% — declared that they decide between vendors based on whether they can know their order will arrive when expected. 

Your communication about shipping during the customer journey matters, too. While online shopping, customers hate few things more than having to pay extra for shipping, especially if it’s unexpected until they pull their credit card out at checkout — and put it away when they see a high shipping cost.

Most customers would even prefer an increase in product prices over having to pay for shipping, according to a study from Wharton. In fact, unexpectedly high shipping prices are one of the main reasons for cart abandonment, according to a study from the Baymard Institute:

If you’re regularly failing to deliver when promised, customers will take their business elsewhere.

How your ecommerce shipping process connects to the rest of your business

Your shipping process isn’t a self-contained unit. It has the potential to affect numerous other aspects of your business. Not only that, the reverse is also true: Other departments and facets of your operations can also affect your ability to ship well.

Here’s just a partial list of the sorts of departments and functions that tie into most businesses’ shipping processes:

• Inventory management and stock: Stockouts and misplaced items affect shipping ability
• Customer service interactions: Can customer support agents see shipping status? Can your shipping strategy reliably achieve what they promise?
• Refund and return policies (and the teams that execute those policies)
• Partnering with shipping fulfillment companies or third-party logistics (3PL): Do they reliably meet expectations? Can you get the data you need from them?

Shipping methods that online stores are offering customers

There are multiple shipping methods used today, and not every option is right for every business. It’s a good idea to evaluate the shipping methods available for your business’s products and settle in on the methods that make the most sense given your audience, products, margins, and current logistics abilities.

That said, most consumers expect fast, transparent, and often free shipping on most goods. As many as 77% have abandoned a shopping cart completely because they didn’t find the available shipping options to be satisfactory.

Here are five popular shipping methods in ecommerce that you might consider implementing for your business.

Two-day shipping

Thanks to Amazon Prime, two-day shipping is the gold standard within ecommerce. If you don’t offer it and a competitor (even Amazon itself) sells something similar with two-day shipping available, you could miss out on sales.

Pro: Can be a driver of sales and is widely available through 3PL and shipping fulfillment vendors

Con: Can be too resource-intensive for smaller ecommerce businesses

Same-day delivery

Same-day delivery ships products and puts packages on doorsteps the same day that customers click “buy.” It’s a truly premium offering and a great way to differentiate from the competition, but it usually requires significant scale and investment to pull off.

Pro: Consumers love receiving their order the same day

Con: Same-day delivery highly dependent on the customer’s location and limited to select major cities, and the infrastructure and resource costs can be significant

Overnight or expedited shipping

Overnight or expedited shipping has gone by numerous names: Next-day air and one-day shipping are two of the most prominent. It’s faster than two-day but slower than same-day, and it usually comes with a (sometimes hefty) surcharge for fast delivery.

Some companies (and carriers) use the term “expedited shipping” to refer to something faster than standard shipping but not as fast as express or overnight. If two-day (or faster) isn’t possible or isn’t the norm for your industry, you can differentiate yourself by offering a premium service, such as expedited delivery process or overnight shipping (or both).

Pro: Gives consumers more control over delivery timeframes and allows sellers to pass the additional costs on to the buyer

Con: Can add complexity and ambiguity (How fast is “expedited?”) to your ecommerce shipping strategy, and when customers pay more, their expectations shoot up dramatically.

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International shipping

International shipping is a requirement if you’re a U.S. ecommerce firm that wants to ship directly to non-US customers. The same is true if you’re located on another continent and want to start shipping to overseas (including US) customers.

Pro: International shipping is the only way to reach international customers if you don’t have globally distributed warehouses.

Con: Can add an immense level of complexity and cost, leading most to rely on a global fulfillment partner

Eco-friendly shipping

Eco-friendly shipping refers primarily to the packaging elements a company uses both to package and ship a customer’s order. Instead of plastic and foam, ecommerce businesses can choose biodegradable and compostable materials to fill boxes and to package products.

As far as the shipping itself, there isn’t a clear eco-friendly choice. All shipping has a carbon footprint, though carbon offsets are available for companies committed to leaving the smallest possible footprint.

Pro: Eco-friendly choices care for the planet and signal to eco-conscious customers that a brand is deeply committed to protecting natural resources.

Con: Eco-friendly packing materials carry a cost premium, and a major eco-friendly carrier does not exist.

For example, Hive advertises its carbon-neutral shipping (which makes paid shipping easier to bear for some customers) and gives customers the option to also request an envelope to recycle certain packaging materials:

How to calculate the true cost of shipping

One challenge ecommerce stores face is understanding the real cost of shipping their products, as well as the true cost implications of faster shipping speeds.

This is especially an issue for SMBs because the calculations for upgrading a fulfillment process are complex and, usually, expensive.

Make sure you consider these four factors as you calculate shipping costs on an item.

Dimensional weight

Dimensional weight is a calculation that determines shipping cost based on the physical dimensions of a parcel rather than its actual weight. Trucks and cargo planes have a finite amount of cubic yardage, so dimensional size (or package size) is often as or more important than actual pounds or kilograms.

Many carriers consider both dimensional weight and actual weight of items and charge your business for whichever is greater.

Dimensional weight concerns are one reason to be as efficient as possible in terms of box size. Using the smallest box possible to ship an item safely is one way to minimize shipping costs.

Shipping carrier

Consumers tend to think of last-mile shipping companies like FedEx and UPS as generally interchangeable, but businesses know that this isn’t always the case. The cost to ship products varies across the — one might be the cost-effective option for small, local deliveries but more expensive for international orders.

Additionally, certain industries with unique needs may need to consider specialized or niche carriers. While these may be able to deliver a higher level of service or a specific service the big guys don’t offer, costs will generally be higher.

It’s a good practice to evaluate from time to time the available carriers for your shipping needs to make sure you’re still getting the best possible service and rates.

Check out these shipping calculators to understand the speed and cost of top shipping companies:

• UPS shipping calculator
• FedEx shipping calculator
• USPS shipping calculator
• DHL shipping calculator

Shipping distance

Shipping distance is another element that consumers don’t tend to realize (at least until they sell something on eBay or Etsy). Most major carriers divide the country (or the globe) into various shipping zones. The farther the distance between the origin and destination, the more you’ll generally pay.

Pirate Ship has a great, interactive tool to show USPS’s variable shipping zones, which change depending on where you’re shipping from, impacting the total shipping cost. Here are shipping zones for a business in San Fransico, CA, for example:

Product handling and loading

Handling is an area that’s easy for smaller businesses to overlook when calculating costs. This factor refers to the resource costs of physically finding a product in the warehouse and then picking and packing that product. Businesses face time and labor costs for this work, and this operating expense must be considered as a part of ecommerce fulfillment.

How to structure your ecommerce shipping costs: 3 options

Your business’s shipping costs are inconsistent and variable. If nothing else, your true cost varies based on how far an item has to travel. So how do you decide how to handle shipping with your customers?

These three basic solutions cover the range of options, and each has its own strengths and weaknesses.

Charge a flat rate

First up is flat-rate shipping. In this model, you charge all domestic customers a set flat rate for shipping the same goods. The rate might scale based on the order value or some other metric, but customers in San Diego and Pittsburgh will pay the same rate — no matter what the true cost is to your business.

Businesses with relatively small items or whose catalog entries are all roughly similar in size tend to choose this method. Coffee and tea ecommerce vendors are a great use case: Consumer orders are almost always relatively small, so internal shipping rates are a bit more stable.

Pro: Calculating rates is simple, and repeat customers appreciate transparent, predictable shipping charges.

Con: Flat-rate gets too complicated if your product catalog is large or varied, and you’ll likely lose money some of the time.

Charge a variable rate based on the market

Variable rate shipping calculates the real shipping cost of a specific order (real-time carrier rates) and then passes that cost along to the customer. Some ecommerce platforms include this functionality: It’s a part of Shopify’s Advanced plan, for example.

Note that variable rate shipping doesn’t tend to account for your own handling costs.

Numerous Shopify vendors use this method to cover their shipping costs, as do most B2B sellers and wholesalers that charge for shipping.

Pro: This method is the most “fair” to your business since you’re directly passing along real costs to your customers.

Con: Especially on the consumer front, customers don’t like being surprised by shipping costs — and they aren’t accustomed to seeing the real cost. When you pass along higher shipping costs, you can fail to live up to customer expectations and risk increasing cart abandonments.

If you offer variable shipping rates, consider including a shipping calculator on your site to set customer expectations early. Native Union, a tech accessory brand, lets customers input their zip code to estimate shipping costs and delivery times before they reach the checkout page. This is a great strategy to manage customer expectations, show off fast delivery options, and reduce cart abandonment (by avoiding unexpectedly high shipping costs at checkout):

Offer free shipping

Free shipping is one more option you should consider. Of course, anyone in ecommerce already knows that “free shipping” isn’t really free, yet it’s what customers in many industries are looking for.

Free shipping doesn’t have to be across the board. You can set an order minimum for free shipping, as Amazon and countless clothing retailers have done. Here’s an example of how Woxer advertises free shipping for qualifying orders on their website’s top banner as well as their cart dropdown:

When you choose free shipping, you still have to determine how to account for those costs. You have three options here:

• Build shipping costs into retail prices (customer pays)
• Eat shipping costs using your profit margin (you pay)
• Build only part of shipping cost into retail prices (both pay)

Pro: Free shipping drives sales, increases customer satisfaction, and incentivizes customers to stick with you (even when they’re still secretly paying the cost via higher retail price).

Con: Usually requires raising selling price or cuts into a business’s margins

Choosing a shipping carrier

Choosing the right shipping carrier for your business requires evaluating what each of the available carriers offers you, along with how your product catalog lands in terms of how they calculate shipping charges.

Each carrier uses its own unique fee structure, and all will offer you a shipping cost calculator to help you understand what your costs would be.

While factors can vary considerably based on the parameters of your products, here are a few general considerations for the big four:

USPS: Often the cheapest for ground shipping but not usually the fastest, the United States Postal Service already has an immense last-mile delivery architecture in place.

DHL: With a specialization in international shipping, DHL is the preferred choice for many businesses that ship primarily overseas.

FedEx: A carrier that excels at both national and international shipping, FedEx offers a range of shipping services. Small businesses should look into the FedEx Small Business program for offers and incentives.

UPS: The iconic brown trucks get the job done as well, both nationally and internationally, with a range of competitive delivery options. Like FedEx, UPS offers a range of services for startups and small businesses, including integrations with ecommerce platforms.

Choosing packaging materials for your ecommerce product

Choosing the right packaging materials for your ecommerce product has numerous effects on your company’s bottom line. The packaging itself costs money, and your choice in packaging can affect carrier rates as well. Consider these factors as you choose packaging materials:

• Protection: Can the item be damaged in transit? Is it sufficiently cushioned or otherwise protected to prevent this? What materials will you use to protect fragile products?
• Material: Cardboard, Styrofoam, plastics, and more eco-friendly materials are all available. What’s the right balance of durability, sustainability, and cost for your business?
• Size: Most shipping costs are based either on size or weight, so choose packaging that’s as compact as possible (while still providing the necessary protection).
• Branding: Should your product stand out through custom, branded packaging? Is the boost to buzz and customer loyalty worth the added expense?

Ecommerce businesses tend to make two very similar mistakes in packaging: choosing too large or too small of a box. Go too large, and you incur higher shipping costs due to dimensional weight. But go too small, and there isn’t enough room to cushion or protect your products.

We love stationary brand Ohh Deer’s packaging, which is 100% recycled and doesn’t come with the plastic sleeves traditionally found in greeting cards. Plus, it’s extremely adorable and branded — great for customer delight:

Providing shipping security for you and your customers

Shipping security is one more area to consider in your overall shipping strategy. Strategic work here can protect your business and allay your customers’ fears.

Provide tracking visibility for customers’ shipments

In today’s ecommerce environment, customers want to be able to track where their shipment is and know exactly when it will be arriving. Basic tracking information is usually available through your carrier partner, but you can take things even further with proactive and branded shipping notifications using some of the integrations we’ll show you in the next section.

And if you use Gorgias, you can make tracking numbers and order status available via self-service order management. In your live chat support widget, your customers can track a recent order, modify order details, report issues, and more. Here’s what the feature looks like in a live chat widget:

Related: Learn how to provide order tracking to your customers.

Understand the role of shipping insurance

When you opt for shipping insurance, you’ll be reimbursed for items that get lost, stolen, or damaged during the shipping process. Shipping insurance can provide your business with a sense of security especially if you’re shipping high-value items or items that can break easily. Here are some of the main use cases for shipping insurance:

Of course, shipping insurance can add significant cost. It also doesn’t directly affect your customers’ experience (they will expect a replacement product whether you’re reimbursed or not) but it can save costs for you. 

Most businesses opt for shipping insurance only when shipping expensive, fragile, or easily stolen items.

Related: Learn how to deal with lost packages in ecommerce.

Create a returns program and handle returns logistics

Not every ecommerce sale is going to work out. Customers may simply not like what they got. And defects and product failures happen to every company, no matter how tight your quality control.

For these reasons, you need a clear plan for how you’ll handle returns (and reduce the number of return requests you receive). If you don’t put a plan in place, you can expect a whole lot more customer service tickets (and angry customers).

Here are a few pitfalls to avoid as you craft your returns policies:

• Unclear or buried return policy
• Manual internal system for processing returns
• Offering free returns without accounting for cost or volume

Related: Get 10 best practices for handlind ecommerce returns.

Our recommended ecommerce shipping integrations, apps, and tools

Ecommerce shipping can be complex, but the right set of integrations, apps, and tools, can greatly simplify the process — and it can expand your capabilities and service offerings too.

Below, we’ll show you some of the best shipping integrations we’ve found for the Big Three ecommerce platforms: Shopify, BigCommerce, and Magento 2. And while you’re at it, check out Gorgias’ own collection of shipping and fulfillment apps for the Gorgias platform.

One quick note before we dive in: Some of these recommendations will repeat, and that’s intentional. If a world-class tool is available on multiple ecommerce platforms and works well on each one, we want you to know about it!

Shipping integrations for Shopify stores

Below, we’ll cover three of the best shipping-specific integrations for Shopify stores. Some of these also showed up in our broader Best Magento Extensions article. Feel free to give that a read if you’re looking for more apps, integrations, and functions beyond just shipping and fulfillment.

Shopify Fulfillment Network

Shopify Fulfillment Network is a relatively new service offered by Shopify, wherein stores on the platform send products to a third-part fulfillment center, contracted by Shopify, while manages and streamlines the rest of the shipping and delivery process. Consolidating fulfillment and shipping usually means stores can offer faster delivery times to more locations. However, Shopify Fulfillment Network is not cheap and remove a degree of control you have over such a core part of your brand’s customer experience.

Check out our complete review of Shopify Fulfillment Network here.

ShipBob

ShipBob is a global logistics platform or third-party logistics (3PL) provider catering to the order fulfillment needs of direct-to-consumer (D2C) brands. If you’re looking for an end-to-end ecommerce shipping solution, ShipBob is a contender.

ShipBob maintains its own network of warehouses in strategic locations and is known for its reliable fulfillment services. The company empowers D2C brands to offer same-day shipping and two-day delivery. It also allows brands to customize their shipping presentation with custom inserts and packaging.

If you’re a D2C brand selling through Shopify and you’re looking for a 3PL partner, ShipBob is worth serious consideration.

In addition to being one of the best Shopify apps, this app is also one of the best on BigCommerce, and it’s a Gorgias preferred partner.

Read our head-to-head comparison of Shopify Fulfillment Network vs. ShipBob.

ShipStation

ShipStation is a cloud-based order management and shipping software solution that helps ecommerce businesses power their own logistics efforts. Order processing, inventory management, shipping label creation, and customer communication are all part of ShipStation.

ShipStation connects online businesses with carriers, marketplaces, and channels in powerful ways, and it can give you access to preferred pricing with numerous carriers.

The app’s Shopify integration helps you automate aspects of the shipping and label creation process and simplify international shipping.

If your goal is to keep logistics in house (rather than use a 3PL partner), ShipStation is ideal software to help you control costs and increase efficiency.

In addition to being one of the best Shopify apps, this app is also one of the best on BigCommerce and Magento 2.

Order Printer

Order Printer is a Shopify exclusive that allows businesses to create invoices, receipts, refunds, and packing slips all from a simple one-screen interface. These reports and invoices are rendered as PDFs, which can be automatically sent out to customers via email.

With Order Printer, you can process multiple orders or print requests in bulk and automate attaching those PDFs to emails. It works with the Shopify POS so your sales agents can send off these documents while working in person with customers.

Order Printer is a Shopify exclusive not available on BigCommerce or Magento 2. 

Shipping integrations for BigCommerce stores

These are our top three shipping-specific integrations in the BigCommerce app store.

ShipBob

ShipBob is a global logistics platform or third-party logistics (3PL) firm catering to the order fulfillment needs of direct-to-consumer (D2C) online retail brands.

ShipBob maintains its own network of warehouses in strategic locations and is known for its reliable fulfillment services. The company empowers D2C brands to offer same-day shipping and two-day delivery. It also allows brands to customize their shipping presentation with custom inserts and packaging.

If you’re a D2C brand selling via BigCommerce and you’re looking for a 3PL partner, ShipBob is worth serious consideration.

In addition to being one of the best Shopify apps, this app is also one of the best on BigCommerce.

ShipStation

ShipStation is a cloud-based order management and shipping software solution that helps ecommerce businesses power their own logistics efforts. Order processing, inventory management, label creation, and customer communication are all a part of ShipStation.

ShipStation connects businesses with carriers, marketplaces, and channels in powerful ways, and it can give you access to preferred pricing with numerous carriers.

The app’s BigCommerce integration helps you automate aspects of the shipping and label creation process and simplify international shipping.

If your goal is to keep logistics in house (rather than use a 3PL partner), ShipStation is the ideal software to help you control costs and increase efficiency.

In addition to being one of the best BigCommerce apps, this app is also one of the best on Shopify and Magento 2. 

AfterShip

As the name suggests, AfterShip takes care of everything that happens after you ship your product. It offers automated shipment tracking, notifications, and branded updates so that you — not your carrier — control the information flow and customer communication.

BigCommerce’s AfterShip app also includes Returns Center, an interactive returns portal.

In addition to being one of the best BigCommerce apps, AfterShip also offers more limited app integrations for both Shopify and Magento 2. Aftership also integrates well with Gorgias.

Shipping integrations for Magento 2 stores

Below, we’ll cover three of the best shipping-specific integrations for Magento 2 stores. Some of these also showed up in our broader Best Shopify Apps article. Feel free to give that a read if you’re looking for more apps, integrations, and functions beyond just shipping and fulfillment.

ShipStation

ShipStation is a cloud-based order management and shipping software solution that helps ecommerce businesses power their own logistics efforts. Order processing, inventory management, label creation, and customer communication are all a part of ShipStation.

ShipStation connects businesses with carriers, marketplaces, and channels in powerful ways, and it can give you access to preferred pricing with numerous carriers.

The app’s Magento 2 integration helps you automate aspects of the shipping and label creation process and simplify international shipping.

If your goal is to keep logistics in house (rather than use a 3PL partner), ShipStation is the ideal software to help you control costs and increase efficiency.

In addition to being one of the best Magento 2 apps, this app is also one of the best on BigCommerce and Shopify. 

Easyship

Easyship is a powerful cloud-based shipping platform that’s highly scalable and easy to implement. Customers use it to optimize their shipping efforts and gain access to pre-negotiated shipping rates with hundreds of global couriers.

Easyship is a great tool for giving your customers visibility and choice in shipping, and it’s a simple way for companies to go global.

In addition to being one of the best Magento 2 apps, this app is also one of the best on BigCommerce and Shopify. 

Mageworx Shipping Suite

The Mageworx Shipping Suite Ultimate is a heavyweight Magento 2 extension that covers all aspects of your shipping needs. Configure complex shipping rules, define shipping rates and methods, and customize everything to your heart’s content.

Mageworx is powerful, but not simple to use. It’s best for larger ecommerce businesses with existing in-house resources dedicated to shipping and fulfillment.

The Mageworx Shipping Suite is a Magento 2 exclusive, though Shopify offers a lighter-weight Free shipping & Promo bars integration. 

Related: Review our roundup of the best shipping software for ecommerce.

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Manage your ecommerce business’s shipping and customer service with Gorgias

Shipping and fulfillment are complex parts of your business. So is customer service, and the intersection of the two areas is where many customer satisfaction battles are won — or lost.

For the best customer impact, ecommerce businesses need a solution that lets them control customer inquiries like tracking, returns, the status of an order, and more from a single unified interface.

Gorgias is the customer service and support platform built specifically for ecommerce. With Gorgias, you can track and follow through on every customer inquiry in one place, with rich customer history and powerful tools to surface the information you need, when you need it.

Learn more on how Gorgias integrates with the ecommerce platform you’re already using:

• Gorgias and Shopify
• Gorgias and Magento 2
• Gorgias and BigCommerce

To make a profit, helping people find you easily is a top priority. That’s where SEO comes into play. 

This in-depth guide will help you:

• Find out how eCommerce SEO functions
• Learn why the SERP position is so important to a website
• Understand which steps you need to take to improve rankings
  

What is ecommerce SEO?

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a marketing method for getting more organic traffic from search engines such as Google. 

Although paid ads will attract more people as well, SEO will cost you a lot less. Moreover, it can help you yield better results in the long run. Paid ads are hindered by things like ad blockers and ad blindness -- and they only work when you’re investing money into them. 

In ecommerce, SEO requires you to optimize meta- and product descriptions, headlines, website speed, and design, and many other things. 

Why does your SERP position matter?

Every day, Google processes roughly 3.5 billion searches. That amounts to around 40,000 searches every second. 

A good number of these searches are product-related. That means there are plenty of opportunities to grab shoppers’ attention. 

But most people are aware of this fact. 

As a result, there are literally millions of stores around the Internet. The competition is fierce. Failing to rank on the first page of Google will result in total failure for one simple reason. 

When looking for a web store, most people only look at the first few results. That’s not a hunch -- it’s backed up by the latest research. A recent study conducted by Chitika revealed that the first organic result on Google usually gets 95% of traffic. 

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Although thousands of ecommerce store owners invest huge amounts of money into optimization annually, it doesn’t mean they’re doing it right. 

That’s why you need to ensure that you’re concentrating on important aspects of your website to avoid spending needless amounts of money.

If you want people to find your products easily, follow these 10 steps… 

1. Take care of your structure

The way your site is organized plays a major role in your optimization efforts. Two basic elements every ecommerce website needs to have::

Breadcrumb navigation

This type of navigation allows customers to know what page they’re on, without constantly looking at the URL bar above. If you want to see good use of breadcrumb navigation, then visit Dormify’s official site. 

Clean URLs

You also need to have clear and clean URLs. That means your URL address needs to be easy to read. Let’s say you’re selling suits online and that your domain name is www.suitshopping.com. You don’t want URLs to be made up out of random characters.

You want to have them clean for two reasons: a) to make sure Google indexes the site quickly b) help visitors navigate the website easily. Here’s how URLs should/shouldn’t look:

• Messy URL: https://www.suitshopping.com/index.php?page=blog  
• Clean URL: https://www.suitshopping.com/blog 

With clear navigation, you’ll ensure that Google indexes your website properly and that visitors can find their way around the site seamlessly. 

2. Research and target long-tail keywords 

When it comes to keywords, instead of going for one-word-long, general keywords, targeting long-tail ones should be your priority. 

If you’re just starting out, you can’t expect to compete with the big dogs for general keywords -- no matter your market or niche.

That’s the only way you’ll see results. 

Just take Sportsman’s Warehouse for example. If you’re into camping or fishing, you’ve probably heard about their website. Five years ago, they were competing for major, hard-to-rank-for keywords like “finishing equipment” and “camping gear.” 

Then, in 2015, they started focusing on more specific, long-tail keywords. After 12 months, they tripled their ROI. Compared to the year before, they saw a 31% increase in organic search and a 25% rise in organic revenue. 

3. Optimize your product pages properly 

As an online merchant, your objective is to sell as many products as you can, right? Naturally, one of your biggest concerns needs to be making sure that product pages not only look great but that they’re optimized with Google algorithm in mind. 

Product descriptions need to contain the correct keywords and all of the images have to be tagged properly. You also can’t forget to optimize your:

• H1/H2/H3 Tags - On-page text used by Google to interpret website content 
• Meta Titles - Bits of HTML code that tell Google the title of the page
• Meta Descriptions - Piece of code that says Google what the page is about

You also can’t forget about product page design. 

Take the case of Lightproof, for instance. It shows how a small change can mean a lot to your bottom line. By simply making a change to their CTA button, the electronic accessory company managed to increase its monthly revenue by 16%. 

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4. Ensure that your site is friendly for mobile

Whether you’re aware of it or not, a large portion of visitors will visit your store via smartphone. 

The number of mobile shoppers is surprisingly high. 

Consider this: last year on Black Friday, a third of people only shopped on their mobile devices. So while a mobile-first approach will help you rank better - mobile optimization is now officially a ranking factor - but it will also increase sales. 

Here’s what to do:

• Make website/store design is responsive
• Keep the page loading time on mobile low
• Create a simple checkout for mobile shoppers
  

Also, read about the Google mobile penalty. That way, you’ll know if you’re doing anything wrong. 

5. Add sitemap to Google Search Console

Most popular platforms - including Shopify and WooCommerce - generate a sitemap automatically, you should still take things a bit further. By that, we mean that you should go ahead and add your own sitemap to Google Search Console. 

‍Why is this so important? 

You want Google to index every page you’ve created correctly. From basic to product pages, ensuring that Google has found all of the pages will validate your efforts. 

If you’ve never submitted anything to GSC, here’s a quick guide on how to submit your sitemap.

6. Optimize your page loading time

Letting your website become too slow is a huge mistake. They don’t say that we live in an age of instant gratification for nothing. Here’s the catch: the slower the site is, the less popular it is. 

Slow loading speeds can hinder your entire sales funnel. 52% of shoppers (on mobile) will leave your site if it doesn't load right away. So if you don’t want to start losing customers quickly, do everything in your power to keep things fast.

When it comes to loading speeds, every millisecond counts. Having your website a second slower than it was initially can cost you a lot. 

A one-second delay in loading time can reduce your conversion rate by 7%. If your website is bringing in $10,000 monthly, it will cost you $700. On a yearly level, that amounts to $8,400, which is not a small sum by any stretch of the imagination. 

7. Invest more in content creation

No matter how many times we hear it and how cliché it sounds at this point, content will always be king. After all, it appeals both to people and Google.

As HubSpot explains, people who prioritize content creation are 13X more likely to see a positive return on their investment. Content creation may be hard work, but it’s more than worth it. 

Your blog needs to be updated on a regular basis. Whether you want to invest in article, audio, or video creation, it doesn’t really matter. How much content you need to create and at what frequency you should post it is all up to you. 

Consider using social media and email marketing to distribute your content for wider reach.

8. Create content that’s easy to digest

Let’s stay on the topic of content creation for a bit. Most people will not read every single word you write. Research shows that less than 2 in 10 people will read an entire web page before leaving it. 

People want to find the thing they’re looking for quickly. 

They don’t want to spend an hour going through material only to read a few sentences they wanted. That’s why you need to keep your paragraphs short, easy to digest, and scan. 

Readability apps that can assist you here are WebFX’s Readability Test Tool and Datayze’s Readability Analyzer. 

9. Work out a link building strategy

We’ve been talking about ranking so much thus far, but we still haven’t discussed the most effective technique for improving your SERP rank: link building.

If you haven’t heard about link building, here’s an explanation: this is a practice of building one-way hyperlinks to improve visibility on Google. Some of the more widely-used strategies include outreach, guest posting, and broken link building. 

The more people link back to your site, the more valuable your store is in the eyes of Google. The problem with ecommerce link building is that many websites don’t want to link to someone selling something. That’s why you need to get creative:

• Affiliate Marketing: You can always offer discount codes and landing pages to affiliate websites in your industry to give them the initiative to help you with a backlink. 
• Resource Sections: Create guides and educational content for your blog and reach out to blogs in your niche to get featured in their “resources” section. 
• Bloggers + Giveaways: Run giveaways with influencers and bloggers in your industry to score backlinks, brand exposure, and social reach. 

10. Don’t forget about internal linking 

Let’s face it: not all pages are created equal. Some are more Google-friendly than others. This can be used to your advantage. Use popular pages on the site to refer consumers to product pages to create link equality.

By placing links to products on these high-ranking pages, you’ll drive more visitors to the shopping section of your website. 

Interlinking also contributes to organic visits. Just take a look at Ninja Outreach and their effort. By ensuring that their pages are strategically interlinked, they managed to increase their organic traffic by a staggering 40%.  

Start investing in SEO ASAP

Getting organic traffic has never been easy for any niche, nor will it ever be. In ecommerce, it can be especially challenging. Unlike PPC, it can take several months to see results from an SEO campaign. 

Does this mean that SEO is not worth it? Of course, it is. Standing out in Google is important for every store. (If you have a Shopify, check out our guide to Shopify SEO.)

Before launching your very first campaign, here’s what you need to remember:

• Without optimization, your business as a whole will definitely suffer
• The higher you rank, the more visitors will you be able to attract
• If you want to do SEO correctly, take it one step at a time and be patient

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Whether you’re a small business owner just starting out or a more established ecommerce brand, your shipping is an essential factor in your customer experience — and by extension, your brand’s growth. 

Unexpected shipping costs, the ability (or lack thereof) to track packages, return shipping costs, and many other aspects have an immense impact on your customers’ experience with and perception of your brand. 

Below, we’ll cover the modern customer’s expectations around shipping, as well as 9 essential shipping best practices to reduce cart abandonment and returns, motivate repeat purchases, and keep customers loyal to your online store. 

9 shipping best practices your ecommerce store will benefit from

1. If you have free shipping options, make it a part of your marketing strategy
2. Track your customers’ orders and shipping statuses for them
3. Provide estimated ecommerce shipping costs and arrival dates before the final checkout stage
4. Use ecommerce shipping solutions with automation
5. Cover the cost of shipping on faulty products that need to be returned
6. Offer multiple shipping methods to accommodate customer needs (from “green” options to expedited shipping)
7. Communicate shipping issues quickly, transparently, and in a human way 
8. Have a shipping strategy with business goals
9. When possible, use multiple shipping carriers

Now that we have an idea of what customers expect when shopping online, let’s look at some of the top shipping practices for your online business that both you and your customers will benefit from. Remember, ensuring top-notch shipping practices can help retain customers, bring in new ones, and even increase your business's profit margins. 

1) If you have free shipping options, make it a part of your marketing strategy

As we mentioned earlier, one of the biggest expectations of the modern-day customer is free shipping — thanks Amazon. We already have a post on how to offer free shipping, so we won’t go into that here. Instead, we encourage you to advertise your free shipping across your site to improve your on-site conversion rate.

“The most popular shipping-related promotion is offering free shipping,” as explained by ShipBob. Even more, 60% of ecommerce companies report that “free shipping with conditions” is their most successful marketing tool, as a study from Wharton reports. Wharton’s study also finds that many customers would even prefer free shipping than a $10 reduction on product prices.

A great example of free shipping as a marketing strategy is Woxer, an apparel brand. Even though they only offer free shipping on qualifying orders, they promote that shipping policy on their website’s banner and their cart drop-down:

Additionally, with Gorgias, you can pre-load your live chat with important answers to frequently asked questions — like questions about your shipping policy:

Learn additional tips to reduce your brand’s shipping costs.

2) Track your customers’ orders and shipping statuses for them

When it comes to tracking customers’ orders and shipping statuses, consistency is key. Again, customers expect a way to track their purchases. Beyond simply creating a top-tier customer experience, proactive tracking can be an additional marketing strategy. As Forbes reports, “compared to typical marketing emails with open rates of 10% to 20%, tracking notifications can see open rates between 50% and 80%.” So, use emails to your brand’s advantage, and include as much information as possible to ensure the customer experience is positive. 

This goes beyond just showing when the package is expected to arrive through a USPS or FedEx link. Ecommerce brands that use Shopify can employ the company’s tracking add-on, Shop. Customers download the free Shop app, and as soon as they purchase from an ecommerce business that uses Shop, the order will pop up in their app. The app shows the customer all of their order details, tracking number, carrier info, and a live map of where their package is with detailed tracking info every step of the way. Brands that use Shop for a standout customer experience include Allbirds, Outdoor Voices, and Credo.

If you use Gorgias, you have a great leg-up on the competition when it comes to order tracking. Gorgias’ deep integration with ecommerce platforms like Shopify means that your customer service agents have easy access to customer order information. Plus, with self-service flows, your customers can track orders without reaching out to an agent:

3) Provide estimated ecommerce shipping costs and arrival dates before the final checkout stage

Another best practice you can implement is providing estimated shipping costs and arrival dates before the final checkout stage. Amazon is best known for this, as the company shows estimated arrival dates right on the product page — even before a customer adds the item to their shopping cart. 

This is an extremely important feature to provide, because 63% of customers abandon their carts due to high shipping costs, according to Statista. So, if your ecommerce site offers this information before customers add products to their cart, this may significantly cut down on your abandoned cart rates and avoid potential customer dissatisfaction.

Native Union, a tech accessory brand, lets customers input their zip code to estimate shipping costs and delivery times before they reach the checkout page. This is a great strategy to manage customer expectations, show off fast delivery options, and reduce cart abandonment (by avoiding unexpectedly high shipping costs at checkout):

Check out Shipping Rates Calculator on Shopify, an app that can add this kind of calculator to your store. If you use another ecommerce platform, chances are they’ll have tools with similar functionality readily available.

4) Use ecommerce shipping solutions with automation

As your brand grows, an ecommerce shipping app will become necessary. Depending on the app, they’ll take over the entire shipping process, like coordinating with delivery services, printing shipping labels, and offering a variety of other shipping services. These tools can also provide necessary metrics and analysis to further improve your shipping strategies. 

Automation tools can also benefit your customers. Because these tools offer in-depth information about the customer’s order, it’s less likely that they will need to reach out to your customer support team for assistance. A great example of this is Gorgias’ self-service order management, which lets customers track and modify orders without having to reach out — here’s an example on Steve Madden’s site:

Some of the best ecommerce shipping software on the market include:

• ShipBob: This global logistics platform is specifically for fulfilling ecommerce orders for direct-to-consumer (D2C) brands. 
• NetSuite: This cloud-based app is designed as an all-in-one solution to help your ecommerce business stay organized when it comes to financials, CRM, and ecommerce. 
• Shipup: This app is specifically for delivery and tracking information. It follows each customer’s package in real-time and can even send notifications to customers, redirect them to other tracking pages, and allows your team to proactively manage potential delivery issues. 
• LateShipment.com: This app can help your business reduce shipping costs by up to 20% by utilizing automated service-failure refunds. It also proactively resolves delivery errors, ensuring a seamless customer experience. 
• ShippingChimp: This app works alongside customer service platform, Gorgias, to automate all of your business’ order statuses and fulfillment queries. 
• AfterShip: This web-based platform helps ecommerce brands provide shipment tracking and proactive notifications to customers, as well as brand updates.
• Wonderment: This app helps prevent, “Where is my order?” complaints from your customers, and can help improve your post-purchase customer journey. 

If you use Gorgias, check out our shipping app integrations to unite your tools and create the best ecommerce tech stack possible.

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5) Cover the cost of shipping on faulty products that need to be returned

Returns and exchanges are unavoidable in the ecommerce world, but how your company handles them can make all the difference when it comes to retaining customers. If you make shipping products back to your company a hassle, customers will hesitate to shop with you again. 

Research by ShipBob shows that the majority (80.2%) of customers report they return online purchases if the item they ordered arrives damaged or broken. But 95% of shoppers who are happy with a company’s return process say that they would buy from the same retailer again. With these statistics in mind, you may want to consider covering the cost of shipping returns if the product is faulty. This return policy can put customers at ease knowing that they won’t be hit with a shipping fee on an unusable product. 

Check out our list of the best returns management tools to help you manage the returns process and retain customers, even when they aren’t satisfied with a product.

6) Offer multiple shipping methods to accommodate customer needs (from “green” options to expedited shipping)

Giving customers options when it comes to shipping will increase their likelihood of buying from you. This could include shipping options like overnight or expedited shipping, or environmentally-conscious shipping options. 

As far as eco-friendly shipping goes, a recent survey by Sifted finds that a whopping 91% of customers want an eco-friendly option at checkout. 

One company that announces carbon-offset shipping is Hive, a sustainable grocery brand. The company automatically has paid on orders that don’t reach the free shipping threshold to offset carbon emissions from shipping. However, they let shoppers know the reason behind the surcharge — and opt to let them pay extra for a pre-paid envelope to recycle certain items:

7) Communicate shipping issues quickly, transparently, and in a human way  

We covered how automation and shipping apps can curb shipping issues before they happen, but sometimes issues still arise. We have all experienced shipping delays around the holidays, or at various points during the pandemic. When a customer faces a shipping issue like long delays or a lost package, the best way your team can handle it is with honesty.

Customers want to be able to trust the company they're purchasing from, and sensing that the company is lying is not an ideal way to keep customers. Inc finds that dissatisfied customers tell between 9 and 15 people about a bad experience. 

So, be transparent, honest, and human in your responses. If you know their package was lost, tell them that and offer a solution. Consider sending the product again, or offering a gift card if the product is no longer available. 

And if you have larger issues affecting many customers, consider taking a proactive customer service approach and adding an announcement to your website or contacting everyone who’s recently placed an order letting them know about resulting delays.

For more tips about providing customer support that improves customer relationships and loyalty, read our post on ecommerce customer service best practices. 

8) Have a shipping strategy with business goals

High-level thinking about your ecommerce company’s shipping strategy can have excellent benefits. It’s important not to create your shipping strategy in a vacuum: Involve team members from every department to ensure your shipping strategies align with overall business goals and the bottom line. You can ask yourself and your team questions like:

• How much should we focus on increasing conversions?
• Do we need to grow our customer base more, or analyze our current audience?
• How much do we want to increase our average order value to align with growth goals?
• How much would we like to decrease costs?

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9) When possible, use multiple shipping carriers

The last shipping practice we want to cover is the importance of using multiple shipping companies. In addition to the numerous shipping and supply chain issues that come and go as the COVID-19 pandemic wears on, there are additional legitimate reasons to consider using multiple shipping carriers, including reducing shipping prices. 

First, you’ll have more leverage in negotiating carrier rates if you don’t box your company into working with only one carrier. Second, you’ll have more flexibility when performing local delivery versus international shipping, as carriers like UPS, USPS, and DHL are all cost-effective for certain types of shipping. And third, using a multi-carrier approach will help avoid potential risks. If something goes sour with one carrier, you have backups (think about the USPS issues we faced during the height of the pandemic). 

Customers expect quick, free, and convenient shipping now more than ever

The pandemic brought on many changes, one of which was a dramatic increase in online shopping. Global online sales grew 11% year-over-year in the third quarter of 2021, according to 2021Q3 data from Salesforce. At the height of the pandemic, consumers increased their online shopping out of necessity, which meant that brands were also forced to change how they approached their shipping and other ecommerce strategies. 

We can speculate that during this time period, customers became even more aware of gaps or flaws in certain ecommerce brands' strategies. With more consumers shopping online than ever, ecommerce businesses must meet the growing and changing expectations of online shoppers. These customer expectations include:

The quicker the better

Amazon’s free two-day delivery for Prime members — now sometimes even same-day shipping — has set the bar quite high for other ecommerce companies, though many can’t compete with the retail giant. According to Invesp, 80% of consumers want same-day delivery while 56% under 35 years old expect it.

If it’s not free, it’s (maybe) not worth it

In recent years, customers have upped their expectations when it comes to shipping costs. In the past, many were okay paying extra for expedited shipping, but as of 2019, over 75% of customers expect free shipping on all orders, as the National Retail Federation finds. This figure was up 7% from 2018.

Convenience is king

Overall convenience is another factor that customers care a lot about. 83% of consumers are willing to admit that convenience is important, according to a 2020 survey from the National Retail Federation. The same survey also finds that 97% of cart abandonment is due to inconvenience. 

Order tracking is a must

Lastly, consumers want to know when their orders will arrive. As stated in Metapak’s fourth annual Global Ecommerce Consumer Research Report, 69% of customers say that the ability to track orders is one of their top three considerations when shopping online.  

Integrate your shipping software with Gorgias to streamline your customer service workflow

Shipping is an important element of your customer experience, which is make-or-break for modern ecommerce brands. 

Gorgias is the leading helpdesk for ecommerce businesses because it’s built exclusively around the needs of ecommerce businesses in mind. Our platform can keep all of your team’s support tickets in one place, automate responses to customers, and integrate with your favorite ecommerce apps, including many shipping tools. 

Book a demo to learn more about how Gorgias helps brands grow through happy customers.

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If you’re like most ecommerce businesses, you’ve already established some form of social media presence. Most ecommerce companies share images and videos of their products to get them seen by more internet users, develop a following, and direct potential shoppers to their website. However, this is only one dimension of a social media strategy .

Here’s our guide on how ecommerce brands can use social media to develop a following, directly influence sales, and improve the customer experience. We’ll share examples from each social media platform, plus best practices and actionable tips to help you get started or refine your existing efforts.

How to use social media in ecommerce: 6 impactful ways

Most ecommerce stores start using social media to share photo and video content with the hopes of growing their audiences. However, that’s only one way you can use social media in ecommerce.

Here’s a more comprehensive list:

1) Organic social media marketing

Organic social media marketing includes posts from your social media accounts that you’re not paying to promote as an ad. This will be the bulk of your social media posts — your daily updates, photos, and videos. The advantage of organic social media marketing is that it’s free to use on platforms like Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, and Facebook. This kind of non-paid posting is a form of content marketing.

The main goal of organic posts is to build brand awareness on social media platforms. This is an opportunity to showcase your brand, products, and unique voice and build a following.

Organic social media marketing can includes posts about:

• New products or services
• Sales and promotions
• Your products in action

For example, here is a post from lingerie brand Parade promoting their sleepwear line. It’s a series of photos modeling the line and a caption that highlights the brand’s unique selling proposition of fun, comfy, and sustainable clothing. Without paying to boost the post as an ad, Parade reached their target audience who know and love the brand.

2) Paid social media advertising

Every major social media platform has an option to place ads. This can be done by either boosting an existing post from your feed or by crafting a brand new post to be placed as an ad. 

The cost of this varies by platform but they all offer sophisticated metrics to track the success of your ads. Platforms typically also let you select and refine a target audience to make sure the right people see your ad. 

While ads used to be a major strategy for direct-to-consumer ecommerce brands, this is no longer the case due to the rising cost of advertising on Instagram, Facebook, and other social media platforms. 

Paid social media advertising may cost money, but the advantage is that the ads are promoted beyond your existing following to social media users who may not have even heard of you. It’s a great way to expand your following and reach potential new customers. Paid ads can be used to promote products or sales.

Here’s an example from Facebook of an ad from plus-size retailer Torrid promoting their Black Friday sale. Note that the post is marked as “sponsored” which tells users this is a paid-for ad.

3) Social commerce

Major ecommerce service providers such as Shopify and BigCommerce have integrations with social media platforms that allow merchants to list products for sale right on the platform.

The goal with social commerce is to make it easier for followers to convert to customers. Rather than seeing an item in an Instagram post and having to navigate to the website and search for it, social media users can find the item on Instagram itself and make a purchase, leading to faster conversions.

That seamless shopping experience is incredibly valuable. According to Insider Intelligence, social selling sales are expected to reach $45.74 billion in the US for 2022. As well, half of US adults are expected to make a social commerce purchase.

This is an example from jewelry brand Mejuri. On this Instagram post, they have tagged products from the photo that they’ve uploaded to their Instagram catalog.

When a user clicks on one of these product pins, they’re brought to another page where they can easily navigate to a purchase link either on the ecommerce website.

4) Customer service

Social media can be used as another channel to connect with customers and solve issues or give customers the information they’re seeking. This can be done through comments or direct messages (DMs) on various social media platforms. 

Many customers prefer to contact brands directly on social media rather than going through traditional channels like calling or sending an email. Responding to these messages meets customers where they’re at, creating a more seamless customer service experience.

Many brands use Twitter, for example, as a place to provide customer service. Have a look at David’s Tea. While their main feed is organic posts promoting products and brand awareness, their replies show them engaging with customers.

Here are two examples. In the first reply, they help a customer find a location. In the second, they help a customer track down their order.

📚Recommended reading: 

• 10 Best Practices for Providing Exceptional Customer Service on Twitter
• Facebook Messenger for Customer Service: Benefit, Best Practices, and Set-Up

5) Social listening

Social listening is tracking mentions and discussions of your brand on social media. This can be achieved with something as simple as searching for your brand name on social media or by using a more sophisticated social listening tool.

Customers won’t always tag your brand directly on social media, so social listening will reveal more than simply checking your mentions. You can take this a step further by also looking for mentions of your industry and competing products and brands.

The purpose of social listening is to see how users talk about your brand, whether good or bad. This provides valuable insight into what customers want from you, what problems you can address, and what your competitors are offering that you don’t.

For example, if you sell matcha powder, you could keep track of mentions of “best matcha powder” on Twitter. Looking at the results, you would see:

• Who your top competitors are
• Tweets you could reply to with a promo code
• Potential influencers you could work with

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📚Recommended reading: How to Track and Monitor Social Mentions

6) Influencer marketing  

Influencer marketing is engaging with social media personalities to promote your brand to their audience. Typically influencers are offered either payment or free product in exchange for showcasing your brand.

Influencer marketing gets your brand in front of new eyeballs but it’s also a proven way to convert new customers and build trust. According to Matter Communications, 61% of buyers are more likely to trust a recommendation from a friend, family member, or influencers on social media.

For example, here’s a sponsored post from beauty influencer Mikayla Jane. She’s promoting Briogeo hair care and tagged the post #briogeopartner.

📚Recommended reading: Forming Partnerships to Grow with Influencer Marketing

Best social media platforms for ecommerce brands

It seems like a new social media platform pops up approximately every few months, and it can be a lot to keep track of. Every ecommerce business has to start somewhere, and that place is probably on the list below. 

If you’re a smaller brand, choose one or two platforms based on your target audience’s preferences (which we share below). You’re far better nailing one platform than barely gaining traction on five.

These are the most attractive social media platforms for ecommerce marketing.

Facebook

Most people are on Facebook, even if they don't actively post. Parent company Meta’s recent earnings report reveals almost 3 billion monthly active users on Facebook alone. Yes, billion — that’s quite an audience.

Why Facebook great for ecommerce brands

If nothing else, it's great because more than a third of the earth’s population is active on the platform monthly. Facebook may have its problems, but there’s no arguing with that reach. Facebook Shops are also worth investigating for on-platform social commerce.

Example: GoPro uses Facebook to share videos sent in by customers

The videos not only showcase the capabilities of the product but gets customers excited at the possibility of having their videos shared to GoPro’s huge audience.

Twitter

Born as a short-form, text-driven social platform, Twitter is more about ideas and conversations than it is about ecommerce. It was very late to the ecommerce game, officially launching Twitter Shops in 2022. The platform also has a smaller user base and a very skewed demographic (heavily male, urban, and college-educated).

Why Twitter is great for ecommerce brands

Twitter is great for connecting with fans and building brand awareness (Remember Wendy’s?), but it’s not the best sales platform unless you’re selling products that really resonate with Twitter's specific demographic.

Example: ASOS has over a million followers on Twitter and regularly posts memes and other fun posts

This is a great place for organic social media marketing and engaging in trends, like this meme format, builds brand voice.

Pinterest

Pinterest calls itself a “visual discovery engine” where users can find all kinds of stuff and pin it to one or more boards. People use it to store recipes, fashion inspo, décor trends, and all sorts of other things — including your products if you leverage the platform properly.

Why Pinterest is great for ecommerce brands

Social media marketing on Pinterest is vital, but it’s a little different than on the biggies listed above. Shopify put together a Pinterest Marketing 101 guide that’s worth a look. Key highlights include that 90% of Pinterest users use the platform as a part of their purchasing decision process. Be aware that Pinterest users skew heavily female.

Example: Ruggable is a popular brand on Pinterest and regularly posts home decor images

It’s a great use of the platform because Pinterest is all about inspiration and Ruggable posts collections that tie into different decor aesthetics. 

Instagram

The visual-first sibling to Facebook is heavy on photos, carousels, and videos and is comparatively light on text. Its user base is also in the billions, though not as large as Facebook’s. The visual-forward nature makes it a great fit for social ecommerce.

Why Instagram is great for ecommerce brands

Businesses can create an online store on Instagram and include products in collections. U.S. customers can purchase directly from this store without leaving the Instagram app. Stores can also show off their products in attractive ads that take up the entire dimensions of the news feed.

Example: Makeup brand ColourPop uses Instagram to post photos of customers and influencers wearing their products

Instagram is all about aspirational imagery and these posts inspire potential customers to purchase the products to recreate the looks they see.

TikTok

TikTok is the new king of short-form video content, which can be extremely easy to create — but very complicated to create in controlled, professional ways. It’s a great platform to generate buzz and has high virality potential.

Why TikTok is great for ecommerce brands

TikTok is about exposure, connection, and virality. It’s not about direct ecommerce, as it recently shelved its attempt, TikTok Shop. However, you can link your online store to your TikTok for Business page and sell via advertising and social sharing.

Example: Gymshark uses TikTok to post funny inside jokes about gym culture

Getting users to laugh is a great way to have a TikTok go viral and these videos also showcase Gymshark apparel without directly selling them, which doesn’t play well on the platform.

Snapchat

Snapchat’s original differentiator, messages that disappear after a time, doesn’t seem like a natural fit for ecommerce, but the platform has evolved quite a bit since launch. With a smaller, younger user base, Snapchat isn’t for every ecommerce seller. But its advertising tools are flexible and robust, ranging from photos and videos to ad-based lenses and filters.

Why Snapchat is great for ecommerce brands

If you’re marketing to Gen Z and the youngest portion of the millennial cohort, Snapchat is worth a look because its user base is concentrated in those ages.

Example: Fashion brand Shein posts young influencers showing off their products

This takes advantage of Snapchat’s “shop” button so potential customers can immediately purchase the items they see.

Benefits of using social media to market your ecommerce store

Why use social media marketing at all for your ecommerce store? The obvious answer is sales, but there are several other benefits, too.

Social media marketing can:

• Help your brand reach a wider target audience than traditional marketing
• Expand your brand’s social trust
• Offer customer support where your customers already are
• Strengthen your brand through non-product content like memes and user-generated content
• Increase online store traffic by driving clicks

6 best practices for using social media for ecommerce marketing

Getting your brand on the right networks is the first step, but real success requires doing the right things once you’re there. Follow these best practices to enhance your ecommerce marketing efforts on social media.

1) Optimize your bio for discoverability and links

Social media networks typically offer you only one place to put a link to your ecommerce website in your bio. 

Rather than simply linking to the front page of your store, you can use a “link in bio” tool to maximize the potential of that one link. Tools like Later, Linktree, and Shopify’s LinkPop let you curate a list of links on a landing page. Using this, you can link to particular sections or product pages..

When it comes to writing your bio, keep it short and snappy but also by include keywords relevant to your brand for good search engine optimization (SEO).

Ohh Deer’s Instagram is a great example that:

• Hits all the major key words (Cards, Stationary, and Gifts)
• Explains why they’re unique (collaborating with artists)
• Links to more information (with LinkPop)

📚Recommended reading: Learn how Ohh Deer generates $12,500 per year through great customer service with Gorgias. 

2) Create platform-native (and platform-appropriate) content

Repurposing social content across networks is a good idea, but simply republishing content isn’t. Facebook users have seen the Reels that clearly came straight from TikTok, and screenshots of Tweets make the rounds elsewhere. But for the greatest reach, build your repurposed social content in native formats for each social media platform.

Reels are huge on Instagram, for example, but are ancillary at best on Facebook. Vertical video is just right for Instagram but looks off on Facebook, etc.

3) Share user-generated content like pictures and videos

Are your fans talking about you on social? Share those posts (with permission, in some cases)! Real people love seeing other real people more than yet another social ad (sorry, but it’s true), so use it if you got it.

 Social listening is the best way to find user-generated content, so regularly search for your brand on social media platforms or make use of a tool like Hootsuite to keep tabs on your mentions.

For example, skincare brand Blume uses before and after photos taken by users to show the effectiveness of their products.

4) Add relevant hashtags and tags to increase discoverability

Hashtags work a little differently on each platform, but they’re worth using anywhere that accepts them. On many networks, hashtags are clickable or tappable, allowing users to discover other posts sharing that hashtag. This means that people clicking a hashtag from another brand’s post could end up on yours, no advertising dollars required.

Similarly, tagging customers featured in user-generated content, celebrities seen using one of your products, or other brands can expand the reach of your social media profile. 

 For an example, look at this post from cereal brand Magic Spoon on Instagram.

In a separate comment, they’ve inserted a series of hashtags to help those who follow certain diets discover their post.

5) Include shoppable links when you post about products

Many social media networks allow brands to add tags or links to let customers directly shop for products from posts.

Shopify, for example, allows brands to upload a catalog of their products to Instagram and Facebook and tag products as shoppable links. That seamless experience means a faster checkout and higher conversions.

According to a Sprout Social report about pandemic shopping habits, 68% of customers made a purchase directly from social media in 2021. Also, virtually all shoppers — 98% — plan to make a purchase through social shopping or influencers in 2022.

6) Combine organic and paid strategies

Organic social traffic happens based on user actions: shares, likes, comments, and discovery-based clicks (reels, pins, hashtags, and more). You don’t pay for that traffic — beyond what it costs to create content. Paid social strategies are (can you guess?) anything you pay for in terms of ads.

Both have strengths and weaknesses, but the best approach is to combine them to yield better results.

For example, you might use paid advertisements to boost posts beyond their organic traffic. Then you might personalize interactions via direct messages with the users that contact you after interacting with a boosted post.

5 tips to use social media for a better customer experience

Social media marketing strategy is important, but it’s only the tip of the iceberg for how your brand can grow with social media. Consider leveraging social media to improve your brand's customer experience.

Below are several tips for accomplishing this. Note that some of these tips won’t be possible with the stock tools various social networks provide to businesses; you’ll need to add external apps. Shopify store owners should check out these 11 powerful social media apps for Shopify.

1) Let customers contact customer support through social media

Social media has made brands even more available to consumers, so much so that people expect near-instant availability from most brands. Not only that, customers want to reach brands on any and all channels — whichever is convenient at the moment.

A helpdesk like Gorgias streamlines this by pulling in comments and messages from Facebook and Instagram, into one shared inbox. That means your customer service team can quickly respond to customers from one location.

2) Engage customers who didn’t even reach out to your brand directly

Social monitoring looks at brand mentions on social media beyond the scope of direct messages. Sometimes, in your social monitoring efforts, you’ll notice a complaint or a flat-out inaccurate claim about your ecommerce business being blasted online.

It’s often worthwhile to reach out to these customers in a visible way (such as a tweet reply or comment reply). Doing this gives you the chance to set the record straight on any factual inaccuracies, and you just might turn a frustrated detractor into a satisfied fan.

📚Recommended reading: Social Media Customer Service: How-To Guide & Useful Tools

3) Move escalated conversations to private channels

Explain that customers are likely to share bad experiences online, and when they’re escalated, you want to manage the interaction privately. Acknowledge their issue in the public channel but move it to DMs or email ASAP. To avoid violating privacy policies, ask customers to send you a message to start the conversation. 

4) Welcome new followers with a DM (and a discount!)

When a new customer follows you on social, it usually means they’re expressing interest in your brand. They’re statistically much more likely to be potential customers (or existing ones) than the average social user, so don’t leave them in the cold!

Rather than waiting for them to reach out, you can proactively make the first move.

Our own research and platform data show that ecommerce businesses that send this kind of welcome DM increase brand revenue via social by 4%.

Read our post on welcoming customers proactively with a DM to learn how beauty brand Glamnetic lifted revenue with this digital marketing strategy, and how you can pull it off, too. Not sure what to say? Just say hey, introduce your brand, and sweeten the deal with a new follower discount code.

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Upgrade your customer experience and social media marketing with Gorgias

Social media marketing for ecommerce stores is a broad discipline with significant potential to increase sales and revenue, build social trust, and enhance your brand’s presence online. Mastering social media marketing isn’t easy, but the results tend to pay for themselves many times over when you do it right.

One thing you’ll need to succeed in social media marketing and social commerce is the right set of digital tools. Without them, posting and interacting via social at scale can quickly become overwhelming.

Gorgias is the customer support and helpdesk platform built for ecommerce platforms. Gorgias helps brands respond to social media support messages and comments from within an all-in-one customer service platform, with access to rich data on existing customers, powerful automations and scripts, chatbots, and more.

Gorgias also integrates with social media marketing apps like Recart and ShopMessage, helping you leverage your social efforts even further.

Ready to see what Gorgias can do for your CS, CX, and social media marketing efforts? Sign up now and see Gorgias for yourself.

Today, a wide range of software solutions exist to help ecommerce business owners better manage every aspect of their online store. However, creating the ideal technology stack for an ecommerce store is often easier said than done. To help you put together a tech stack that’s best suited for your unique business needs, we’ll review some of the top ecommerce tools on the market today, grouped by category. 

First, we’ll walk through what you need to know about building a powerful, easy to use ecommerce tech stack — without breaking the bank. 

What is an ecommerce tech stack? 

An ecommerce tech stack is the collection of digital tools, software applications, and platforms that an online store owner uses to run their business. These tools work together to optimize day-to-day tasks — across sales, marketing, customer service, order fulfillment and returns, payment processing, and other key areas — and reveal customer insights that can fuel growth.

If you’re curious about an ecommerce brands’ tech stack, try searching on builtwith.com, which scans the back-end of any website to see what technology it uses.

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Factors to consider as you build your ecommerce technology stack 

Today, ecommerce store owners have a broad range of solutions to choose from when it comes time to build their ecommerce tech stack. However, an abundance of options can also make selecting the best solutions a challenge. Here are the most important factors to consider: 

Cost

An ecommerce tech stack can consist of anywhere from 3-5 core tools to more than 20, depending on the size of your operations and how you approach the process. It’s vital to set a budget and keep it in mind as you weigh different solutions and plan tiers. If possible, balance it against the return on investment (ROI) for the particular tool or feature set (more on that later). 

Compatibility

Ideally, you’ll create a digital ecosystem of tools that integrate seamlessly and transfer data quickly and reliably. The ecommerce tools you consider should allow you to combine the features of multiple solutions, either through direct integrations or third-party integration tools. 

Ease of use

While all ecommerce solutions come with some degree of a learning curve, it's a good idea to prioritize user-friendly tools that are easy to install, set up, and use. Look for a knowledge base with tutorials and FAQs; expert-led training options can also help.

Customer support

Make sure the support solution aligns with your business hours and the channels you prefer, like email, phone, or live chat. Choosing a solution that’s backed by excellent customer support means you’ll have a reliable source of assistance if or when issues arise. 

Determining the order of tool additions 

Building the right tech stack, complete with all the tools and features your store could possibly need, doesn’t happen overnight. It’s best to focus on testing and approving the tools you truly need for your day-to-day operations. That way, you know that any other software or hardware you’re considering should integrate nicely with your must-have tools. 

For starters, an online store hosting platform will be the cornerstone of your ecommerce tech stack. From there, it’s up to you to decide which tools you add next. 

We’ve seen that many ecommerce store owners choose to prioritize their sales and marketing tools — after all, many of the other solutions on our list won't offer much value if your online storefront isn't attracting customers or ready to manage payments. Big picture solutions or add-ons, like the top tier of a user analytics tool or premium page themes, can come later on. 

Ensuring compatibility between tools 

When it comes to building the best possible ecommerce tech stack, integrations are key. Choosing apps that sync with one another allows information to flow seamlessly between them, cutting down on manual labor and user error and letting you get the most out of your stack. 

Most software platforms have an integrations or apps page where they list their official integrations. For instance, the Gorgias Apps page has a categorized, searchable database of the 80+ apps that integrate with its platform. For apps that don’t directly integrate, a tool like Zapier lets you easily set up workflows between them and doesn’t require much tech expertise to use. 

An email marketing platform that connects with your order fulfillment platform, for example, can enable you to send automated order tracking updates to your customers personalized with their name. A customer service solution that integrates with your social media marketing solution, meanwhile, can allow you to turn your social media channels into customer service channels.

A connected ecosystem provides far more value and functionality in the long run. By looking for compatibility between tools ahead of time, you can build an ecommerce tech stack that’s much more than the sum of its parts. 

Balancing your tech stack budget against potential ROI

Fortunately, the money you invest into building tech stack doesn’t disappear into thin air — it will offer real value and unlock revenue opportunities. As you consider the cost of different tools, it’s a good idea to weigh it against the potential ROI of each tool. 

At a high level, you can determine the potential ROI of each tool by weighing the expenses for a given time period — such as monthly subscription costs, licensing fees, additional users, and training or setup fees — against the potential gains. It can be tough to put the positive value of using a new tool into figures, however, consider gains like increased sales or reduced labor costs to start. 

We recommend creating an optimistic estimate (lowest cost and highest return) and pessimistic estimate (highest cost and lowest return) to get closer to an accurate number. For example, if your optimistic estimate suggests that an email marketing tool will increase your store's cash flow by 10%, then you could factor this estimated ROI into how much of your budget is allotted for this tool.

Ecommerce store hosting platforms

• Bluehost
• Hostinger 
• Cloudways 

The first solution that you will need to choose before you can get your ecommerce store up and running is a hosting platform. Hosting platforms allow you to build a custom ecommerce website — regardless of your coding experience — using simple drag-and-drop commands. 

Plug-n-play hosting platforms also offer services such as website hosting, website security, and payment processing on your behalf. If you would like to get started building your own ecommerce store using an ecommerce store hosting platform, here are the top platforms to consider:

Shopify

Arguably the most recognizable ecommerce store hosting platform, Shopify has certainly earned its reputation as a go-to choice for e-commerce sites. With Shopify, business owners are able to create attractive online stores in a matter of minutes by choosing from a broad variety of starting templates, then adding additional design elements and features from Shopify's ever-expanding library. 

Business owners can also integrate thousands of additional features into their online store by making use of the Shopify App Store — a store that sells thousands of third-party apps designed to integrate with Shopify websites.

Pros

• Mobile-ready
• Choose from thousands of third-party app integrations on the Shopify App Store

Unique features

• Integrated payment processing
• 24/7 live customer support

Check out Shopify’s integration with Gorgias.

BigCommerce

Like Shopify, BigCommerce is a web development solution that allows ecommerce business owners to create their own online stores within a no-code environment before offering a full suite of web hosting services that includes site security and payment processing. 

With that said, there are a few features that set BigCommerce and Shopify apart. For one, BigCommerce offers a long list of built-in sales features that don't require any additional installation, ensuring that you are ready to start moving products the moment your store goes live. Another nice feature of BigCommerce is that BigCommerce does not charge any transaction fees regardless of the plan that you choose.

Pros

• The ability to add an unlimited number of product variants
• Designed for scalability

Unique features

• Wide range of built-in sales features
• No transaction fees on any plan

Check out BigCommerce’s integration with Gorgias.

Magento

Magento differs from Shopify and BigCommerce in the fact that it is an open-source platform that is free to download and use. In order to build a website using Magento, though, you are going to need a certain degree of coding experience. The tradeoff for this steeper learning curve is that Magento allows you to build sites that are much more customized than what you could build using Shopify or BigCommerce. Magento also offers hosting services and a broad range of third-party integrations that can be purchased as add-ons.

Pros

• Unlimited customization options providing you know how to code
• Comprehensive answers to just about any question can be found on the Magento Forum

Unique features

• Detailed analytics and reporting
• Enhanced product browsing (i.e. the ability for customers to zoom in on product images, the ability to display stock availability, and the ability to display multiple pricing tiers)

Check out Magento’s integration with Gorgias.

Ecommerce marketing tools

• Ahrefs
• Canva 

According to data from The Drum, the total amount of money spent on digital ads increased 41% in the first half of 2021. If you want to keep up with econnerce industry competition that is increasingly spending more on advertising, it is essential to develop the right marketing strategy for your online store — and a big part of creating an effective marketing strategy is choosing the right ecommerce marketing tools. 

From providing insights about your visitors, to helping you conduct keyword research, to helping you manage your email and PPC campaigns, there are a lot of capabilities that come with developing the right ecommerce marketing tool tech stack.

Klaviyo

Klaviyo is a SaaS solution that automates the process of creating and managing email and SMS campaigns. With Klaviyo, you start out with pre-built campaign workflows that you can customize into your own email or SMS campaigns. From there, Klaviyo allows you to create automated triggers and segmented lists for your campaigns that will completely automate the process of sending the right messages to the right customers at the right times.

Pros

• An incredibly wide range of pre-built email workflows to choose from
• A convenient analytics dashboard that displays key campaign data

Unique features

• Multiple automation triggers such as cart abandonment, price drop, back-in-stock, and more
• A large library of integrations to pull data from other ecommerce tools and platforms into Klaviyo

Check out Klaviyo’s integrations here. 

Postscript

Postscript is a tool that integrates with Shopify stores in order to provide store owners with the ability to create and manage SMS marketing campaigns from one centralized dashboard. 

Given that SMS messages have a 98% open rate according to data from TechJury, SMS can be a powerful medium to manage, and Postscript provides all of the tools you need to develop and oversee effective SMS marketing campaigns: detailed reporting, tools for growing and managing your SMS subscriber list, and beyond.

Pros

• Create up to 65 different automation triggers
• Segment your subscribers using 40 segmentation filters, including historical Shopify data, SMS activity, data from app integrations, area codes, and more

Unique features

• Create multiple "text-to-join" keywords
• Create QR codes that can be used to opt-in to your subscriber list

Check out Postscript’s integrations here. 

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a free analytics service offered by Google that is designed to provide real-time insights regarding how users find and use your website. With Google Analytics, you can see where your traffic is coming from, the pages that they visit, how much time they spend on each page, detailed demographics of your website visitors, and beyond. This detailed customer data helps you optimize your online store and marketing campaigns alike. 

Google Analytics can also connect with any ecommerce platform and offers an incredibly wide range of other integrations as well.

Pros

• Excellent data visualization features
• Create custom data reports

Unique features

• Perform keyword research using Google Analytics's Search Console
• Segment your website visitors and leads for more personalized and targeted campaigns

Learn how to set up and integrate with Google Analytics here. 

Canva

Canve is a simple, powerful design platform where anyone can design marketing assets for their website, social media, and more. While most designers prefer more powerful design tools, Canva’s extensive template library and simple drag-and-drop editing features make it the perfect choice for small business owners and single-person marketing teams. 

Pros

• Easy to use, regardless of technical or design skills
• Great free model

Unique features

• A large template library with pre-sized images for Instagram stories, Facebook banners, and so much more
• Great collaboration features to help facilitate brainstorming and feedback 

Ecommerce social media management

• Octane AI 
• ShopMessage
• Gatsby 

With billions of engaged users all over the globe, social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter are ripe with marketing opportunities. In addition to solutions for marketing to your social media audience, ecommerce social media management tools can also provide benefits such as automating the process of managing your social profiles and enabling you to turn your social media profiles into customer service channels. 

Sprout Social 

Sprout Social is an all-in-one social media management tool that offers features like social listening tools for gleaning key insights from your social media audiences, automation tools for automatically scheduling and publishing posts, a centralized inbox for responding to comments and direct messages across multiple platforms, and rich analytics for gauging the results of your social media efforts. If you're looking for a single solution to empower your store's social media strategy, Sprout Social is a wonderful option to consider.  

Pros

• Offers a variety of powerful tools and features in a single solution 
• Intuitive and easy to use 

Unique features 

• Social listening tools automatically track and extract key insights from social conversations about your brand 
• Publishing and scheduling tools enable you to schedule posts for automatic publishing across all major social media platforms 

Check out Sprout Social’s integrations here. 

Gorgias

Gorgias's comprehensive customer service platform offers powerful social media management features such as the ability to respond to direct messages, comments, and mentions across platforms from a single dashboard, track sales generated by individual support agents via social media app, and create macros that streamline your day-to-day social media interactions. 

Pros

• Powerful, user-friendly social media features and integrations built specifically for online stores
• Offers a broad range of customer support tools to make Instagram, Facebook, and more part of a stellar customer experience

Unique features 

• A centralized, user-friendly dashboard for managing social interactions across platforms 
• Customizable rules and macros powered by customer sentiment detection

Check out all of Gorgias’s integrations here. 

Recart 

With over 146 million active users in the United States alone, Facebook Messenger is one of the most popular messaging platforms in existence. With Recart, ecommerce store owners are able to take advantage of this app's popularity by creating automated Facebook Messenger marketing campaigns. Recart also offers tools for helping you grow your Facebook Messenger subscriber list, as well as SMS marketing and list-building features.  

Pros

• Makes it incredibly easy to build opt-in popups and automated marketing flows 
• Offers a range of useful Facebook Messenger marketing campaign templates 

Unique features 

• Enables you to create cart abandonment reminders, welcome series, sales promotions, and a range of other automated Facebook Messenger campaigns 
• Provides customizable, fast-loading opt-in popups for growing your subscriber lists 

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Check out Recart's integrations here.

Ecommerce customer relationship management (CRM) tools

• Zoho CRM 
• PipeDrive 
• Monday Sales CRM 

Creating an optimized customer experience is a vital goal for all types of retailers, and ecommerce stores are certainly no exception. With ecommerce CRM tools, you can ensure that you are managing your all-important customer relationships in a way that is well-organized and largely automated, freeing you up to focus on other important tasks.

Attentive

Attentive is an SMS and email marketing solution designed to help store owners scale their subscriber lists and engage with those lists in a more personalized manner via enhanced segmentation and targeting. If you would like an all-in-one solution to SMS and email marketing, Attentive can offer everything you need to start building your subscriber lists and generating impactful campaigns.

Pros

• Makes it easy to ensure compliance with SMS and email marketing regulations
• Strategic guidance and resources designed to help store owners optimize their SMS and email campaigns

Unique features

• A design editor that allows you to easily create various sign-up units for your website, social media platforms, emails, and product packaging/in-person marketing initiatives
• Build custom integrations using Attentive's Public APIs and developer resources

Check out Attentive’s integrations here. 

Ecommerce sales tools

• Sender 
• Hubspot Sales Hub 
• Showpad 

Ecommerce technologies designed to help you optimize your store's conversion rate and grow its sales can be highly beneficial. Ecommerce sales tools are able to provide a number of capabilities, such as helping you create the ideal sales funnel for your site, helping your sales staff perform customer outreach, and providing you with a wealth of customer data that you can leverage to boost your website's sales.

Certainly

With Certainly, ecommerce store owners can create AI assistants that will guide their site's visitors to recommended products, walk customers through the checkout process, present customers with upsell opportunities, assist with returns, and more. These AI assistants also gather loads of valuable data during their conversations with customers that you can use to optimize the customer experience on your site.

Pros

• Create AI-assistant-guided sales funnels for your site
• Access much more detailed customer data that is acquired via customer conversations with your AI assistants

Unique features

• Certainly Webhook Builder allows you to completely customize your AI assistants
• A wide range of pre-made templates to speed up your time to market

Check out Certainly’s integrations here. 

EasyCall

Even in today's digital age, contacting customers by phone remains a lucrative sales strategy. With EasyCall, sales teams are able to manage every aspect of phone-based customer outreach from a single centralized dashboard. EasyCall also makes it easy for customers to get in touch with you by making it simple for you to create a business phone number and web-based call center.

Pros

• EasyCall can easily integrate with almost any CRM tool
• An intuitive call center tool allows for effortless collaboration between your sales and customer support teams

Unique features

• Create a web-based call center without the need to purchase any hardware
• Make international calls without paying international calling fees

Check out EasyCall’s integrations here. 

Ecommerce automation tools

• Zapier 
• Buffer 
• Jumplead

Automating time-consuming tasks such as managing email marketing campaigns or building new features into your website can free you and your team up to focus on other responsibilities. If you would like to leverage the power of automation on your website, here are two great automation e-commerce solutions to consider.

Alloy 

Alloy is a no-code automation solution for ecommerce stores that allows you to create triggers and automated flows with ease. Alloy is designed to integrate with a wide range of ecommerce tools and platforms so your system is ready to go when a specific event occurs within your store or one of the apps that you rely on, like a sale, customer message, page view, and more.

Pros

• Plenty of customizable triggers, conditions, and executable actions to select from 
• Capable of integrating with over 100 different ecommerce tools and platforms 

Unique features 

• Offers a variety of pre-built workflows in addition to the ability to create your own, customized workflows 
• Centralizes data from multiple applications and customer touchpoints 

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Check out Alloy's integration with Gorgias. 

Omnisend 

Omnisend is a tool that allows ecommerce store owners to create automated SMS and email marketing campaigns. In addition to templates to help get you started, Omnisdend also offers precision targeting and list segmentation tools, customizable triggers for launching automated campaigns, and in-depth reporting on the results that your SMS and email campaigns generate.

Pros

• Easy to set up and use 
• Affordable pricing plans with a completely free plan that offers up to 500 emails per month 

Unique features 

• A broad range of customizable email and SMS templates to choose from 
• Automated list segmenting automatically divides your subscriber lists into targeted list segments 

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Check out Omnisend's integration with Gorgias. 

Mesa

Mesa offers a wide range of automation solutions, including automating customer returns, order tracking, creating customer support tickets, and beyond. With Mesa's large library of pre-built automation workflows and its no-code workflow editor, you can build and customize just about any automation you can imagine — regardless of your coding experience.

Pros

• Makes it easy to build customized automations using only drag-and-drop commands
• A well-regarded support team for helping you make the most of Mesa's many features

Unique features

• A no-code workflow editor that allows you to customize Mesa's pre-built automations or create your own automation from scratch
• A vast selection of pre-built automation workflows

Check out Mesa’s integration page here. 

Ecommerce shopping cart tools

• X-Cart 
• Shift4Shop 
• AbanteCart 

Once you successfully direct a customer to the checkout page of your online shop, the battle is still far from over. In fact, the average cart abandonment rate across all industries is right at 70% according to data from Baymard Institute. Thankfully, utilizing the right ecommerce shopping cart tools can help you optimize your customers' checkout experience and keep your cart abandonment rate as low as possible.

Shopaccino

One-part shopping cart tool, one-part plug-n-play ecommerce platform, Shopaccino allows you to turn any website into an ecommerce store by providing features such as payment processing, campaign tracking, inventory management, and more. If you are looking for an all-in-one solution for creating and managing your online shop but would rather use your existing website, then Shopaccino is a great option to consider.

Pros

• Provides the ability to turn any existing website into a fully functional ecommerce store
• Provides APIs for connecting any ERP, accounting system, or other software solution

Unique features

• A large selection of free responsive themes to help you get started building your online store
• Automatically or manually generate coupon discount codes

Check out Shopaccino’s integrations here. 

Ecwid

Ecwid is a tool that makes it easy to add products and a checkout page to any website or social media profile. Like Shopaccino, Ecwid can be used to turn your existing website into a fully operational online store. Ecwid also makes it easy to sell across multiple sales channels and platforms, including in-person, on your website, or on your social media profiles.

Pros

• Easily add products and a checkout page to any existing website or social media profile
• Completely free to use

Unique features

• In addition to turning any website or social media profile into a point-of-sale, Ecwid also allows you to easily process and manage in-person sales and accept credit/debit card payments on the go or at your brick-and-mortar location
• Provides automated marketing features such as automated abandoned cart emails and automated PPC advertising

Check out Ecwid’s integrations here. 

Ecommerce web development tools

For brand-new stores, most of the tools listed in other sections will be enough to . However, as you grow, you may need additional web development frameworks to help you customize your store, improve efficiencies, and offer the customer experience your shoppers deserve.

Front-end web development

Front-end web development programming languages help you develop, design, and deploy your ecommerce website. They help make your website more interactive, eye-catching, and user-friendly. The main front-end programming languages are:

• Cascading Style Sheets (CSS): Stylizes and formats HTML documents
• Hypertext Markup Language (HTML): The standard markup language for web pages
• JavaScript (JS): Adds more dynamic, interactive elements to your web pages

Back-end web development

If front-end web development is the aesthetics of the house, back-end web development is the plumbing, electricity, and everything else that operates behind the scenes to power the house’s — or your website’s — functionality. 

Back-end development is usually custom-built, and requires a few elements:

• Operating system: Windows, Linux, or macOS
• Web server: Apache, Nginx, Microsoft-IIS
• Databases: MySQL, MongoDB, DynamoDB by Amazon, Firebase database by Google, PostgreSQL
• Storage: Amazon Web Services (AQS) S3, Firebase Storage by Google
• Scripting language: Ruby on Rails, Java, Python, Scala, PHP, Spring, Groovy on Grails

If you’re interested in learning more about technical stacks for ecommerce, consider reading more about some of the most popular:

• LAMP Stack
• Python-Django
• MEAN Stack
• .NET Stack

And if this section on web development went over your head, don’t be alarmed. Most stores get away with simple no-code tools until they mature enough to hire outsourced or in-house developers to support. 

Ecommerce payment processing software

• Skio 
• Checkout Champ
• Recharge 

The ability to securely and conveniently accept payments from customers is a vital capability for any online store. Thankfully, these payment processing solutions make it easy for you to provide your customers with multiple payment processing options: Think of them like payment gateways that connect your store to flows of funds.

Shopify POS 

Shopify POS is a point-of-sale solution designed specifically for Shopify stores. It boasts a variety of advantages for Shopify users, including the ability to sync inventory, payments, and orders across multiple Shopify stores, create discounts and loyalty programs, and offer customers flexible shopping options like local pickup, local delivery, and ship-to-customer. 

Pros

• Easy and powerful integration with the Shopify platform 
• Provides useful inventory management tools in addition to payment processing 

Unique features 

• Allows you to process payments online, in store, or on your social media channels 
• Lets you create detailed customer profiles for use in loyalty and rewards programs 

Check out Shopify POS's integrations here.

PayPal

Once integrated into your online store, PayPal allows you to accept both credit/debit card payments as well as payments that are made using the customer's own PayPal account. PayPal also offers convenient point-of-sale devices that enable you to accept credit, debit, and PayPal payments at your brick-and-mortar location.

Pros

• Robust security ensures that your customers' sensitive financial data doesn't fall into the wrong hands
• PayPal speeds up the checkout process for customers with an existing PayPal account, making it much easier for your customers to complete their purchase and thus reducing your cart abandonment rate

Unique features

• PayPal Checkout allows customers to complete their checkout without having to fill in information such as credit card numbers and shipping addresses
• PayPal Marketing Solutions provides insights into how your customers are shopping

Learn how to integrate with PayPal here. 

Square

Like PayPal, Square offers both ecommerce and in-person payment processing solutions. While Square is best known for its point-of-sale devices that make in-person payment processing secure and convenient, Square can also be integrated with your online store to allow you to easily accept credit/debit card payments.

Pros

• Slightly lower fees than PayPal and other payment processing solutions
• Exceptional point-of-sale devices for in-person sales, including a free card reader

Unique features

• 24/7 live chat support
• Square offers a feature that allows customers to book appointments with your company through its website

Check out Square’s integrations here. 

Recharge

Recharge is a subscription billing platform for Shopify stores that allows store owners to sell subscription-based products and services. If you are selling subscription-based goods such as replenishable goods or subscription boxes, Recharge can help you manage the complex billing in a way that is easy and largely automated.

Pros

• Detailed analytics and reporting
• ReCharge is the only Shopify Plus partner designed specifically for subscriptions

Unique features

• A gifting function that allows customers to gift a subscription to another person
• Upsell workflows to help increase your average order value

Check out Recharge’s Tech Partners list of best-in-class integrations here. Or, see the full integrations directory. 

Ecommerce customer service software

• Zendesk 
• HelpCenter
• Help Scout

Excellent customer service is a key pillar of ecommerce success. With these ecommerce customer service software solutions, you can integrate live chat customer support into your website, create automated chatbots for handling common questions and customer support issues, and automate other time-consuming elements of customer support.

Gorgias

Gorgias is an all-in-one customer service solution built specifically for merchants in the ecommerce industry. 

The tool provides live chat customer support capabilities and self-service options such as a dedicated help center and knowledge base. This platform also offers a wide range of automations and macros for automating much of your customer service responsibilities. If you are looking for a comprehensive solution to ecommerce customer service that will save your customer support team time and resources and give your customers the help they need, Gorgias is an excellent solution.

Pros

• Gorgias centralizes all of your multichannel support tickets in one place, allowing your customer support team to edit orders, modify subscriptions, and refund payments without leaving the helpdesk
• Can connect with Shopify, BigCommerce, and Magento stores to bring your products and shopper history right into the helpdesk

Unique features

• Live chat customer support with the ability to automatically message customers first during key events
• Macros and rules that allow you to automate customer service tasks such as providing shipment updates or creating customer support tickets

Check out all Gorgias integrations here. 

Stella Connect

Stella Connect is a tool designed to help business owners manage remote customer support teams. With Stella Connect, you can manage your entire customer support team from one centralized dashboard, or integrate with Gorgias for an even more robust solution for remote teams. You can also schedule one-on-one meetings with customer support agents, provide agents with real-time customer feedback and more, making Stella Connect an excellent choice for business owners who rely on remote workers as their customer support staff.

Pros

• Centralizes and streamlines all aspects of remote customer support team management
• Provides detailed customer data that you can use to improve your customer support performance

Unique features

• Create and implement automated customer support workflows
• Create rewards and incentive programs for customer support agents

Check out Stella Connect’s integrations here. 

Still not satisfied? Check out our list of the best:

• Customer service software on the market
• Customer service software for Shopify stores

Ecommerce chat tools 

• LivePerson 
• ChatBot 
• ManyChat 

Installing chat tools on your website is one of the best ways to boost order value while making customer support more convenient for your customers. In fact, nearly 80% of businesses say offering live chat features has positively impacted sales, revenue, and customer loyalty.

Chat solutions for ecommerce stores can come in two different forms: live chat and automated chatbots. Implementing a live chat solution lets customers connect with a live support agent via a chat widget on your website. Chatbots, meanwhile, are AI-powered chat tools that auto-reply to common customer questions and issues according to rules you create and macros and resources you build ahead of time. 

In both cases, ecommerce chat tools can be a powerful way to make your support channels more accessible to customers while reducing the workload of your support team. Here are the tools that can help you do it.

Gorgias 

Gorgias offers a fast-loading and easy-to-install live chat widget that lets customers easily connect with a support agent any time they visit your website. In addition to live chat widgets built into your ecommerce store, Gorgias also gives you the power of live chat support via Facebook Messenger and SMS. For common questions and issues, Gorgias offers rules and macros that can be used to create automated responses, allowing you to quickly address the questions your brand receives most and turn them into sales opportunities.

Pros

• Gorgias's fast-loading live chat widget won't slow down your website 
• Your live chat support agents can manage conversations across multiple platforms from a single dashboard  

Unique features 

• Provides support agents easy access to key details, like shopper history and inventory levels, during any live chat conversation 
• Allows you to automatically trigger live chat campaigns based on a variety of events and customer actions 
• Includes customer sentiment tools to automatically sort chat-based requests by priority and keep tickets organized 

Learn more about the Gorgias live chat tool here. 

Ada  

Ada is a solution that provides AI-powered chatbots for customer experience, sales, and support purposes. In addition to automated customer support chatbots that are able to address common questions and issues, Ada offers chatbots that will proactively engage customers when they visit your store. These proactive outbound messaging chatbots can be used to automatically deliver timely content to customers that is personalized based on their actions and interests.  

Pros

• No-code automation and one-click integrations make Ada easy to set up and use
• Chatbots deliver personalized responses based on customer data that feel like an interaction with an actual human agent 

Unique features 

• Intent and sentiment detections for delivering relevant, personalized responses 
• Capable of automatically routing customer inquiries to your sales or customer support team 

Check out Ada's integration with Gorgias. 

Still not satisfied? Check out our lists of the best:

• Best live chat apps for Shopify
• Best live chat apps for BigCommerce
• Best live chat apps for Magento 2 Stores
• Best live chat apps for overall ecommerce
• Best live chat apps (industry agnostic)

Ecommerce returns and shipping tools

• Returnly
• LateShipment.com 
• Shippo 

Managing returns and shipping is a hassle that most online store owners would rather do without. Fortunately, there are high-quality tools available that allow you to automate many of the responsibilities associated with handling shipping and returns. By providing customers with self-service return options, automatically sending out shipping updates, and more, the following two tools can go a long way toward streamlining the logistics side of your business.

ReturnLogic

ReturnLogic is designed to automate the entire returns process by enabling you to create automated return workflows, automatically updating your inventory, and making it easy for you and your customers alike to track the status of returns. ReturnLogic also provides complete visibility to your customer support team, making it easy for them to access a customer's purchase history and issue refunds and returns.

Pros

• Creates a completely transparent returns process that is easier for both your customers and support agents to navigate
• Provides analytics on your returns that you can use to lower your return rate

Unique features

• Barcode scanner functionality that allows you to update the status of a returned item with a simple scan
• 3PL and ERP integrations that allow you to seamlessly connect ReturnLogic with your existing inventory management systems or logistics provider

Check out ReturnLogic’s integrations here. 

Wonderment

Wonderment is an order-tracking platform that seeks to reduce customer support tickets regarding order status by providing customers with automated shipping updates. With Wonderment, you can automate shipping notifications via email or SMS, send internal notifications regarding delayed or lost orders, and create custom, fully-branded shipping alerts.

Pros

• Seamless and customizable shipping update automation options
• Helps stores be more proactive about resolving issues that could otherwise lead to customer support tickets

Unique features

• View the status of all of your shipments from one dashboard
• Integrates with Klaviyo, making it easy to send customized and automated shipping update emails

Check out Wonderment’s integrations here. 

Loop Returns 

Encouraging exchanges for returned products rather than refunds is a great way to reduce the often substantial impact that product returns have on a store's bottom line. With Loop Returns, online store owners can create a customized product return portal where customers can return their purchases and manage exchanges without needing to contact the support team, among other helpful features. 

Pros

• Customizable product return portals allow customers to manage returns themselves and reduce your support team's workload 
• Meaningful metrics provide insight into your returns and refunds and identify supply chain, positioning, and other issues 

Unique features 

• Enables customers to automatically apply the value of their return to any order using the "Shop Now" feature
• Allows you to apply variable bonus credits to customers who choose to exchange their returned product

Check out the Loop Returns integration with Gorgias.

ShipBob 

More of a logistics service provider than an application, ShipBob is a service that allows ecommerce store owners to ship their products in bulk to ShipBob warehouses across the country. Once you've delivered your products, ShipBob then takes over all inventory management and order fulfillment responsibilities on behalf of your online store — picking, packing, and shipping products to customers as they're ordered. 

Pros

• ShipBob completely eliminates the burden of order fulfillment, including managing product returns 
• Strategically located warehouses allow you to offer faster shipping to locations across the country 

Unique features 

• Includes built-in reports and analytics that provide a window into product performance 
• Offers a comprehensive help center that will help you master the platform and resolve any issues that you might experience 

Check out ShipBob's integration with Gorgias. 

AfterShip 

Providing customers with the ability to easily track their shipments is one of the most important parts of creating an optimized post-purchase experience. With AfterShip, you can create customized order tracking pages that allow customers to follow the location and status of their orders on your website. AfterShip's user-facing dashboard also enables you and your staff to easily monitor purchases and returns. 

Pros

• Simplifies the tracking of purchases and returns for both your staff and your customers 
• Plenty of customization options make it easy to create tracking pages that are on-brand and optimized for your store theme

Unique features 

• Provides a range of automated post-purchase workflow templates, such as shipping notifications 
• Provides detailed analytics around your shipping performance and post-purchase experience 

Check out AfterShip's integration with Gorgias.

Add Gorgias to your ecommerce tech stack to give your customers the top-notch service that keeps them coming back

From boosting your sales to streamlining the customer support process, creating a tech stack for your ecommerce store that is complete with the best ecommerce solutions can offer a wide range of advantages. At Gorgias, we are committed to helping our clients improve the quality of their customer support while at the same time making their entire customer support process more efficient with our industry-leading ecommerce customer support solutions. 

See for yourself how Gorgias can help you provide your customers with the service they deserve — try out Gorgias today!

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Does your business have an ecommerce upselling strategy in place?

If not, you’re leaving money on the table.

Ecommerce upselling involves selling higher quantities and more expensive products to shoppers who are already considering a purchase. And for most ecommerce companies, the bulk of upselling and cross-selling happens when the customer support team interacts with customers who are already on your site or have already purchased an item. One reason is that returning customers spend 67% more than first-time shoppers, according to Bain and Co. Plus, it costs about five times more to acquire a new customer than it does to retain one.

In other words, chasing after new customers is expensive and brings in lower-value sales. Upselling, cross-selling, and customer-experience strategies to keep customers coming back — and spending more and more each time — is more profitable.

Whether you’re just starting to explore upselling or it’s time to retool your current efforts, these 11 best practices can improve your efforts and help you reach greater results.

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What is ecommerce upselling?

Ecommerce upselling is a sales technique of allowing customers to purchase a higher-priced item instead of the item they selected from your ecommerce store, to convince the customer to spend more money. When successful, ecommerce upselling provides additional perceived value to the customer and nets your store a higher sale price (and higher profits). A simple example is a shopper deciding to get an expensive camera after initially coming in for a more basic model.

Ecommerce upselling is the digital equivalent of old-fashioned, in-person upselling. Instead of speaking to an in-store associate, customers get recommendations from pop-ups, customer support agents, and other prompts throughout your website: usually on product pages, in the cart, or at checkout.

Here’s an example. Say you’ve launched an ecommerce venture that sells high-end, organic toothpaste. A customer adds a single tube of toothpaste to their cart and heads to checkout. At the checkout page, you trigger a pop-up that offers:

Buy 3 tubes and save 20%!

Or perhaps:

Try Our Variety Pack, Get One Tube Free!

You could create an endless variety of deals here, but you get the idea: You’re offering customers more (usually with some kind of discount or value proposition) to entice them to spend more and increase your average order value (AOV).

What is ecommerce cross-selling?

Ecommerce cross-selling is a similar sales tactic where you strategically recommend add-ons related to whatever the customer has put in their cart. The goals are the same: higher ticket value, greater sales, and greater customer satisfaction. Instead of upgrading to a fancy camera, a shopper who accepts a cross-selling offer might also buy a roll of film and an extra battery in addition to the basic camera.

If the camera example above doesn't make sense, let’s go back to our toothpaste company. A great example of cross-selling would be something like this:

Got toothpaste? Don’t forget the brushes! Add 3 bamboo brushes for just $5!

For this brand, other great cross-selling opportunities could include floss, electric toothbrush heads (assuming you sell an electric toothbrush), and maybe even night guards. All appeal to health-conscious customers looking for oral hygiene products.

What is the difference between cross-selling and upselling?

Upselling and cross-selling are similar concepts, but the terms aren’t interchangeable.

With upselling, you’re offering the customer more of a product or a better version of a product at a higher price point. If the customer bites, the upsell item replaces the original item in their cart.

For a real-life example of upselling, think of Apple. Each of their products has multiple storage levels, premium versions, and newer models they could (and do) push customers toward.

With cross-selling, you’re offering the customer additional products, usually related items that work in tandem with that original item. Cross-selling opportunities don’t replace the original item but stack on top of it.

For a real-life example of cross-selling, think of Amazon. No matter what you buy — or even look at — you’ll inevitably be shown a “People also bought…” section. It’s usually full of on-topic and useful add-ons, like battery packs or chargers for phones or cables and USB mice for laptops.

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11 quick ecommerce upselling tips to drive more revenue

Whether upselling is new for your ecommerce business or you’re looking to retool your existing upselling strategies, check out these eleven quick tips that can help you drive more revenue more effectively.

1) Use tools specifically built for ecommerce upselling

For small and medium ecommerce businesses, using a tool that’s already done the work of building out support for ecommerce upselling is the single most important step to take.

Dynamic, beautiful, frictionless upselling is prohibitively complex to create on your own, requiring a serious resource outlay for even the largest ecommerce sites. But several ecommerce platforms have already done this hard work and make upselling and cross-selling easy to implement for any vendor using their platform.

Many Shopify stores already take advantage of upselling thanks to the company’s smooth interface enabling the offering. If you’re a current or prospective Shopify user, check out 30+ of the best Shopify apps to boost your performance.

Some of our favorite Shopify apps for upselling include:

• One Click Upsell which automatically gives customers recommendations at checkout in a single click
• In Cart Upsell & Cross Sell which gives shoppers product recommendations on your shopping cart page
• AfterSell Post Purchase Upsell which presents buyers with opportunities to purchase more items throughout the post-purchase experience

Not a Shopify user? We’ve created similar guides for BigCommerce and Magento. Check out the best extensions for BigCommerce or the best extensions for Magento and start powering up your store today!

2) Incentivize your customer support agents to recommend products

Your customer support agents speak to customers more than anyone. They have a huge opportunity to drive sales — up or down, depending on the quality of service — for your brand. 

Here are a few examples of moments when customer support agents can cross-sell or upsell clients:

• When a customer leaves a positive product review, you can offer them a discount for their next purchase as a thank you
• When a customer asks to return an item, you can urge them to opt for an exchange instead (with a different product recommendation they might prefer)
• You can include dynamic product recommendations in your email signatures
• You can give relevant product recommendations to customers lingering on your site via live chat — more on that below

If you use Shopify, Gorgias makes giving great product recommendations easy thanks to our integration with the product picker, which lets agents add product recommendations to tickets without leaving the helpdesk:

Agents will pursue more product upsells and cross-sells with the right incentives, so we encourage larger teams to reward agents for driving revenue. Measuring the amount of revenue generated by customer support is challenging, which is why we built the revenue dashboard in Gorgias, which gives you a breakdown of revenue metrics, such as tickets coveted by each agent or your team’s conversion rate:

3) Show off your best-selling and relevant products

Using products that have already sold well in the past will significantly improve the chances of cross-selling or upselling.

For upselling, this isn’t the place to push your most exclusive, niche products. Focus on popular upgrades instead, ones in the same price range as whatever’s in the customer’s cart. People looking to spend around $20 might be convinced to spend $30 or $35, but they’re unlikely to jump to a $250 item no matter how amazing it is.

For cross-selling, make sure you’re using highly targeted, highly useful products, and make sure they’re already good sellers. If you’re selling whole coffee beans, a hand or electric grinder makes great sense. A nice $50 manual brewer (like a siphon or AeroPress) might make sense too.

But a $999 espresso maker? Not so much. 

Likewise, aim to recommend similar products whenever possible. A related product is anything that compliments the product in the customer’s cart or a product that better satisfies the customer need that drove them to add the original item.

(Pro tip: People shopping for a dozen roses right before Valentine’s Day are never going to go for a bell pepper instead.)

4) Use proactive live chat to suggest products at key points in the customer journey

If you use live chat for customer support, you may be able to start conversations with website browsers proactively. This allows your customer support team to speak when they’re deciding whether — and how much — to purchase. Your customer support team can answer questions that get, recommend products, and offer discounts to drive a sale.

We call these proactive chats “chat campaigns” and recommend designing them around key points of the customer journey. For instance, if a customer spends a lot of time on your website without adding an item to their cart, you can fire a live chat asking whether they need any help finding a product:

Likewise, you can message customers if they add a product to their cart but don’t place a purchase for a few minutes. You can open the door for them to ask any questions that might be stopping them from making a purchase:

Or, to bring it back to cross-selling, you can offer product recommendations and discounts to motivate shoppers to add more items to their carts:

The possibilities of chat campaigns are wide-ranging. If you want to learn more, book a demo and ask about the many ways Gorgias’ live chat can drive sales on your site. Or, if you want to spend more time researching live chat, check out one of these resources:

• Our live chat app page, which shows off some of the key features
• Our list of the best live chat apps for any purpose
• Our list of the best live chat apps specifically for ecommerce
• Our list of the best live chat apps for Shopify
• Our list of top live chat statistics to learn more about the tool's impact
• Our guide to adding live chat to your Shopify store

5) Optimize the post-purchase experience to cross-sell, announce new products, and plug other promotions

Your post-purchase experience is everything that happens after a customer completes a purchase, from the digital receipt they receive to follow-up marketing materials. 

Consider using your purchase confirmations as a place to send out product recommendations, discounts, announcements about new products, subscription offers (“Never run out again!”), or whatever else makes sense for your business model. 

Strict upselling is likely out at this point (they already bought the original item), but you have all sorts of opportunities for convincing that customer to spend more with you during an extended sales session.

You can manually chase after customers post-purchase, but those efforts will be disorganized and time-consuming. Plus, you might run into trouble if you try to cross-sell a customer that’s dissatisfied with their purchase. Klaviyo is one of the best tools on the marketing for email and SMS marketing (plus, it integrates with Gorgias to help you unify your customer support and marketing).

And if you sell subscription-based products, Recharge (and its Gorgias automation) can help you manage your subscription customers and put them on larger plans. 

6) Reduce the number of clicks wherever possible

The best upsells and cross-sells are the ones that feel smooth and simple. You want to keep your upselling tactics subtle, not pushy, and make sure your tech tools and partners enable a smooth and frictionless experience.

All it should take is a click or a tap, maybe two, for the upsell to be completed. Anything more complex than that could start getting in the way and might even drive customers away out of frustration or “move on” syndrome (they move on to another tab or app and never come back).

One approach to one-click upselling is to target customers who have already added items to their cart and even inputted their credit card information. Then, your buyers can click to add the item to their cart directly, rather than having to go to that item’s product page, add it to the cart, and then checkout. It’s kind of like an easy-to-grab candy bar put right next to the checkout counter.

Here’s an example from Little Poppy Co., a brand that smartly tries to upsell shoppers with a subscribe-and-save option during the checkout flow: 

If you use Shopify, One Click Upsell can add this functionality to your store.

7) Offer only two or three product options

Next, make sure you aren’t overwhelming new customers with too many choices. At the point where a customer is ready to put a product from your online store in their cart, they’re already pretty far down the purchase path. Whether you’re cross-selling or upselling, keep your set of upselling options small — no more than three at most.

Why? Because successfully upselling products needs to feel like simply making a better choice — not like going back to square one and comparing a half dozen new options.

Make your upsell offer clear and concise so you can have the best chance of increasing that cart value without frustrating or confusing your users.

8) Offer discounts and specials while upselling

Next up is a crucial upselling strategy: You’ve got to sweeten the pot. Use discounts and specials to motivate your customer to action.

Yes, discounts cut into your bottom line, but their ability to attract customers and increase revenue is undeniable. Simply build the discount into your asking price, and all is well.

Think of it this way: If your customer came to your site intending to purchase a single tube of toothpaste or a pound of coffee or a bucket of protein powder, it’s safe to assume they’re going to be biased toward the thing they meant to buy (in the size they meant to buy it).

You won’t convince many of them to simply buy two or three instead of one just because you asked them to in the checkout process. Most will simply say “no thanks, I only need one” and skip the offer.

What moves hearts and minds (and credit cards) is the perception of value. Offering a discount or free shipping for certain cart values is a great way to make cross-sell offers sweeter. And one of the best upselling techniques is to include a subscribe-and-save option to motivate customers to sign up for repeat purchases from the jump:

9) Target repeat customers

Next up, if your chosen tools and ecommerce platform allow you to make this distinction, focus your cross-selling and upselling efforts on your returning customers, not on new ones.

For one, it’s way easier to sell to an existing customer than to a new one. Customer acquisition costs can be five times as much as customer retention costs, and you don’t want anything scaring off those new customers, including an upsell attempt that feels a little too pushy.

Your repeat customers are also much more likely to have a positive opinion about your business and your ecommerce site. This segment of your market is already primed to like what you have to offer and is much more likely to trust your recommendations based on their previous positive experiences with your brand.

If you use Gorgias, you can integrate with customer loyalty tools like Yotpo or LoyaltyLion, both of which help you identify and nurture customers that love your brand (and who would therefore be good candidates for upsell and cross-sell campaigns.)

When you add these integrations to your Gorgias account, you bring that loyalty data inside your helpdesk, giving your agents the context they need to determine whether to try and sell more to a repeat customer:

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10) Limit offer availability

Whatever recommended products you’re presenting to customers, create a sense of urgency or scarcity by setting a time limit for the discount or special offer. Yes, this can be cheesy, and it might not be right for high-end or prestigious brands. But it’s highly motivating — and highly effective.

The reasons why get into some of the psychology surrounding shopping. Discounts are highly motivating, but savvy shoppers can see through “permanent discounts” well enough that the perception of value starts to disappear. By setting a timer (and displaying it in countdown fashion, if your plugins allow), you send some key messages:

1. The full price is the real price.
2. This discount is special (and so are you)!
3. It’s now or never — if you miss it, you may never get access to this discount again.
4. The timer’s ticking, so you’d better move now; no time to stop and think.

So how long should your offer last? It depends on the nature of your business. Small-dollar retailers might make the window as short as 30 minutes. 48 hours makes sense for many, and one to two weeks can be a good timeframe for larger commitments that might have their own email sequences and funnels.

Instead of limiting availability with timing, you can also opt for a longer-term selling strategy and ask for a customer’s email address instead. That information will let you sell more in the long term:

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11) Always A/B test

Not every offer is a winner. The same goes for headlines, email subjects, and all sorts of elements in the marketing world.

But how can you determine which ones are working and which are falling short? A/B testing.

A/B testing is the process of trying two different sets of wording on a smaller subset of an audience to determine which one lands better.

You see this most often with marketing emails, where two initial test emails are sent to two small subsets of a list. Whichever subject line gets a better open rate wins the day and gets attached to the main email going out to the entire list.

You can apply this concept in numerous spaces. YouTubers A/B test video titles. News organizations do the same with some articles. And you can do it with your upselling offers.

Set up two similar offers (or an identical offer worded two different ways or using two different visual styles) and unleash both on your customer base. After enough customers receive one or the other offer, it’ll become clear which one has the better conversion rate and the best effect on the bottom line.

This is worth the investment: Forrester found that a strong UX can increase conversion rate by 400% over a weak one. That’s a lot of extra tubes of toothpaste!

Of course, you need an ecommerce platform that allows you to implement A/B testing on upselling and cross-selling initiatives, so make sure you have access to that feature through your chosen platform.

Integrate all your upselling tools with Gorgias

By implementing (or refreshing) ecommerce upselling and cross-selling strategies for your ecommerce site, you’ll enjoy a range of benefits, with improved customer experience and higher average cart value sitting at the top of the list. And with the eleven best practices we’ve provided here, you’re now ready to take your upselling efforts to the next level.

Of course, succeeding in ecommerce and upselling requires the right suite of ecommerce tools and partners. Gorgias integrates instantly with more than 150 top ecommerce tools like Shopify, Yotpo, Klaviyo, LoyaltyLion, and so many more.

Ready for a better (and more profitable) helpdesk experience? See what Gorgias can do for you and sign up for free now.