Marketing Tools In 4 Popular eCommerce Platforms

Without the right marketing eCommerce features, businesses will have a hard time attracting the right shoppers to come and increase their brand awareness. Today’s article will discuss the marketing tools in 4 popular eCommerce platforms provided by the big four eCommerce platforms, Shopify, Magento, BigCommerce, and WooCommerce, that users should utilize for a successful business. 

Shopify  

Shopify SEO has a good range of tools at your disposal, which doesn’t provide every trick in the book but still has most essential areas covered, from header code to customer URLs. When you add products, Shopify immediately prompts you with SEO best practices to drive as many organic traffic to your store via search engines as possible. 

However, there is one considerably big disadvantage of Shopify SEO set is the lack of keyword support. Without this, shoppers cannot find your online store through search results to increase traffic to your site and possibly generate more sales.  

Other than that, it does have built-in email campaigns, which require simple coding if doing it directly with Shopify. However, there is no coding related if users conduct an email campaign through third party apps, such as Campaign Monitor, Seguno, or Constant Contact. 

Apart from SEO and email campaigns, reporting tools are also necessary to show how people are interacting with your site, what is working and what is not. Without it, you will be running your store blindfolded. Hence, it’s very important to set up this eCommerce tool after having your website. 

Shopify has in-house analytics tools that describe the overall performance of your store. This includes how much your store has earned in sales, returning customer rate, and real-time insights. An external marketing feature like Google Analytics is highly recommended as well. You can collaborate the information from Shopify and Google to view more detailed data. 

Shopify also allows users to advertise and sell their products on Facebook, Instagram and other social media directly. It is now possible to gather multiple selling platforms under one roof to avoid any confusion when users spread their products to various selling channels. 

Last but not least, Shopify supports blogging, providing users with essential tools such as display categories, comments, RSS feeds and blog specific SEO. However, this is not its strength as the platform doesn’t offer blogging analytics, social bookmarking or archive functionality. 

Magento

Magento SEO provides basic tools. It allows users to easily edit the page title and description to define how your store will be displayed in the search result pages or add alt text to images to help search engines understand what is your store about, what service do you offer and what kind of product do you have. 

Other than that, it offers powerful marketing eCommerce features, which requires users to have professional coding experience to set up. Magento can create catalog and cart price rules that trigger discounts based on different conditions, which are initiated before you place a product in the shopping cart. Furthermore, the platform has cart price rules, in which promotional coupon discounts spring into action when meeting the required conditions. 

There are a wide range of communications methods available on Magento, such as email and newsletters templates, newsletters queue and subscribers.  Users can customize the templates based on their need, manage subscription lists and export the list of subscribers in different formats. 

Magento is able to manage URL changes and avoid broken links. It helps customers to find products they need in your store by studying search terms, manage metadata, and create site maps. Customers can leave product reviews on your website to create a sense of community. Magento lets you decide whether only registered customers can leave comments, or if guest customers can as well.

Despite offering powerful marketing attributes with high customization levels, Magento heavily relies on its Marketplace for most of the marketing tools. The system asks you to install extensions for basic tools like running email campaigns, which might be free or at a cost whereas Shopify is built-in with these tools no matter what type of plan you choose to purchase. 

BigCommerce

BigCommerce stands out for its SEO features, which placed at your fingertips.This platform gives merchants the ability to edit page titles, and support sitewide HTTPs. Free SSL certificates can be installed on BigCommerce through third party apps. Its default URLs (products, categories and webpages) use one of the best in-class formats, which are fully customizable to help improve search rankings. 

BigCommerce SEO entitles users to easily filter products by brand and price and users have the benefits of a traditional category/subcategory structure, which improves SEO by creating URLs and breadcrumbs. Furthermore, the platform provides a wide range of Google AMP (accelerated mobile pages), which enable themes to be very responsive on mobile devices. This feature has a highly positive SEO implication. 

In regards to email marketing, merchants are encouraged to install extensions or apps for better support. Then, collaborating with BigCommerce built-in customer groups, it will let users segment contact lists based on purchase history, order total, order date, location and much more. 

Built-in analytic tools offered by BigCommerce are fairly strong. Merchants can see customer reports, telling them where their customers come from, the percentage of new and returning customers, or their overall spend. The information on the phrases customers used when searching for products in your online store is also available. Other necessary analysis such as marketing or abandoned cart reports are also accessible within BigCommerce marketing features. 

BigCommerce allows users to create a simple blog easily with its built-in marketing attributes. However, it doesn’t let you use blog categories, only tags are available. Users won’t be able to make use of Yoast-style SEO plugins when creating blog posts. There is one important function that BigCommerce blogging doesn’t have: an RSS feed. This attribute lets merchants to syndicate content and automatically create and send e-newsletters with your latest posts. It can be found through extensions with or without a cost on BigCommerce App Store. 

Nonetheless, in the end, BigCommerce is fine with users who don’t put too much emphasis on blogging to attract the right customers. It is decent in the sense that it permits you to create the content and inbound marketing campaigns that can attract traffic to a site. 

WooCommerce

Several SEO tools are built-in on WooCommerce. It enables users to sell unlimited digital and physical products, offer ratings and reviews, zoomable product images, upselling and cross-selling. When integrating with WordPress, WooCommerce SEO becomes fairly solid from the content perspective as it accommodates with the robust content marketing system on WordPress. 

Merchants can design the templates of the blog posts to be more pretty and attractive, which result in more time spent on your site. Additionally, the platform generates sitemap.xml, bulk editing, and allows the use of canonical tags. 

WooCommerce heavily relies on plugins for its email campaign features, offering integration with extensions such as MailChimp to help users send personalized email campaigns at ease. You can also integrate your store with Amazon, eBay and Instagram for a fee, but you can run advertisements on social media for free. 

Overall, WooCommerce’s marketing tools depend significantly on its add-ons and integrations. There are more advanced marketing eCommerce features if users are willing to pay for, such as one-click upsells, personalized products, importing/exporting your products with a CSV file, or subscriptions. 

Final Words

Through this article, we hope to give you an overview of what features are available on these platforms and which ones you need to pay for. Please feel free to contact us if you have any further questions.