What is web content management systems and how to use them
Choosing the right web content management system may be tricky for an eCommerce business. Businesses are usually attracted by fancy functionality that they will never use without having a clearly defined set of requirements. Therefore, in this article, we discuss various features of WCMS that we need to consider while choosing one for your application. What is a Web content management system? A web content management system (WCMS) is a program that allows maintaining, controlling, changing and reassembling the content on a web page. Businesses can manage digital content on their websites by publishing and maintaining content without prior knowledge of web programming or markup languages. Typically, WCMS uses a database to store page content, metadata, and other information assets that might be needed by the system. A presentation layer displays the content to website visitors based on a set of templates, which are sometimes XSLT files. The administration is usually done through browser-based interfaces. Pros and cons of a web content management system Pros Simple and easy to use: Thanks to the simple design of the admin IU, everyone can create and maintain content without specializing in coding. Workflow management: Users can set up and control their own workflow to improve efficiency and effectiveness. SEO: Many editing tools for SEO are available so that every published content has the best SEO results. Customizable: Users can create custom font ends based on the various original layouts. Not expensive: Businesses of any scale can afford it. Cons Security issues: The system can be attacked by hackers unless it is patched properly and regularly. Latency issues: If the business does not update it regularly, it will be slow when the cache files grow large. High cost when implementing in large: large companies often have to pay more for training employees and maintaining the system. Necessary features Here are the key features of a WCMS: Organize websites to provide effective access to content. Control and prepare content for publication, including controlling content evaluation and approval before publication on the website. Automate some parts of the publishing process. Some additional features of a WCMS are: Automated templates: There are many standard and preset templates that users can use to change all their content’s appearance. Controlling access right: It can restrict a webpage on the website to one or more users. Only authorized users can access the content. Editing tools: Even non-technical users can create and edit content. Workflow management: WCMS provides workflow management to make the publishing process easier for creators. Versioning: Users can check pages in and out. Editors are allowed to retrieve the previous versions of work and work at any selected point. Document management: It provides a means to manage a document from initial creation time, revision, publication to destruction. Scalable expansion: Users can expand a single implementation across several domains subject to the server settings. Top web content management systems There are many available WCMSs on the market today, but here’re the effective systems you shouldn’t miss. WordPress WordPress is a web software platform to create and manage websites, blogs, and apps. The first thing to look at WordPress is that it has no limitation on the type of website you will build, whether an online store or a membership site. Secondly, there are many themes and plugins such as contact forms or photo galleries to customize your site. The platform also enables you to create categories and tags for posts. Finally, you can easily move to a new system when you want because it allows downloading content in XML format. However, because it has too many options for users and a high level of flexibility, you will be confused at first. One more thing, you have to make sure you are holding your own site as WordPress only permits users to deal with security and backups on their own. Drupal Drupal is a web content management software with standard features, such as easy content authoring, reliable performance, and excellent security. Compared to WordPress, it is more flexible and modular. Drupal provides users with many options to customize their content type, add modules and plugins to the site. Also, It offers a built-in management system so that you can approve new roles and control their rights. Drupal is a good choice for you when you expect more than content management since it integrates with marketing automation tools to send abandoned cart emails or group visitors. Nevertheless, like WordPress, it’s difficult for beginners to use. Besides, some themes customized by developers take your cost higher. Atom8 Atom8 is an automation platform powering eCommerce businesses’ web content management. With Atom8, your content management process will be both effective and productive. Because it is more than a system for creating and maintaining content, it is also a solution for productivity with the powerful automation feature. For example, you can schedule a time to publish or unpublish content, landing page, price list, and change themes, banners, etc. Another point that makes Atom8 stand out among various web content management systems is its multifunction feature. You can manage order fulfillment, manage inventory, marketing, customer service, etc. Everything is in one place. Last but not least, Atom8’s interfaces and operations are simple, thus you will run it quickly and easily. The disadvantage of Atom8 is that it is only available on BigCommerce, Shopify, and Magento (coming soon). Thus, not every business can apply it. You can register for a demo here: Conclusion Choosing the right web content management system for your online businesses requires a deep understanding of how well solutions can fulfill your demand. We hope the article has helped you make clear what is a web content management system and useful solutions for your content management success.
How to improve your eCommerce emails
Your recent email marketing campaign doesn’t work well? Or are you looking for some ways to enhance your emails’ effectiveness? Here’s what you need. Our article comes up with ideas for better emails that you can apply to your eCommerce business. Keep reading! Actionable tips to create better eCommerce emails Attractive headline A headline (or subject line) is a crucial part of your emails. Because audiences only spend just a few seconds looking at the headline to decide whether to open it or not. 47% of email recipients open an email based on the subject line and 69% of email recipients report email as spam, which means you are losing a potential conversion. To convince your audience to delve deeper into your email, start your emails with something short but compelling and informative. You can make subscribers curious by asking them a question, telling some of a story, presenting your best offers or an urgency to encourage them to open your email. Finally, don’t forget to test different headlines to see which type is creating a higher open rate.. Personalized content Many customers find somewhere else to go when emails aren’t personalized. Meanwhile, fulfilling the point may improve your open rate and enhance customer engagement. Personalized email content means that you are tailoring the email message to the right customers. When making your email content relevant to the audience, you should consider two factors: segmentation and dynamic content. Segment your customers by demographics, location, purchase history, etc., and create different content to ensure they get what they are interested in. To segment customers successfully, it is indispensable for automation. Automation tools such as Atom8 can help you segment customers, create workflows to send relevant emails to customers at the right time. For example, Atom8 helps online merchants segment customers by the products they purchased and send an email that recommends related items. Try it here: Visual content Research showed that visual content helps grab the targeted audience’s attention better than text. The reason is that visuals and images make the content better and more understandable for the audience. Try using HTML emails for visually rich emails! Mobile optimized emails A mobile-optimized email experience is essential for your eCommerce email campaign success. 55% of email is now opened on a mobile device, which means modern customers tend to open an email on their mobile devices rather than on desktops. How will you create the most mobile responsive design for your emails? Firstly, be sure that your subject line is viewable on mobile devices. Next, use and optimize the CTA buttons instead of links. Buttons are easier to click on when using a mobile device. Also, leaving a sufficient amount of white space around the button will improve mobile UX further. Mix-up templates Common email service providers such as Mailchimp, Campaign Monitor, etc. offer users a selection of pre-designed templates. However, there are hundreds of other brands using the same templates to reach the same audience as you are doing. Thus, you need to build something that makes you stand out more. You can customize templates to suit your needs and fit with your brand, as well as those of your target audience. Continuous testing If you don’t test your email campaign consistently, you’re leaving money on the table. You should test and measure the performance to know what works better and determine whether there’s anything you can do to improve. Split testing or A/B testing is not complicated to do. You can make simple tests with your email subject lines, CTA, part of the design, or some of the copy. Then, track the open rate, click-through rate, and conversion rate for each to choose the best one. Conclusion There are a lot of ways of optimizing your eCommerce emails for achieving big wins. By making small changes in email campaigns, you are creating an impact on your eCommerce business’ success.
Top 5 reasons for high cart abandonment rate
$18 billion is the amount of revenue eCommerce brands loses every year due to shopping cart abandonment. Meanwhile, $4 trillion worth of merchandise is predicted to be abandoned in digital carts in the next year. These figures show that cart abandonment is becoming a concern that every eCommerce business makes. To understand what the cart abandonment rate is and what leads to a high cart abandonment rate, take a deep dive into today’s article. What is cart abandonment rate? Understanding cart abandonment rate correctly It is the percentage of shoppers who add items to their shopping cart but leave before completing the purchase. This rate is different from browse abandonment rate and checkout abandonment rate. Browse abandonment rate: The percentage of shoppers who view a product but never add it to their shopping cart. Checkout abandonment rate: The percentage of shoppers who add an item to their cart, start down the checkout path, but then stop purchasing before submitting their order and payment. How to calculate cart abandonment rate It will show the number of customers who are interested in your products through your efforts from marketing to design, product management, etc. A high cart abandonment rate is a problem for e-tailers because it means that their online businesses are having problems with a website or customer experience. Cart abandonment rate varies from industry to industry: Top five common reasons for a high cart abandonment rate Extra costs Extra costs tacked on at checkout are the leading cause of a high drop rate. 49% of shoppers abandoned their shopping cart as the additional costs at the checkout were too high. Extra costs such as shipping, taxes, etc. are added to each product price making shoppers stop purchasing. Lack of payment methods A lack of preferred payment methods hurt shoppers. They are discouraged from completing an online purchase if the payment methods are limited such as only debit or credit card. Every time they can’t pay with their preferred payment method, they abandon the purchase. A long time of delivery 36% of shoppers said they would give up on an order when the delivery period was too long. Although some products are expected to ship slowly, most online shoppers demand a fast shipping time. Complicated checkout A long and complicated checkout process is the reason behind 18% shopping cart abandonment. Customers want a simple and convenient process. Thus, a requirement for registration or a complex information entry will make them leave their cart and go somewhere else. Stockout An unexpected stock-out event leads customers to stop the transaction and leave the site. This happens more often with eCommerce businesses that don’t allow backorder in their online store. As a result, they experience a high cart abandonment rate. How to rescue abandonment carts for your BigCommerce stores Reducing cart abandonment rates needs to be planned and implemented from the beginning. However, when you fail with your strategy, you are still able to rescue your revenue from abandoned carts. The key is abandoned cart emails. Abandoned cart emails reduce 6,5% cart abandonment and increase 20% online sales for businesses. Similar to retargeting ads, you can make use of the information such as the products a customer added to her cart, the size, color, the brand, and so on to deliver an email reminder to continue the purchase. If you are running your store on BigCommerce, use the Abandoned Cart Saver. Abandoned Cart Saver is a built-in tool of BigCommerce platform that sends an email to customers who added items to their cart but left before completing checkout. You may customize the emails and combine them with discounts or coupons to entice the customers to continue their transactions. Otherwise, you can offer your customers a discount or coupon for the next purchase they make, which increases customer loyalty and a long relationship with your brand. In this case, Atom8 automation platform is a great choice. If a customer returns his shopping cart and purchases successfully, Atom8 will automatically send him an email offering a discount to encourage more purchases in the future. It’s totally automatic, so you needn’t manually check and send emails. Moreover, Atom8 also provides other various useful automation solutions for your online stores, improving your performance and productivity. Try the app here: Conclusion A high cart abandonment rate indicates that eCommerce businesses need to address arising problems and make a strategy to recapture the sales. We hope that by understanding the reasons for cart abandonment, you will deal with it or prepare in advance to grow your online business effectively.
Why is eCommerce tasks automation easier than you think?
Owning and running an eCommerce store is not a simple job, but in fact, involves such a bunch of complicated tasks. From marketing and communication to fulfillment and shipping, not to mention the after-sales follow-up task. This process no matter how hard it can get, you can always make it easier by automation. This article will outline reasons why eCommerce tasks automation is easier than you think. What is eCommerce tasks automation? You can refer to E-commerce automation as a digital or technologically-driven task triggered by an action or non-action from a customer, or member within the team. In another word, it is a task that happens automatically, using software or online systems, without human intervention. You set it up, and it runs. Let’s take some particular examples for more clarification, in marketing, certain ads or emails can be sent to target audiences. All you need to do is to set up the content of ads, emails, set specific customer personas, profile then the machine will send them to the correct people. Why is eCommerce tasks automation easier than you think? Saves times Automation can save your time and free you from repetitive and boring tasks. If you don’t have to track remembering to do them and making them happen, imagine what you could do with the extra time. In addition, you not only have someone to do it for you, but actually do it better. You can schedule sales promotions to go live at the right time, automate new product releases with their announcements, remove discontinued products, adjust prices, apply discounts, track purchases and provide rewards, etc. E-commerce saves you from having to go back and correct errors. When data is sent from one platform to the other, the chances of human error are lessened. So, your job, in general, will be much more simple, and easy. Easy to use with multiple templates Automation sounds quite a complicated concept at first. However, it is a fact that it is not hard at all to start using and applying ít to your eCommerce store. Refer to Atom8 for example, this is an automation app that helps to automate some websites tasks. You can compose sales emails and make instantly available templates. After you have reduced your teams from administrative tasks, you will have more time to focus on other important tasks. The special point is that it is very simple to get on well with due to a very friendly feature. The template library includes more than 100 templates that suit your personal interest and style. If you want to send emails, for instance, set the content, build customer personas then set the time to send them. All are easy as a piece of cake but things still things will fall into their places. If you are a BigCommerce or Shopify merchant, find out more about Atom8 here: Simpler deliveries Is there anything worse than lost or misdirected packages after you place an order? Do not need to worry anymore since you just need to click on the site and see, automation will process and track it for you. E-commerce automation systems process orders directly from the customer, printing receipts and shipping labels rather than having a person type them manually, which saves time and prevents the recurrence of mistakes. As customers make package tracking a priority, businesses need to know where packages are for customer service and quality assurance purposes. E-commerce automation options can communicate tracking information automatically. Conclusion Above are some remarkable reasons why eCommerce tasks automation is easier than you think they are. The benefits are scalable and steps are simple to take. So, there is nothing holding you up but to immediately learn about automation and set up an app that suits your preference. And do not forget to check out Atom8 for a more time-saving experience.
How to improve SEO for your BigCommerce store
When thinking about website content improvement for your BigCommerce store, you may need to take SEO effectiveness into consideration. The high-quality content which is in accordance with SEO criteria can engage a lot of customers and help your store with branding strategies. Our article today will give more ideas to enhance SEO Tip For Increasing SEO Effectiveness For Your BigCommerce Store Research Keywords Your posts and articles will follow keywords to ensure transparent and unified content. Keywords play a vital role in enhancing your posts’ attractiveness, engagement and cohesion. Before establishing content, you may need to take time to research keywords. The common way is discovering what related words people usually search for recently and then you can collect some trending terms and issues. You need to pay attention to your target customers. Moreover, it is important to focus on the keywords that are well-matched with your target buyers’ demands. The inappropriate keywords can make your posts become helpless, obsolete, and outdated. Improve Page Content Four parts that you need to invest time and effort in to enhance the quality of your content. This includes title, meta description, headers and quality content. The title must contain under 60 characters and keywords. To save time and effort, you can take advantage of automatic tools such as Atom8 to automatically bulk edit article titles and product descriptions. Meta description needs call-for-action content which provokes visitors’ curiosity and attention with attractive words and well-researched keywords. On the other hand, the headers must be planned logically and reasonably with the appearance of keywords. Visitors should feel easy to address the main point of each paragraph since they usually skim blog content. Finally, high-quality content is considered as the one which can deliver helpful and necessary information to the visitors without copying, dim and complicated. Enhance Product Page The optimal product page can help your page achieve high ranks. You may need to sort logically and arrange simply the categories and subcategories so the visitors can easily find out what they want in minutes. A useful tip for you is utilizing BackOrder to avoid hiding products that are out of stock and hurt SEO. With backorders, the customers can place orders as normal at 0 inventory and get them delivered at a later date. Especially with BigCommerce’s integration with Google Shopping, your products can drive a lot more organic traffic to your site. Try the BigCommerce BackOrder app here: Turning on backorders is one of the effective ways to utilize out-of-stock product pages. Moreover, you can allow visitors to use filters and essential features to find expected products more quickly and then you can increase your product conversion rate. Also, you may need to take advantage of pop-up product recommendations, customer reviews and special deals to add value to your product page and make it more compelling. Add Backlink A backlink which is is a crucial element to rank your page on Google. This is because it usually takes the visitors from other pages to your page. The number of backlinks decides the level of popularity of your article. Therefore, the more backlinks, the more prevailing your blogs are. However, you should focus on adding the most relevant and high-quality backlinks rather than the quantity of them because unrelated ones can distract the visitors. Read more: Bigcommerce upsell Take Advantage Of SEO Audit The SEO audit can give you fulfilled and transparent reports about your SEO performance that can help you realize the arising mistakes or problems that negatively affect your SEO quality. SEO audit is fundamental to building your SEO strategy and planning for approaches to help your page get a higher rank. Conclusion It is time to make your Bigcommerce store page more widespread with our SEO tips above. Hope to see your post in the top ranking of Google!
Best B2B eCommerce platform in 2023
With the growth of digital commerce also comes the increasing number of online businesses. The number of online companies within the last three years has skyrocketed. The business-to-business (B2B) market value is projected to increase rapidly, which will allow more merchants to establish their business online. This will further result in increasing the demand for B2B eCommerce platforms. Today, there are several B2B eCommerce platforms that online merchants use for their business. It can be a daunting task for new eCommerce owners to find a reputable platform that offers everything they need. As for others, they don’t know what to look at in these platforms. In this article, we will explore the best b2b eCommerce platform in 2023. Too busy to read? Listen to this article here: What is B2B eCommerce? B2B eCommerce is an online transaction with both parties involved are businesses. For instance, buying a product from a manufacturer to stock for your online store. In this situation, both parties are not the end-user of the product. The manufacturer sells the product to another company, and once that happens, it is known as B2B. Best B2B eCommerce Platform in 2023 Shopify Plus The Shopify Plus is a powerful online shopping cart system that most online eCommerce stores use. The platform offers the same features and dashboard as Shopify. Nevertheless, it has advanced tools and B2B functionalities that allow you to perform different operations. Nowadays, Shopify Plus is gaining wide recognition because of its compatibility with most systems and the unique features it offers. Today, top brands such as Pepsi Co, Kylie Jenner, Nestle, Hawkers, and so on use Shopify Plus on their website. Pricing: starts from $2,000/month. In order to maximize your productivity with a Shopify store, be sure to give our app Shopify Automation a try! Magento Commerce Magento is another reputable eCommerce platform in the eCommerce industry. It has made waves because of its high scalability and customizability. Today, it is a sensational choice for businesses looking to up their game in the ever-competitive eCommerce industry. Currently, Magento has two editions. The Magento Open Source (this is free but with limited features) and Magento Commerce, which is the premium version. The premium edition has a lot of features and offers a better customer experience. It provides richer functionalities, customizable solutions, security, B2B data, and much more. Pricing: Magento Open Source, as stated above, is free. However, you should expect at least $12,000 for development and maintenance. Magento Commerce: from $22,000/year. Usually plus a minimum of $10,000 for development. Magento Commerce Cloud: from $40,000/year. You won’t have to pay extra for hosting, but development costs will still be there. If you’re using an open-source Magento version but switching to Adobe Commerce is overwhelming in terms of cost, efforts and time, GritGlobal’s B2B Magento platform will be one of the considerable choices for you: You can now convert your Magento store into a B2B format website without effort. BigCommerce Enterprise Hardly can you mention the top three eCommerce platforms without mentioning BigCommerce. It is well-known for excellent support, easy to set up, high functionalities, and customizable features. The platform is suitable for manufacturers, distributors, and wholesalers. Several big brands utilize BigCommerce Enterprise for their online business, such as Natori, Ben&Jerry’s, and Toyota. Pricing: comes with different plans. From $29.95/month and varies based on features and revenue. While considering BigCommerce, it is essentials to check out our apps: BigCommerce Automation and BigCommerce BackOrder. NuORDER Another unique eCommerce platform that connects over 2,000 brands with a platform to offer their products online. If you want a two-way marketplace with an ordering system that allows brands to connect retailers while retailers look for other brands, then you need NuORDER. It provides storeowners a seamless process that makes searching for a product straightforward. Furthermore, it comes with unique features that include customization, security, and visual assortments. Pricing: customized by quotes. Conclusion Whatever business you want to set up online, you need a good eCommerce platform that provides security, customization, and other features. Today, the growth of an online business is rapidly increasing, and you need to stay ahead of the game by providing a seamless platform for customers. We have looked at some of the best B2B eCommerce platforms in 2023 for your online business. (article updated December 2021)
