Omnichannel commerce is a buzz phrase, with different meanings for many merchants. Simply put, for small and medium-sized business owners, omni-channel is both a great opportunity and an intense challenge.
The threats and rewards of omnichannel commerce
The opportunity is to increase visibility to customers so that revenue grows but the challenge is often both technical and structural - finding the right partners for omnichannel commerce can be a long and often painful affair and huge amounts of time can be spent on connecting all marketing channels and making inventory visible both to customers and through back-office functions. With a recent survey suggesting that more than 45% of merchants lose revenue as a result of multi-channel commerce challenges, it’s essential for a merchant to have confidence in their e-commerce platform.
Finding the right omni-channel system for you
Online business has diversified dramatically in the past decade. When ecommerce took off, merchants invested in ‘off the shelf’ solutions that worked when they bought template websites and dropped in standardised shopping carts. Today’s consumer expects a great deal more of their online shopping experience and mobile shopping is now more than 51% of the overall online browse in the UK - as a result, customers want a range of facilities, and experiences, that ‘one size fits all’ software simply can’t provide.
On the other hand, there’s no perfect solution that will work for every merchant - if online businesses are as diverse as their owners, there’s no doubt that what works for some won’t work for others. So is it possible to identify the key factors that help make it easy to choose the right shopping cart partner for you?
What makes one omni-channel solution better than another?
There are definitely factors that are non-negotiable when managing your online business:
- Visibility - page ranking is king when it comes to e-commerce for obvious reasons: it doesn’t matter whether you have the best product or the best customer service if people never reach your page to shop. This means an ecommerce solution needs to offer good SEO as standard.
- Inventory - rapid, responsive and largely automated inventory processes are essential to customer fulfilment. Downtime in a business environment while inventory processes are updated isn’t just a business cost, it results in disappointed customers and abandoned shopping carts.
- Customer support - this may not be something that vendors consider as a high priority when they are making their initial selection but after a couple of years of experience, many merchants recognise they they should have given this area much more consideration. One reason that customer support is vital is that as omnichannel marketing mutates rapidly, throwing up challenges and opportunities that leave businesses scrambling to keep up, having excellent customer support allows a merchant to keep pace. As an example, when Asda launched a ‘Black Friday’ promotion in 2013, few other businesses in the UK had a handle on this American import. By 2016 ‘Black Friday’ had become standard and even the smallest online enterprise now floats a Black Friday banner and contacts existing customers with special offers. Your e-commerce system doesn’t just need to respond to such changes in the marketplace, it needs to help you benefit from every change in an evolving marketplace.
So how does a business define its needs and ensure that it chooses an e-commerce partner that will meet its needs today and allow it to grow and thrive?
Let’s start by looking at the claims of two ecommerce solutions: GoECart and Shopping Cart Elite.
GoECart review
GoECart claims to offer a complete software solution - GoECart 360 - that give SME merchants total control of all channels of commerce. A cloud-based system, GoECart should be a seamless software-as-a-service (SAAS) system that works with any size of merchant. But what’s the reality?
The average goecart review mentions one thing up-front. Money. GoECart is almost universally seen as an expensive option and for the average business, investing huge amounts of money in an e-commerce system that may or may not work for them is a non-starter. Several reviewers comment that while GoECart is great, a merchant might need to be in the range of having $6 million (£4.5 million) in revenues, which is definitely way beyond the revenue scale that many small and medium sized enterprises will be aiming to achieve in the short term.
Data-structuring has also been much commented on and almost every GoECart review talks about how it can be difficult to get the data a merchant wants in the form that the merchant wants it. Of course for those who aren’t interested in mining raw data to establish business priorities this may not be an issue, but for business owners who like to be able to interrogate their data, it can be annoying to have a limited range of reports.
There’s a wild range of responses to this platform, from those who love it, to those who have nothing good to say about GoECart - giving it one star and insisting the product over-promises and under-delivers. One regularly mentioned weakness is the amount of ‘legacy code’ in the system. This means that contemporary design elements can be difficult to implement and that without raw html experience, merchants may become frustrated when trying to achieve their design goals.
There’s no doubt that reviews, while useful, are always going to be personal and biased, but what are we to make of this variety of response? The answer may lie in GoECart’s history. In 2017, GoECart rebranded to Pulse Commerce. Originally established in India, GoECart has since moved to Connecticut but has some difficulties shaking its overseas origins, including several GoECart reviews mentioning the occasional difficulty of communicating with customer service operatives.
Shopping Cart Elite review
Another shopping cart system built in response to need, Shopping Cart Elite (SCE) was created by brothers Igor and Nick Soshkin with a next generation focus. SAAS is another buzzword that can mean many things to many people but for the SCE founders omni-channel is the key to delivery a true merchant solution - virtually every element from Customer Relationship Management to inventory oversight all come as standard while popular add-ons such as Quickbook have built-in linkages. Also next generation with Shopping Cart Elite is the degree of automation on offer - in fact, automation is at the heart of the system and by offering automatic sync, upload and listing features this system dramatically reduces time spent on non-productive activity like data entry.
White Hat SEO is often mentioned in Shopping Cart Elite reviews, which is because SCE focuses in on Google specified requirements to ensure its customers get high rankings.
Customer Service is crucial to an effective relationship with your e-commerce partner, which is why it’s encouraging to see that Finances Online which has a unique customer satisfaction algorithm - has identified 120 positive social media mentions of Shopping Cart Elite compared to a mere four negative ones. Responsive customer service isn’t just essential if you have difficulties with migration or integration - it’s equally important to a merchant’s ability to engage with omnichannel opportunities.
Threat Engagement Analytics are something that is unique to SCE - a system that identifies click fraud and stops marketing activity that doesn’t deliver converting traffic gives merchants control over areas of their business that are out of their reach with many other e-commerce systems.
Conclusion - the best e-commerce solution
While GoECart has attractive features, its cost and the legacy code that clutters its interface may prevent it being the first choice for many online merchants. Shopping Cart Elite benefits from its excellent SEO focus and high-ranking Customer Service rating which makes it an appealing place for many new merchants to find their feet in omnichannel marketing while its Threat Engagement Analytics offer a unique opportunity for established businesses to refine their marketing to engage better with their customers.