Tools to help you reap the benefits of the rapidly-growing eCommerce industry
If there's ever a time to be an eCommerce merchant, now's that time! The prospects of increased sales have never been higher than it is today.
Take a look at the numbers:
The dollar value of the eCommerce market in the United States between 2023 and 2027 will rise by 551.9 billion U.S. dollars (+54.59 percent), according to Statista.
By 2027, eCommerce market revenue will have increased for the fourth consecutive year to 1.6 trillion U.S. dollars.
Industry records show that by 2040, online platforms will account for up to 95% of purchases.
And to reap the full benefits of this rapidly-growing industry, you need digital tools to help you do more with less. For this article, we share 21 of the best eCommerce tools to help you play in the big league.
20 Must-Have eCommerce Tools for 2023 and Beyond
We’ve selected the tools below based on their features. The benefits you derive from them might vary depending on your experience and knowledge level…but they’ll make your work much more effortless.
Tools For Customer Acquisition and Onboarding
HeyDay: Elevate your website with HeyDay's AI-powered search box
HeyDay helps you elevate your eCommerce shop through Typeless Search and Discovery for effective customer acquisition.
HeyDay's AI-assisted site search integrates AI technologies into your website's search functionality, using advanced algorithms and machine learning techniques to provide more accurate and relevant search results. This technology addresses the limitations of traditional keyword matching by leveraging AI capabilities to understand user intent, context, and natural language.
With Heyday, your visitors will think you’re clairvoyant!
HeyDay is loaded with exciting features like an unlimited page and word index, Autocomplete from over 100 million terms, and Spell check for a limitless Searching experience. It's tailor-made for your needs, with onsite keywords suggested first, so you can effectively suggest trending products. Plus, you can set it up within 15 seconds.
Pricing Overview:
Free Usage Tier: 10,000 searches + 10,000 pages (records) / 1 month
Premium: $0.25 for +10,000 searches + 10,000 pages(records)/ month.
#2: HubSpot Marketing Hub: All your marketing tools and data — connected in one place.
Generating leads is just the first step to customer acquisition. You also need the tools to help nurture them into loyal customers. With Hubspot’s marketing automation, you’ll be able to engage prospects immediately while staying focused on mission-critical tasks quickly.
From there, Marketing Hub Starter allows you to segment your audience and automate your email marketing to personalize each touchpoint with your brand better. You can leverage your website visitors’ activity to contextualize your marketing messages and unlock insights into your customers’ journey to create detailed segments. And because it's essential to meet customers where they are, contact list audiences and advanced website audiences help you deliver ads on the platforms where your customers spend the most time.
Pricing Overview:
Editions starting at:
$0/month (Free)
$45/month (Starter)
$800/month (Professional)
$3,600/month (Enterprise)
Drift is a customer acquisition software that helps you connect with customers and visitors. Drift uses AI-powered Conversation Cloud to enhance your customer acquisition process. The tool offers several features that can benefit your marketing and sales strategies. Their customer prospecting features help prioritize accounts you need to contact.
You will gain valuable insights into your customers and develop effective customer acquisition strategies with their visitor intelligence and real-time personalization features. Automate and enhance customer support with custom chatbots to improve customer satisfaction significantly. Analyze your audience using lead gathering and customer profiles to obtain valuable data.
Pricing Overview:
Subscription starts from $2,500/month, billed annually.
#4: ReferralCandy: Grow your sales by word-of-mouth marketing
ReferralCandy gets you more customers by incentivizing referrals. You can think of it as word-of-mouth marketing on steroids.
ReferralCandy makes customer acquisition and referrals seamless. It allows you to automate your referral program and analyze the results.
The software offers a user-friendly experience, and you can easily integrate it into your e-commerce stores, including Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, Magento, and ReCharge. You can choose various rewards for your marketing campaign, such as percentage discounts, dollar discounts, cash, and custom gifts. Additionally, you can enhance your site's conversion rates by adding referral widgets, embedded signup forms, and post-purchase popups.
Pricing Overview:
Premium: $47/ month, billed yearly + 3.5% commission fee
Premium Plus: $239/ month, Billed yearly + 1.5% commission fee
#5: GetResponse: An affordable, easy platform to send emails, grow your list, and automate communication.
GetResponse is a powerful tool for digital marketing and acquiring customers. Its email marketing, landing pages, autoresponders, and automation solutions can enhance your audience growth and boost your sales conversions.
Some of the outstanding benefits of using GetResponse include the ability to automate your marketing campaigns and provide exceptional user experiences. You can also create your own sales funnel using its conversion funnel features to increase conversions.
Plus, you can directly interact with customers and improve customer service through their live web chat solutions. And you'll have tools to improve your email marketing game with their email creator, autoresponders, email analytics, list management, and transactional emails.
Pricing Overview:
Free: Up to 500 contacts
Email marketing: 1,000 contacts, $15.58/mo
Email marketing: 1,000 contacts, $48.38/mo
eCommerce marketing: 1,000 contacts, $97.58/mo
Hotjar is a tool that helps you gain insights into how visitors interact with your website. It uses heatmaps to show their behavior, allowing you to identify improvement areas. The heatmaps feature highlights what catches their attention, and you can analyze their behavior before and after launching your website.
The feedback and survey features also allow you to learn about your visitors' experiences and tailor your website accordingly. The recording feature maps their journey from start to finish so that you can analyze it in detail.
Pricing Overview:
Basic: $0USD/ forever; Up to 35 daily sessions
Plus: $32USD/ month; Up to 100 daily sessions
Business: Starting from $80USD/ month; 500 daily sessions
Scale: Starting from $171USD/ month for at least 500 daily sessions
#7: Document360: Best for managing a self-serve knowledge base
Document360 helps you instantly create an online Self-Service Knowledge Base for your Customer and Employees (accessed either publicly or privately). It helps your customers access a fully-functional knowledge base that they can use to solve problems, making it easy for your customers to learn how to use your product.
Document360 works hand in hand with your existing help desk, analytics, commenting, and chat products both ways. Their seamless integration helps to bring external systems like chat, commenting, and analytics into your knowledge base.
With Document360, you can use your knowledge base in external systems like the help desk and chat. And they seamlessly complete the entire migration process for you so that you can focus on your next big moves.
Pricing Overview:
Standard: $131 per project/ month; billed annually
Professional: $263 per project/ month; billed annually
Business: $351 per project/ month; billed annually
Enterprise: $527 per project/ month; billed annually
Tools For Post-Purchase and Upselling
ReConvert helps you sell more by making it easy to optimize your post-purchase journey. It empowers you to boost revenue by 15% with one-click instantly upsells, customized thank you pages, and more.
You can add checkout upsells, one-click upsells, thank-you page offers, and more in minutes. Boost your profits with one-click upsells displayed after checkout; no need for customers to re-enter payment details.
ReConvert allows you to customize your thank you page with personalized cross-sells, pop-ups, custom videos, surveys, and more -- it's the easiest way to grow your revenue and boost customer retention.
Pricing Overview:
Starting from $4.99 for 49 orders per month
AfterSell’s Shopify upsell app helps brands create a checkout and post-purchase upsell experience to boost sales by 30%.
You can use their seamless customer experiences to take advantage of high buying intent and create a seamless buying experience for your customers. No need to re-enter shipping or payment information; just one click and add the offer to their order.
Their Beautiful designs, with no code needed, gives you a plug-and-play system to make more sales hassle-free.
Avoid delays and big dev efforts with a no-code targeting engine and page editor. Anyone can create and publish checkout and post-purchase campaigns that convert in minutes.
Pricing Overview:
Starts from $29.99/month for 500 orders after 30 days freemium
#3: Trustpilot: A review platform that’s open to everyone
Trustpilot is a digital platform that allows customers to review a business from which they’ve purchased a product or service or contacted customer service. It's a great way to capture UGC by inviting your customers to provide a star rating—from one to five—and leave comments about their experience with the company.
The solution helps businesses improve customer experience, showcase their reputation, amplify their online presence, and increase overall conversions and sales. Trustpilot’s key features include review reporting and analytics, invitations and reminders, rich snippet stars, on-site review widgets, and Google seller ratings.
Pricing Overview:
Standard: From $250 per domain per month
Growth: From $600 per domain per month
Scale: From $900 per domain per month
Wiser helps you provide an immersive shopping journey, mobile and email, with personalized recommendations across your store. Users say it's the best product recommendations app for Shopify stores.
With Wiser, you can analyze browsing patterns, preferences, order data, and interests. Provide a personalized shopping experience across web, mobile, and email to drive up to 35% higher conversions.
Wiser uses your customer's activity history to set up recommendations while they browse your Shopify store, creating opportunities to convert them. Shopify stores have seen a 20 to 30% increase in conversions after setting up Wiser recommendations. Create a shopping experience that assures more revenue!
Set up personalized recommendation widgets on your Shopify store with the Wiser app to bring your customers back to products they have their eye on.
Pricing Overview:
Freemium: For stores up to 0 to 50 monthly store orders
Startup: $29/Month; for stores up to 51 to 200 monthly store orders
Growth: $99/Month; for stores up to 201 to 500 monthly store orders
Premium: $199/Month; for stores up to 501 to 1000 monthly store orders
#5: qikify Upsell Cart, Cross Sell: Boost AOV and drive more revenue with upsell, cross-sell offers
qikify helps you create one-click upsell, in-cart upsell and cross-sell, thank you page upsell and cross-sell offers with ready-made templates and full customization. It’s easy to capture the moment your customer adds products to a cart and checkout to give them Pre Purchase Upsell and Cross-sell offers.
With qikify, you can increase your AOV by recommending the right products that customers need or Free Gift and Service Cards. You can also increase customer’s lifetime value with Thank you Page Upsell and Cross-sell Offers.
Make customers purchase even more with the post-purchase on Thank You Page, upsell easily by offering a service cart or gifts, and access real-time and insightful analytics to optimize your campaigns.
Pricing Overview:
Freemium
Dinosell helps to make great thank you pages that convert and boost AOV with a wide range of widgets.
Dinosell is a powerful app that enables merchants to boost their AOV and customer experience with one-click post-purchase upsells and thank-you page widgets. In addition to the proven upselling and cross-selling widgets for thank-you pages, Dinosell offers various revenue boosters, customer retention tools, and store design options. With Dinosell, merchants can quickly increase their revenue and improve their store's performance.
Post Purchase Upsell & Cross Sell Widget with Industry standard UX designs, simple and powerful drag and drop thank you page-builder, start reconverting customers with post-purchase store-wide discounts, with new 1-click upsell in the checkout, no need to re-enter card details.
Pricing Overview:
$29.99/month. 14-day free trial.
Loox is a social-proof marketing platform that empowers over 100,000 Shopify and Shopify Plus merchants to grow their brands by turning real customers into ambassadors that submit visual reviews, share product experiences, and refer friends.
Loox helps you grow a trusted brand using reviews and referrals. Collect product reviews with photos and videos from your customers. Display reviews in beautiful widgets. Reach new audiences by rewarding customers for referring friends.
Make your post-purchase upsells trustworthy. Loox is fully customizable to fit your brand look, supports multi-lingual stores, integrates with your tech stack, and operates on auto-pilot. Oh, and we offer 24/7 world-class support.
Pricing Overview:
From $9.99/month. 14-day free trial. Additional charges may apply.
For Customer Service and Rention
#1: ShipStation: The Best Way to Ship
Ship your orders confidently, save on top carriers, and automate your processes with ShipStation.
Shipping doesn’t have to be expensive or time-consuming. You can print your whole day’s shipping labels with just a few clicks. With ShipStation, you can create an impactful delivery experience. Connect your Shopify store in seconds, automate your shipping workflows, sync your tracking information, and deliver products to your customers quickly with the lowest rates. Wherever you sell, however, you ship, ShipStation powers global shipping success of all sizes.
Save big on rates from top carriers like UPS, USPS, and DHL Express, sync orders from all your selling channels, marketplaces, ERPs, and other places, and cut hours out of your day’s work by automating, tagging, splitting, and batching, and instantly update tracking information to the selling channel and your customer.
Pricing Overview:
From $9.99/month, after a 30-day free trial. Additional charges may apply.
Klaviyo helps you get the most out of your product reviews with all your data consolidated in one platform. Deliver a seamless customer experience with all review requests on brand, on time, and never double-sent – Klaviyo already has all your existing templates and applies smart sending rules to all sends.
You can automate review requests with email and SMS flows, showcase top reviews in emails & on your website, build segments based on the star rating and custom questions, reward reviewers with a unique coupon, and import previous product reviews.
Pricing Overview:
Email and SMS: Starting at $60/ month (1,001 - 1,500 contacts; 15,000 monthly email sends)
Email: Starting at $45/ month (1,001 - 1,500 contacts; 15,000 monthly email sends)
Free: Starting at $0/ month (500 monthly email sends)
Hootsuite is a social media management tool with features to help plan, schedule, and syndicate social posts. Key features include automatic scheduling, social media monitoring, performance reporting, essential task management, and more.
Hootsuite can save you time with your social media marketing. Instead of logging into each network and posting there one at a time, you can manage Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Pinterest all from one place.
And its “Streams” feature can help you stay on top of relevant conversations as they’re happening. Again, you can monitor conversions on different networks from a single dashboard.
Hootsuite also has a helpful Analytics feature for in-depth social media performance reporting. If you run an agency, you know that reporting the ROI of social media can be tricky. Hootsuite’s Analytics feature helps you show off your deliverables.
Pricing Overview:
Professional: $99per month/mo*; 1 User, 10 Social accounts
Team: $249per month/mo*; 3 Users, 20 Social accounts
Business: $739per month/mo*; 5 Users, 35 Social accounts
Yotpo helps you collect and display user-generated content (UGC), such as Ratings & Reviews, to showcase social proof.
With AI-powered review widgets, Yotpo makes it easy for eCommerce brands of all sizes to gather high-quality product reviews that impact the path to purchase. Yotpo’s partner integrations allow brands to display customer reviews and star ratings on social media and search engines like Google. Plus, with Yotpo Reviews, brands can unlock synergies between SMS and loyalty.
Stand out on a search with Google Seller Ratings and Google Shopping Ads; connect your reviews with our SMS, loyalty, and subscription product synergies. Use their marketer-friendly solution to customize your reviews widget. Collect and display Photo & Video reviews to showcase social proof and leverage Smart Filters to build buyer confidence by displaying relevant content.
Pricing Overview:
Freemium: Up to 50 Monthly Orders
Growth: Starting at$15 / month
Prime: Starting at$119 / month
Connect channels, organize warehouses, and manage inventory more efficiently by trading spreadsheets for easy-to-use software.
Improve warehouse efficiency, reduce picking errors, and quickly onboard new staff with SkuVault’s easy-to-use platform and digital picklists like Hyper Picking and Interactive Wave Picking. So your customers receive the right products on time, every time.
Make every dollar count with complete visibility into your inventory and accurate reporting and forecasting. Plus, manage inventory across marketplaces and replenish Amazon FBA orders with ease.
Easily create bundles, track packaging and other consumables, make substitutions, and avoid overselling by drawing from a total quantity for bundles and individual products.
Pricing Overview:
Growth: $359 per month, 2 users
Pro: $769 per month, 4 users
Enterprise: $1259 per month, 6 users
3PL: $689 per month, starting at 2 users
Mambo is a customer loyalty gamification platform that helps you improve the training of your customer support team.
Integrate Mambo customer loyalty gamification platform to boost customer loyalty and engage clients in a participatory, social, and rewarding way using analytics and behavior tracking systems, loyalty programs, and personalized learning.
Building customer loyalty and increasing retention isn’t easy, but we all know it’s worth the effort. Go beyond and offer a custom loyalty program – with status, badges, and rewards! Don’t limit your program to purchases; expand the reach to actions that impact your brand, like sharing with friends, writing reviews, or being an ambassador.
Pricing Overview:
Differs depending on user preference.
Zoho helps you bring the very best out of your customer-facing teams with robust automation, comprehensive analytics, personalized solutions, and more.
Engage with your customers through the right channel at the right time and with the right message. With Zoho CRM, you can harness the power of omnichannel presence, segmentation, KPIs, predictive intelligence, and more to deliver personalized experiences that breed customer loyalty. Zoho CRM gets more done in less.
Automate your workflows, processes, campaigns, customer journeys, and more so you can focus less on software and relationships. You can make informed decisions with agility using Zoho CRM's advanced analytics tools. Derive actionable insights, create custom reports and dashboards, and measure operations in real-time to drive growth sustainably.
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About the Author:
Tom-Chris Emewulu is HeyDay’s Digital Evangelist. With 8+ years of digital marketing and business development experience, he crafts high-intent, high-converting, data-driven SEO articles that put brands on page 1 of Google search. Forbes, DW, Business Insider, Businessss2Community, and many other publications have featured his works. You can find him on Social Media via @tomchrisemewulu.