Today, businesses have more options than ever while designing an online store. But, like too many cooks spoil the broth, too many options with different capabilities make selecting the best eCommerce platform for your business tricky.

If you’re looking to design an eCommerce website but aren’t sure which feature to get, look no further. In this guide, we’ll discuss the top eCommerce platform features and equip you with comprehensive strategies to pick the perfect set for your business.

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But, before we start, it’s essential to understand that an eCommerce website has two primary components — frontend and backend. The frontend consists of consumer-facing features that enhance their journey on your website. The backend is all about creating a supply chain network that markets, manages and delivers your products to a customer’s doorstep.

In the first section, we’ll talk about the latest eCommerce website features you must have to keep up with the competition. Following this, we’ll discuss the eCommerce software features you need to streamline your backend processes. Let’s dive in.

This Article Covers:

• Top Ecommerce Website Features
  • Intuitive UX
  • Site Search
  • Footer Navigation
  • Product Pages
  • Return Policies
  • Order Tracking
  • Email and Push Notifications
  • Chatbots
  • Mobile App
  • Physical Store Integrations
  • Privacy and Data Policy
  • Personalization
• Top Ecommerce Platform Features
  • Content Management System
  • Product Information Management
  • Shopping Cart
  • Email Marketing
  • SEO
  • Payment Processing
  • Order Management
  • Reporting
• Best Ecommerce Software
• How to Select the Best Features for Your Business
• Software Selection Strategy
• Wrap Up

Top Ecommerce Website Features

1. Intuitive UX

The first and foremost thing customers look for in an eCommerce store is an easy and intuitive shopping experience. The eCommerce industry is rich in competition, and if consumers can’t navigate to what they’re looking for on your website, they’ll swiftly move on to a competing store.

An intuitive and engaging user experience (UX) is a must for modern eCommerce stores. It keeps customers on your website and increases its dwell time metrics. Consumers also tend to make snap decisions about a product when they’re captivated by the visual design of a website, in turn boosting its conversion rate.

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Wix allows you to create dynamic webpages using drag-and-drop tools.

Therefore, although your products are key to your business’s success, you shouldn’t neglect your website’s design and UX. They do a lot of heavy lifting while attracting and retaining customers.

Most eCommerce platforms let you design a website from scratch using drag-and-drop tools and design templates. In comparison, advanced solutions offer in-depth editing tools, WYSIWYG HTML editors, blogging features and PWA studios to create personalized and branded experiences across all web-browsing devices.

2. Site Search

A fundamental aspect of your website’s UX is the proficiency and robustness of its search and filtering options. Every top eCommerce site has a universal search tool that allows customers to bypass navigation and quickly locate desired products.
According to a Forrester report, 43% of consumers will head straight to the search bar when visiting an online store. Therefore, not having search tools on your website can prove to be costly in this day and age.

On top of that, a search bar’s role is rapidly evolving into a potent marketing tool. Ecommerce solutions like Adobe Commerce and Salesforce Commerce Cloud equip search bars with AI to suggest upselling opportunities to customers.

Amazon’s impressive search suggestions.

For example, if a consumer searches for pencils on your website, AI will suggest erasers and papers under the “People also searched for” tab. A few solutions also enable you to advertise marketing campaigns like deals of the week, upcoming sales and discounted products on the search bar.

3. Footer Navigation

This often-overlooked website feature helps users find their desired information quickly and easily. The footer includes links to crucial sections of your website, allowing customers to visit the page with just a mouse click instead of navigating through multiple web pages.

You can include information in your footers like support details, FAQs, featured products, website translations in multiple languages, return policies, terms and conditions, and more. For example, at SelectHub, we use our footer to include links to major software categories, social media pages and other CTA links.

SelectHub’s footer links.

Have you considered the best way to utilize your footer? To begin, you should start thinking, “what do customers want from my site?” And include links to every section of your website that garners the highest visits and clicks.

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4. Product Pages

When customers shop online, they can’t interact with products before purchasing. They rely heavily on product information showcased on the website to get a feel of what it might be like in real life.

You must equip your site with the necessary information customers need to make an informed decision. This means including descriptions, photos and videos on product pages. A study found that a product’s visual representation, mainly via pictures and videos, positively influences consumers’ purchase intentions.

But that’s not all. User-generated content (UGC), like product reviews and ratings, provides social proof to shoppers that a product is what it says it is. A study to explore consumers’ online behavior found that online reviews significantly impact consumers’ purchasing decisions.

Amazon’s UGC section.

To capitalize on this trend, you can offer customers a space on each product page to ask and answer questions. You can also take inspiration from Amazon and allow users to vote on the most relevant questions. It creates a mini FAQ list at the top of each UGC section.

5. Return Policies

A generous return policy is a sure-shot way to boost consumer confidence in your products. A report by Loop reveals that 96% of consumers review return policies before purchasing. On top of that, 57% said they would abandon a brand if the post-purchase experience weren’t good.

You must devise a well-thought returns policy backed by a robust reverse logistics workflow if you don’t want to risk abandoned carts. To maximize your return policy’s visibility, you can consider showcasing it beside the “Add to cart” button on each product page.

6. Order Tracking and Shipping Options

Remember when you ordered something online that didn’t arrive on time? It wasn’t a good experience, was it? The top question on a consumer’s mind after placing an order is, “when will my order arrive?”

According to Shopify’s The Future of Commerce industry report, 74% of customers prefer to see shipping costs upfront while making a purchase.

To set realistic expectations and assure customers, you must notify them of shipping options in detail before confirming an order. This means displaying shipping costs, expected arrival time, insurance information and shipping carriers alongside product information.

Autozone allows users to track their orders using email IDs and order numbers. Source

Ecommerce platforms can streamline the process by selecting the best shipping option, automatically calculating costs and sending confirmation emails with tracking information.

7. Email and Push Notifications

The primary goal of an eCommerce business is to sell its products. But if you can’t convert a visitor to a customer, the next best conversion for your store is when a visitor subscribes to your emails and newsletters.

A recent report found that eCommerce marketing emails have a 15.68% average open rate and a 2.01% click rate. Emails are considerable revenue-generating opportunities, allowing you to reach prospective customers with future sales and marketing campaigns.

But what if your emails go to the spam folder? For situations like this, the best way to capture your visitors as subscribers is via push notifications.

Shein’s push notification trigger box.

As you can see in the screenshot above, when a shopper allows Shein to send notifications, its eCommerce platform adds the visitor’s browser to the subscriber list and sends the latest messages and offers through the desktop notification bar.

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8. Chatbots

One of the many advantages of eCommerce is there are no strict business hours. You can sell to customers 24/7. Chatbots are a crucial part of a successful eCommerce store as they support customer journeys during hours when your sales representatives aren’t available.

You can simplify your daily operations by automating most of your business’s interactions with shoppers. Define rules to automate customer responses about your products and services.

Decathlon’s customer service chatbot. Source

Due to its many advantages, the global chatbot market is expected to expand at a 25.7% CAGR till 2030.

As the world acclimatizes to interacting with intelligent algorithms, not having a chatbot can lead to many missed sales opportunities. Are you willing to take the risk?

9. Mobile Optimization

As of the second quarter of 2022, mobile phones account for 73% of commercial site traffic and 63% of eCommerce orders worldwide. Today, if your store isn’t mobile optimized, you risk losing a major chunk of global traffic and site visits.

You can no longer optimize your desktop experience to fit on a mobile screen and package it as m-commerce. You must design bespoke landing pages and ensure they load quickly on mobile devices.

In addition to mobile-friendly websites, you can also consider launching branded mobile apps. It lets customers directly engage with your business (compared to visiting your site via a browser) and keeps them up-to-date about upcoming events through in-app notifications.

10. Physical Store Integrations

Social distancing is no longer a prerequisite, and physical stores are resuming operations. Reports show that retailers opened 80 million square feet of retail space in 2022, making it the only year to record net-positive store openings since 2016!

If your brand has physical stores, it’s important to offer a fluid online and offline omnichannel brand experience in 2023. With innovative fulfillment options, like BOPIS and curbside pickups gaining popularity, your inventory must sync across channels, warehouses and stores.

A reliable eCommerce platform can help manage online and offline selling by tracking real-time inventory across locations. It notifies customers when their order arrives via app, SMS or email. You can define rules to confirm customer identity and prevent fraud using QR codes, order numbers and PIN machines.

11. Privacy and Data Policy

Online data privacy is big on the agenda across industries and countries. A survey
showed that 42% of Americans are highly concerned about their online data. On top of that, leading web browsers like Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox and Apple’s Safari are banning the use of third-party cookies.

Therefore, online businesses not only need to safeguard customer data better (from phishing, identity theft and other illegal activities) but also innovate new techniques to collect data, determine what customers want and deliver relevant content.

The eCommerce software of your choice should help you design websites with SSL certification and SSAE 18 encryption. It helps fend off online attacks and attempts to hack your database.

Additionally, having a PCI-compliant solution is a must if you want to gain customers’ trust and offer them a safe environment to use their credit cards. You can also consider solutions that provide two-factor authentication for customer and staff profile access.

12. Personalization

Although people are apprehensive about sharing their information online, they still feel favorably towards brands delivering personalized experiences. According to a survey, 62% of customers stated that a brand would lose their loyalty in case of un-personalized experiences.

With the ban on third-party cookies, 37% of global brands strictly use first-party data to personalize customer experiences. You need eCommerce platforms that can record a customer’s journey on your domain and offer relevant experiences to keep them engaged.

A few innovative techniques by which you can personalize customer experiences are:

• Use AI to offer predictive suggestions.
• Integrate the platform with CRM modules to collect customer data and BI tools to analyze it.
• Recognize customer preferences to provide relevant suggestions in physical stores.
• Personalize search results based on a customer’s navigation history.

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Top Ecommerce Platform Features

Now that we have gone through the key features of eCommerce websites let’s have a look at the key eCommerce platform features:

1. Content Management System

Content management systems (CMS) help create, edit, publish and manage digital content for a website. The main benefit is that they eliminate the need for coding expertise. An easy-to-use interface allows content creators and writers to manage a website’s content without assistance from website developers.

Businesses that produce fresh content regularly can benefit heavily from a CMS. It offers intuitive drag-and-drop tools to modify a website’s design and feel — from product page layouts and promotional banners to designing new sections and editing text, images and videos.

Customize every website section using drag-and-drop tools. Source

It centralizes your content database and brings your entire content team on the same page for streamlined collaborations. You can use a unified platform to create content and publish it on multiple channels, social media and websites.

2. Product Information Management

While CMS manages all types of digital content, product information management (PIM) modules specifically manage product data and publish accurate catalogs across sales channels.

It can store product descriptions, images, videos and user-generated content (like reviews, unboxing videos and how-to tutorials). You can add multiple product attributes and define rich taxonomies between various product iterations.

Setup complex relations between products using a PIM module. Source

You can centralize CAD drawings, technical specifications and other documentation during the R&D and product development phase. Procurement officers can collate multiple marketplace data while defining product quality criteria.

3. Shopping Cart

Shopping carts are the key differentiators between an eCommerce website and a non-commercial, generic website. This feature allows your customers to create a list of products they’re interested in and saves the information for checkouts and future purchases.

View a list of selected items and a detailed bill breakdown at a glance. Source

It offers customers a detailed breakdown of total bills and smoothly transitions them from checkout pages to payment gateways. You can collect and analyze shopping cart data to identify abandoned carts and launch marketing campaigns to retrieve lost sales.

4. Email Marketing

Emails are the only way a business can reach its customers directly without involving middlemen like search engines and social media networks. Email marketing is one of the fundamental features of an eCommerce platform that maintains your site’s subscriber list and allows you to launch personalized campaigns using templates.

According to a recent report, for every $1 spent on email marketing, businesses receive an ROI of $36. To compete in today’s digital marketing landscape, you must have comprehensive email marketing tools that nurture leads, create brand awareness and promote your products to global audiences.

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5. SEO

Search engine optimization (SEO) is about getting your site and content in front of the right customers by ranking high for target keywords on Google and other search engines.

It’s a marketing strategy that doesn’t burn a hole in your wallet and has one of the highest ROI. 70% of marketers believe that SEO is a better marketing strategy than pay-per-click (PPC).

While most of the on-page SEO strategies depend on your keyword research and content, you need a great eCommerce platform for strong technical SEO backing. This means simple and scalable website architecture, quick site speed, customizable and canonical URLs, mobile-optimized pages, and clean sitemaps that search engine spiders can crawl easily.

6. Payment Processing

Ecommerce platforms can offer you a variety of options to process payments. Some solutions connect with popular payment gateways like PayPal, Stripe and Venmo to offer your customers all the latest payment options, including credit card, ACH, eWallet transactions and cash on delivery.

A few advanced solutions have native payment processors and connect directly to your bank account. They don’t redirect customers to external payment gateways during checkout and allow them to complete transactions from within the website interface. The only drawback is it may take two-three business days to credit the amount to your account, and vendors may charge a nominal processing fee.

7. Order Management

Order management is the penultimate backend process that involves customers. Even the slightest human error, like a wrong letter in an order number, could disrupt the sales funnel. Situations like that not only dampen the marketing effort it took to get the customer to that stage but also jeopardize your company’s reputation.

Ecommerce order management tools minimize manual effort by consolidating orders from multiple channels on a centralized screen for easy trackability. The system connects with your warehouses and automates inventory updates after each order.

Track orders from multiple channels on a centralized dashboard. Source

You can also connect order management modules with multiple third-party logistics providers and define rules to automate order routing based on a customer’s location and preferred fulfillment option.

8. Reporting

Ecommerce platforms are a treasure trove of your customers’ primary data. The system must organize and analyze this data and provide actionable insights to improve and scale your business.

Most solutions offer a library of report templates and pre-built dashboards to track profitability, engagement, inventory and other personalized KPIs. You can export reports in multiple formats and connect with external analytics modules for in-depth reporting.

Enterprise solutions have built-in AI and offer BI modules to analyze historical and existing data that help make data-driven decisions.

Track business-specific metrics using customizable dashboards and visualizations. Source

Best Ecommerce Software

Now that you know the necessary features, it’s time to look at the market leaders to drive the point forward. Our analysts at SelectHub continually dive deep into the eCommerce software market to discover and compare the leading vendors.

This section covers overviews of our top three picks. For a more detailed analysis, you can check out our in-depth eCommerce platform comparison report and analyze leading products’ features, pricing and other criteria side-by-side.

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Shopify

Shopify is an intuitive and easy-to-use eCommerce solution that can help launch an SEO-optimized online store in just a few hours. It doesn’t require prior coding experience and offers a WYSIWYG editor to design storefronts from scratch.

Each of its plans includes unlimited storage and bandwidth and doesn’t cap the number of products you can sell. You can scale the solution as your business grows and shift to a headless architecture to manage multiple storefronts and brands.

On top of that, it offers more than 6000 external app integrations, allowing you to customize the solution per needs. Other features include:

• Physical and digital products
• Point-of-sale system
• Analytics
• Dropshipping
• Multi-branding
• Social media integrations
• Marketing and email automation
• Mobile app
• 24/7 customer support

Design storefronts and start selling in no time with an intuitive digital commerce platform.

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BigCommerce

BigCommerce is a SaaS eCommerce solution ideal for startups and mid-sized businesses. It offers a robust website builder with customizable themes, checkout customization, WordPress integration and mobile optimization.

Its headless architecture lets businesses design and customize multiple storefronts for different brands without interrupting backend processes. It supports multiple languages and currencies with automatic conversions, allowing you to sell to a global audience.

BigCommerce also offers a long list of external integrations for in-depth customization. Some of the features are:

• Unlimited bandwidth and products
• Unlimited staff onboarding
• Point-of-sale
• Google reviews
• Reporting
• Customer segmentation
• Product filtering

Track website engagement using custom dashboards.

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Adobe Commerce

Adobe Commerce is an end-to-end enterprise solution that helps create branded customer journeys across channels and platforms. It offers a modular and headless architecture, enabling you to build your perfect software stack and create personalized journeys for each storefront and brand.

Its native AI, Adobe Sensei, simplifies your daily operations by organizing business data and analyzing it to provide actionable insights. The system creates customer profiles, and the AI personalizes their journey based on interest and navigation history.

You can also offer tiered pricing, targeted ads and content for specific customer segments. Its other features are:

• Website builder
• PWA studio
• Content staging
• A/B testing
• Inventory management
• Order routing
• Business intelligence
• Reporting
• Commerce financing

Create visually stunning online storefronts from scratch using intuitive designing tools.

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Feature Selection Guide

Knowing the best and latest eCommerce features and platform isn’t enough to guarantee your online store’s success. When it comes to business software, the one-size-fits-all notion rarely works. Each business has unique products, audiences, business models and requirements.

You need software that fits your business like a glove. It should accentuate your USP, address all your pain points and not complicate matters with extra features.

You can start by assembling a committee of your business executives, stakeholders and managers to discuss your eCommerce platform requirements. Here are a few departments you should consult to get the right mix:

• Sales and Customer Service: These employees directly interact with customers on your business’s frontline. You need an intuitive solution that they can easily use.
• Accounting: Your new platform must connect with your existing accounting suites and comply with local regulations. Your accountant’s opinion is valuable in this scenario.
• Marketing: The marketing team is responsible for advertising the business and the product to your customers. They can give you insights on trending features according to the audience you cater to.

Once you’ve put together an ideal committee, ask yourself these questions to get the conversation rolling in the right direction:

• What are our goals? Defining your goals can streamline your search to a handful of options.
• Which mode of deployment do we prefer? SaaS deployment is easy to use and inexpensive but lacks customizations. On-premise deployment gives you enough leeway to customize but requires investment in IT infrastructure and personnel.
• Who will use the system? Not all platforms support unlimited staff onboarding. Identify the critical touchpoints in your supply and value chain, and look for software to streamline those.
• Do we need a new website or add-ons? Platforms like Ecwid and WooCommerce are available as extensions and add eCommerce functionalities to existing WordPress or non-commercial websites.
• What’s our budget? Ecommerce software ranges from a few dollars to more than $3000 monthly. Choose software that fulfills all your requirements without going beyond the budget.
• Which integrations do we require? The new platform must integrate with your existing software stack.
• What are our plans for the future? Plan for the future while selecting a new platform. The last thing you want is the platform hindering your business growth.

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Software Selection Strategy

The next step in your selection process is to hit the market and evaluate vendors on how well they match your requirements. But the global eCommerce software market is booming, with a total valuation of $3.81 billion in 2022 and expected to grow at a steady 12.5% CAGR. Due to the expansion, there are options galore for software buyers.

To streamline your selection process, SelectHub has outlined a nine-step process that helps sift through the sea of options and get the perfect solution for your business. We call it the lean selection methodology.

• Establish: The first step in problem-solving is admitting that there’s a problem. Determine the pain points you want the new software to solve. It helps set the foundation for your quest for the ideal solution.
• Collaborate: Prepare a selection committee that includes administrators, stakeholders and department heads.
• Define: This step is about preparing a building blueprint before starting construction. Think about the needs of each department, make comparisons, and prioritize tools and features to define your requirements clearly.
• Distribute: Send out requests for proposals (RFP), requests for information (RFI), requisition for quotation (RFQ) or a combination of all three to a list of potential vendors. Having a scoring system can help rank vendors’ performances.
• Justify: Culminate the results of the last four rounds and carefully deliberate whether you want to buy a new system, invest in add-ons to your existing software or end your search here and stick to your current solution.
• Prove: In this step, you request vendors to prove how well they match your requirements. You can ask for demos, use cases, success stories and proofs of concept (POC).
• Rank: Rank each vendor on your list based on the requirements score, demo score and the total cost of ownership. Strike out low-ranked options and shortlist four to five vendors that are ideal for your business.
• Negotiate: Review the top-ranked vendor’s contract and contact a lawyer for a second opinion. You can move on to the next step if the contract looks good. Otherwise, repeat this step with the next vendor on your list until you find the ideal agreement.
• Sign: Put pen to paper and devise a detailed implementation strategy with your vendor. Congratulations on the new software!

You can check out our article on lean selection for a detailed breakdown of the process. We also have a lean selection book! Be sure to check it out if the intricacies of software selection and a structured approach toward decision-making interest you.

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Wrap Up

Ecommerce platforms are a comprehensive set of tools that allow you to design online storefronts and digitize every backend process from inventory management to fulfillment and reverse logistics. Due to the wide scope of functions, many variables differ from business to business, and there isn’t a singular platform that fits every type and size of an organization.

You must carefully assess your unique situation to outline your requirements and look for the right software to help your business grow. You can start off by using our free eCommerce requirements template to prioritize the features you need from the long list we mentioned in this article.

What do you think of our eCommerce platform features list? Which ones will benefit your business the most? We’re eager to hear from you; let us know in the comment box below.