If your business has entered the exciting but turbulent world of ecommerce, you’re undoubtedly aware of how challenging it can be.

Running a website and fishing for those sales in an ever-changing environment means that ecommerce websites have to constantly update themselves to remain relevant and compete with the newer business models in the market. The ongoing global pandemic and its effect on the economy has also produced dangers and opportunities that an ecommerce business has to deal with.

Thankfully, there’s business management software geared towards ecommerce websites that can help attract customers, increase sales, and generally make your site run more smoothly. Two fantastic business management software apps called Odoo and Akeneo can be easily installed on our Virtual Private Servers, that can revolutionise how you run your ecommerce website. Here are some of the benefits they can offer you:

Ecommerce website design

Improving the design and functionality of your ecommerce platform is very important in a fast-moving and competitive marketplace. Business management software can offer a number of handy tools to ensure that your website looks and performs as you want it to.

Odoo is business management software that offers many different applications that can improve the effectiveness of your ecommerce website. One of the features of Odoo is its huge choice of themes, that can let you pick a website design that’s both professional, suits your type of business, and is easily changeable in a few clicks. Similarly, its ability to easily tweak your website design by building product pages without having to know code, or create and update text through an easy-to-use editor, is very useful.

Other Odoo advantages, such as the ability to create flexible price lists, product variant options and online forms, can only make your online shop even more appealing to the customer.

Product information management

Product Information Management software, or PIM software, such as Akeneo, offers a single location to collect, manage, and enhance your website’s product details, build a product catalogue, and distribute it across your channels.

Akeneo can help you efficiently organise technical data, such as product measurements and specifications, usage data like descriptions and ‘how to’ content, and emotive data like blogs, product stories or case studies. Media files such as images, videos and PDFs can also improve the richness of your website and make it more likely to complete sales by delivering irresistible shopping experiences.

Integrated ecommerce tools

Business management software can offer your ecommerce website a number of integrated ecommerce tools that can boost your revenue.

Odoo, by suggesting optional products that are related to certain items, can help you reap the benefits of cross-selling and upselling. Promo codes and coupons are also excellent methods of encouraging potential customers to make a purchase. Similarly, automatic search, mail and marketing features can ensure that baskets abandoned by customers can be converted into orders.

In addition, Odoo can magnify your sales by pushing your best products to the top of your page, use attributive search, and defining product categories.

Online store customer experience

Making the customer shopping experience as easy and intuitive as possible is another benefit of ecommerce business management software.

Odoo can help you ensure that customers can find the product that they’re looking for with a simple, accurate and attribute-led search system, that will boost sales while improving customer satisfaction.

Even simple things such as allowing customers to skip the shipping address when ordering a service rather than a product, creating a user profile when ordering, or offering a simple checkout process, can make your website a much more appealing place to do business.

By offering an easy-to-use customer portal that can help customers keep track of orders, help with shipping, and manage returns, Odoo can improve the shopper experience as well as making life easier for customer service staff.

On the other hand, the Akeneo PIM solution can ensure that all product information given to the customer is consistent and accurate due to features such as product completeness tracking, data validation and automated enrichment rules. Akeneo also offers new channels, like chatbots and vocal assistants, to improve answers to customer queries quickly, efficiently and without having to sacrifice employee work time.

Online store billing and accounting

Maintaining an accurate and complete record of all financial transactions is vital to running a successful ecommerce website – and business management software can help you do this far more effectively and efficiently.

Odoo can adapt to the different tax rates of customers in different countries, calculate and bill shipping costs, or build you your own chart of accounts.

Web store payment and shipping

Odoo allows a website to accept payment with a range of different means, such as Adyen, Buckaroo, Ogone, bank transfers and cheques, rather than just Paypal, you can offer your customers more options.

It can also help you create your own shipping rules that accurately reflect the costs that you incur when delivering a product to a customer, such as criteria based on weight, size and geography. Integrating any third party shipment processes and tracking into your website, can also improve the customer experience and avoid customer service issues.

Sell online reporting

Operating an ecommerce website without a reporting tool is like trying to drive a car with your eyes closed – you’re likely to crash. Being able to analyse what your website is doing right and wrong so that you can react and make the necessary changes, is critical for the health of your company.

Odoo can provide you with the vital analytical capability required to find the best customer in terms of revenue, grouping your sales or utilising graphs to build an accurate picture of your circumstances. With a range of useful KPIs at your fingertips, such as conversion rates, best sellers, and average cart amount, you’ll be able to make the crucial decisions that can make your ecommerce website a roaring success.

Akeneo can also provide an intuitive centralised hub to manage your product information and assets across all your sales channels, while making invoicing orders, receiving payments, and tracking shoppers simple and convenient.

If you'd like to learn more about how Fasthosts servers can help power your ecommerce business, talk to our sales team.