Top 6 Must-Have Tools for Scaling Your Ecommerce Business

Internet businesses need growth to survive. There has to be a balance between ever-growing costs and profits, which means your business efforts have to generate more leads, for example using TikTok Ads and eCommerce product videos and more conversions.

The Internet, of course, is full of articles on scaling your business. We’re not exactly creating a new industry here. Instead, we’ll share a few useful tools and techniques on how to grow your eCommerce business in 2021. After all, not only have we developed several businesses ourselves, but also helped countless other businesses do the same.

Read on to find eCommerce tools you didn’t even know you needed.

What Is Ecommerce?

Electronic commerce or e-commerce is the area of the economy, in which advertising, promotion, retail, and financial transactions are done directly on the Internet. In other words, eCommerce is a business model that allows both companies and individuals to buy and sell things online.

From the perspective of business owners, manufacturers, and suppliers, eCommerce is the promotion and provision of their products/services on the Web. And from the perspective of buyers (customers), eCommerce means browsing, choosing, comparing, and ordering products/services online.

Why not expand your eCommerce business to Amazon?

Amazon is one of the world’s largest eCommerce platforms, with over 2.5 million active sellers from around the world. Not only is it an amazing business solution for merchants of all levels but also a highly competitive marketplace with its own ranking system. 

Here, it’s as easy to climb to the top as it is to fall down to the bottom. To avoid the latter, there are a few useful tools that can help scale your business and increase your sales on Amazon.

With that said, let’s start with Sellzone.

Sellzone

The Sellzone toolkit is designed to help merchants make the most of every Amazon product listing by influencing its visibility, traffic, and conversion rate.

Sellzone is a tool that will analyze your Amazon data and help you make more informed decisions about your eCommerce business. The leading marketing app, designed specifically for Amazon sellers, was created by Semrush in 2008. This means it has been successfully helping hundreds of online businesses grow for 13 years now. 

Initially available as a free A/B split-testing tool, Sellzone has become an ultimate feature-rich marketing tool, used by almost 7 million marketers worldwide.

In a nutshell, Sellzone allows you to do the following:

  • Identify the most popular keywords for your product on Amazon;
  • Find simple wins and gaps in your keywords to quickly gain online visibility;
  • Strategize and match all your keywords.

Sellzone features:

  • Keyword Wizard (200+ million keywords to increase your ad profitability);
  • Listing Protection (monitor your Amazon page);
  • Traffic Insights (analyze and compare traffic channels);
  • A/B Split Testing (evaluate the effectiveness of web pages);
  • Listing Quality Check (analyze your listings, improve their quality, and rank higher);
  • All-in-One Amazon Analytics Tool;
  • Free Features;
  • Affordable Pricing;
  • Designed by Semrush.

Unicorn Smasher

An important part of running an eCommerce business on Amazon is product research. Knowing your product, competitor products, and what prices your customers expect can make a huge difference. You can dramatically increase sales at a healthy profit margin or struggle to break even.

Unicorn Smasher is a free Amazon sales estimator, perfect for getting basic product information. It provides you with real-time data to analyze ratings, prices, reviews, and sales, using real data on thousands of products.

You can expect the most accurate information, downloads, and support to help you research a certain product. Unicorn Smashers offers comprehensive data and allows you to quickly switch between product niches. Plus, you easily share and export that data.

Find products on Amazon’s search pages and manage your research via a one-stop dashboard. The latter collects the necessary information along with your saved favorite searches. From there, quick links can take you straight to a list of products.

The whole point of Unicorn Smasher is to take the guesswork out when you think of the best products. It provides detailed metrics, sales estimates, and a browser extension so you never have to leave the website when searching for products.

You get opportunity estimates to have a better look at the entire Amazon marketplace. You can compare your current products and understand which ones will make a difference in the future and which to exclude.

Amazon Seller App

Amazon Seller App is a free tool to help your retail arbitrage. Its main function is to scan items and present a suggested selling price for you as an FBA (Fulfillment by Amazon) seller. 

FBA is a set of services that Amazon provides to the seller, from product storage to delivery.

Amazon Seller App is a pretty simple app but a great introductory tool. It can be a great option to try Amazon FBA without any upfront investment because it’s completely free. 

We dare you to “test yourself” by being an Amazon FBA seller.

EngageBay

This is a free CRM to help small business scale operations. This marketing and customer relation management tool can make things much easier for e-commerce businesses as it offers a myriad of options to engage with customers and track their behavior in real-time.

EngageBay gives a 360-degree view of all the customers and even monitors their behavior on your e-commerce website and social pages. There is a seamless integration of all related marketing and sales processes, like sending personalized automated emails to all customers who abandon their shopping carts.

There are built-in email and landing page templates that you can personalize and even code. You can build site popup forms as well from the same place, and test all the elements of your emails, landing pages, and inline or popup forms with A/B testing.

The best thing about EngageBay is how comprehensive this tool is – you get everything from importing contacts to a visual sales pipeline and Live Chat, customer support group management, help desk, and even uptime SLA.

Octoparse

Octoparse is a cloud-based software designed for web scraping, collecting, storing, and analyzing web data. It’s a totally free tool for Windows and Mac users to scan web Amazon pages. 

The scraper is intuitive and easy to understand for both professionals and novices. This means that with Octoparse, you can extract data from various websites using a clear visual interface. Even if you don’t have any coding skills.

Octoparse allows you to automatically collect content from almost any web page and store it in a clearly structured form in any format you like.

The tool can extract product information, customer reviews, profiles, etc. The web scraper also provides built-in Amazon web search templates with predefined data fields for extraction. 

Octoparse benefits:

  • Easy to use. Scrape all data with a simple point and click. No coding skills required;
  • Extract websites. Almost 99% of websites can be extracted by Octoparse, no matter what kind of data you want.;
  • Download results. Download extracted data in CSV, Excel, API, or save to databases;
  • Cloud service. 24/7 data collection and access to data on the Octoparse Cloud Platform;
  • Scraping schedule. Schedule scraping tasks at any specific time
  • (hourly, daily, or weekly);
  • IP rotation. Automatic IP rotation to prevent IP blocking;
  • Parsing web data from sites; 
  • Text, video, audio, visual, graphical, and structured data analysis;
  • Reporting & analytics; 
  • Simultaneous access by multiple users;
  • API, etc.

You might also want to check out their super easy-to-use eBay tutorial on YouTube.

Profit Bandit

Once you’ve decided that you want to continue and run your business as an Amazon FBA seller, you can start investing in a paid tool. Profit Bandit is a good option that costs $15 a month. 

Slightly more sophisticated than the Amazon Seller App, it has pre-set filters that automatically calculate profit/loss on your products. It also has some other useful features, e.g. flagging items that are “collectible” and analyzing competitors in the app from other platforms. The tool determines who your competitors are and whether you have any chance of selling in that area.

With Profit Bandit, you can quickly scan Amazon and find products that might work for your online store. It also checks to see what you are currently selling online.

Sellics

If you want to track revenue in real-time and maximize revenue based on clicks, Sellics might become your favorite tool. It’s one of the best eCommerce data analysis tools with expertise in keyword research and Amazon products.

Sellics is the leading advertising optimization software designed to help you increase ad reach, reduce ACoS (Advertising Cost of Sales), increase product sales and business profits on Amazon. 

Additionally, with Sellics Autopilot, you can set your daily budget and optimize your advertising for maximum profit. Consequently, you can maximize the profitability of your advertising campaigns. 

The tool also comes with a number of awesome features such as Amazon SEO Tools, Amazon PPC Management, Listing Optimization, and the list can go and on.

Sellics helps you in key areas of your business, including SEO, PPC, research, reviews, competitor monitoring, and inventory management. It also effectively manages reviews on Amazon, which is considered a very important part of Amazon’s business. 

The tool can handle all basic tasks, including organizing, prioritizing, and responding to customer reviews in just a few clicks. 

All in all, Sellics is the perfect solution for busy marketers who want to optimize their advertising and increase their profits. 

Prisync

With price comparison sites and price drop notification apps on the rise, online sellers lose too much without a solid competitor monitoring system.

Prisync—a price tracking and dynamic pricing tool—solves this problem. It helps online sellers track competitors’ prices and automatically adjust their own.

Prisync users see all their competitors’ prices and price history and set up dynamic pricing rules that allow them to match or beat anyone’s prices. They increase profits not only by selling more but also by increasing profit margins whenever there’s an opportunity for it.

Prisync benefits
14-Day Free Trial—No credit cards required
Super easy-setup—Just log in from the website
24/5 Live Support
Continuing communication after-sales
Easy dashboard
Cloud service
Track unlimited competitors in any package
Product variant tracking—colors, sizes, storage, etc.
Reports
Historical pricing data
Shopify, Magento, API integrations

Ways to Scale Your Ecommerce Business: 5 Key Components

1. Automation

Automating business processes is a great starting point for saving time (and therefore, company funds and other resources). Automation brings a significant reduction in operating costs. Thus, just a couple of minutes won in a repetitive process cycle and multiplied by a dozen employees on a monthly basis can turn into a full 40-hour week of additional working time. For example, many Ecommerce businesses automate their customer support system by using IVR technology. Using interactive IVR for customer support, customers are able to call on Ecommerce helpline numbers and get their order status by entering their order number or customer ID. This automation in customer support reduces the burden of support executives saving hours of productive time. 

Businesses can also automate their feedback collection process using an omnichannel survey software. By sending surveys and collecting customer experience data in real-time, businesses can optimize their customer journeys and improve their conversion rates. 

Not only cyclical processes need to be automated but also more complex ones, e.g. marketing. In addition, there are effective tools, which are already adapted to the conditions of the U.S. market and have been tested by hundreds of B2B companies.

Don’t forget that the more you invest in setting up your automation and process optimization today, the easier it will be to scale your business tomorrow.

2. SaaS Technology

Getting a company online means moving all your data to distributed cloud storage and accessing it via subscription-based SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) software. 

The advantages of SaaS are not only remote access from anywhere in the world but also the speed of access to the server and high efficiency. And most importantly – easy business scalability at the right time.

SaaS technologies are off-the-shelf solutions that allow you to quickly increase staff and immediately provide new staff with online access to databases and analytics needed for work from any computer. Without such software, your workplace must meet serious requirements for power and disk space. You will need to install and configure special software, download the company’s databases, etc. In addition, it’s endless downloading and transferring of data from computer to computer via flash drives, along with paperwork and piles of “important and necessary” papers in each office.

With a subscription, all employees get access to work on the same data at the same time. Then, as your business grows, IT resources will easily expand

SaaS technology will meet your growing bandwidth requirements, ensuring your company can continue to operate efficiently while growing and expanding. 

3. Long-Term Financial Outlook

Obviously, long-term survival will be assured when your revenues exceed your expenses. However, if you’ve already made a profit, don’t be in a hurry to move those funds away from the business. If you’re looking to scale your business, set aside money for reinvestment at the same time as your sales increase: it will come in handy when the company needs to increase its resources.

Plan your expenses year ahead and make provisions in advance for each month of fixed costs. This will allow you to manage your profits while maintaining financial management security. In addition, this way you won’t need to urgently seek outside investors to scale. Plus, you can retain control of more of your company in the future. After all, you can sell some shares or get a loan at any time.

4. Effective Sales Funnel

Sales and loyal customers are what will ensure the company’s consistent and stable revenues. Improve the sales funnel by polishing each step, from reducing costs and increasing product margins to after-sales customer service. Some Sales prospecting tools could be used to make the process transparent and traceable.

Pay even more attention to post-transaction service. After all, it’s easier to turn customers who bought once into repeat customers. They will cost the company 80% less than attracting new ones that you will have to warm up again.

An effective sales funnel includes 3 components:

  • Awareness is maximum information about your company and your products. Provide buyers with quality content with images and detailed descriptions to help them choose;
  • Evaluation is the ability to compare and contrast similar products. Offer a clever catalog search that allows customers to compare and evaluate several products, quickly choose a similar item (if you don’t have the right one);
  • Decision making. Use this phase for upselling, offer related products, bonuses, and discounts on the next purchase to make customers loyal.

Improve each phase of the funnel and bring it to perfection and automation. Use online survey tools which provide you real-time insights as they can work wonders for your business. This will be the basis for scaling up your business.

5. Positioning As a Separate Product

Most companies perceive their website as a business card, whereas an online platform is a separate product. Such a product requires separate resources for development, launch, implementation, and constant improvement.

While the development, launch, and implementation processes are simplified by off-the-shelf solutions. The company will still have to do the “homework.” The latter includes studying visitor behavior, surveying users, analyzing their feedback, refining the site infrastructure to improve the interface and site experience. 

Constantly improving the interface to meet customer needs is the key to ensuring that your site won’t need to move to a new, optimized platform in just a couple of years. However, if the relocation is still imminent, a B2B company should consider launching its own B2B marketplace.

A wholesale marketplace will work effectively for the company, providing all the conditions for optimizing business processes and quality customer service. This is an all-in-one platform for working with partners and clients, as well as for staff management. 

The transfer of business processes from a B2B company will free up the resources of top management. The owner will only need to rationally distribute the profits, ensuring the business a long-term positive financial outlook.

Conclusions

When it comes to scaling your eCommerce business and managing your Amazon operations to increase sales, you have plenty of solutions to choose from. We hope that our tools and strategies on the list can significantly improve your eCommerce business and ensure steady, lasting growth for your business.

Feel free to share your thoughts and opinions below and let us know if you have any questions. 

Adam Hansen
 

Adam is a part time journalist, entrepreneur, investor and father.