More and more businesses have been going online in recent years, with the e-commerce industry hitting over $1 trillion in revenue in the United States alone. This is largely driven by entrepreneurs and enterprises alike having more tools to ease digitalization as consumers opt to shop online.
Tech has been a driving force for online growth, especially when introducing businesses to the world of e-commerce. For new businesses, there are some key pieces of software that help you break into the scene – from turning ideas into an actual business all the way to sustaining your launch and expanding.
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Pre-Launch: Business Name Generator
It goes without saying that you’ll need to have a distinctive name before you can even begin to consider other aspects of your business. This is the way you capture the attention of your target audience and differentiate yourself from others in the industry. In e-commerce, you also need to pick a name that works for a domain so that you can build your online presence accordingly.
Using a business name generator like the one offered by Namechk is a simple yet effective way to find a name that suits your brand, hits the right keywords, and sticks to SEO best practices. Today, business name generators use AI to make a comprehensive list of suggestions based on user input. It’s much more robust now that it can immediately exclude any dupes, identify the most relevant keywords, and link available domains that match the suggestion. The process is usually done within minutes and doesn’t cost anything to run, so you end up saving a lot of time and money during the brainstorming period.
Branding: Canva
Canva is software-as-a-service that allows users to create different branding materials with robust graphic design tools and templates. There is both a free and premium version, with the latter offering more tools and graphic resources for you to use. Taking advantage of such tools is a no-brainer when it comes to starting a business in today’s tech-driven world.
When you are forming your business, it’s important to build your brand in terms of messaging and aesthetics. These go hand in hand to inform your potential customers about what you do, why you’re worth checking out, and what you care about. With tools like Canva, you can pick what type of brand material you are creating and build different elements from there. There are tons of templates to help you get the ball rolling, but you have the freedom to make your brand as unique and original as possible.
Project Management: Asana
When running an online business, you need to make sure that you are allocating your resources efficiently, setting goals, collaborating with any team members and vendors, taking stock of your inventory, and using careful planning to mitigate any business risks.
There are tons of software options available today that allow for task and workflow management, but Asana is one of the most commonly used by predominantly online-oriented businesses. Studies show that using tools for time management is not only an effective performance booster but may actually be a great way to enhance well-being. From the moment you map out your business plan to when you are actually running the whole thing, it’s worth using tools that aid in your management of tasks and objectives.
Launching Your Platform: Shopify
Having a platform to actually conduct your business is important if you’re going to thrive online. Whether you plan to set up a digital storefront or just plan to use your web presence to direct business to your offline efforts, a good platform will have exactly what you need to build an audience, secure transactions, and scale your business.
Shopify is one of those apps that every business needs to be successful, particularly because it’s an effective way to launch an online store with little cost and no extensive coding experience necessary. Its interface is very user-friendly, so it doesn’t have an extremely high learning curve. With Shopify, you get to not only build your online store but also maintain it with the tools included. This means payment platforms, user analytics, inventory management, and shipping services, among others. It is really geared towards e-commerce, so any business looking to conduct most of its business online may want to go for this over other website builders.
Marketing and Sales: ActiveCampaign
Although many website builders and e-commerce systems like Shopify already have integrated marketing, you can go a step further and make use of software that is built to expand your reach. More than just being visible to a lot of online users, the goal is to be seen by relevant potential consumers that actually have a higher chance of engaging with your business. After all, it all comes down to traffic and conversions.
Important advertising types to make use of include pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, social media, email, and traditional advertising. Each of these has its own strengths which will serve your business well depending on your budget and goals. While you can manually go for each of those, automated marketing software like ActiveCampaign makes things easier for you. It’s a great way to make your business grow, and there’s a 2-week free trial so you can see if it’s something you want to allot part of your budget to.
Cybersecurity: Cloudflare
A huge part of thriving online is about protecting yourself and your consumers from malicious attacks. Service interruptions, data loss, and breaches are some of the worst problems a business can face. Data shows that a majority of small businesses don’t take concrete steps toward data security measures. Alarmingly, around 60% of small businesses close within six months of being hacked.
With those numbers, cybersecurity is one of the best things you can focus on in order for your business to succeed in the long run. Even if you don’t think you are a target, it’s better to be safe than sorry. A lot of websites use cloud-based security software like Cloudflare because it doesn’t take too much expert knowledge and already covers a lot of security basics. This protects your cloud server, masks your IP, shields you from DDoS attacks, and blocks spam and SQL injections attempting to infiltrate your website.