Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) is a software licenced to a user to access and use via the internet that is paid on a monthly or annual basis. There are various SaaS available to cater your needs, your team’s or for your business and nowadays, the common ones are SaaS for eCommerce businesses.
With SaaS, you don’t need to develop and design your own solutions to run and manage your eCommerce business. This means less cost for you and surely you’ll be able to use a feature-rich software that will cater your business needs.
Here are 7 important SaaS tools for your eCommerce business:
1. Shopify: SaaS to Set Up Your eCommerce Website
Shopify is one of the best SaaS to help you set up your eCommerce website. It offers business owners with a solid yet adjustable store maker that can increase conversions and sales, as well as trim down a lot of departmental tasks, and provide beneficial management information. Shopify is definitely worth getting when you want your money’s worth.
Their basic license plan costs $29 which is already enough to establish your shop and manage it. If you want advanced features, prices cost up to $299/month. Your plan can always be upgraded, downgraded or cancelled whenever you want.
Shopify also included marketing-friendly solutions to help you with your marketing campaigns. There are ready-made email templates to make email campaigns easy, Shopify Ping to connect and engage with your customers through messaging, and SEO tools to help you promote your brand in Google search engine.
Aside from Shopify, there are many other providers that you can choose from. If you explore more on SaaS that will help you set up your eCommerce website, there are also a lot of alternatives like: Wix, BigCommerce, WooCommerce and more.
2. Oberlo: SaaS for Inventory Management
Oberlo is a tool that makes finding products to sell online super easy. You can access a variety of different products such as electronics, toys, and cosmetics with Oberlo. Oberlo helps you locate various products from international suppliers to include them on your own ecommerce.
After you’ve sold a product, your supplier sends the products from their warehouse directly to your customer. No need for storing, packaging, or shipping products from your end.
One can use Oberlo to sell your products in your own online store, social media, and through online marketplaces. Already dropshipping with AliExpress? No worries! You can connect your existing products to your Oberlo account.
The Oberlo Basic plan costs $29.90 a month and allows sellers to sell up to 10,000 products in their online store. The plan has recently been upgraded, and now clients can get an unlimited number of monthly orders.
3. Removal.AI: SaaS to Optimize Your Product Photos
In most eCommerce sites, white background is used in product images. Based on statistics, 76% out of 7 million product images currently are placed in a plain, white background. 16% of it was made first by making the background transparent and the rest had the original backgrounds. Entrepreneurs prefer white backgrounds mainly because it is considered to be clean, timeless, and sophisticated.
Aside from the background, image optimization is also important for your eCommerce site. Failing to do this might cause a toll on your site loading speed which is very important for every website. Using SaaS to automatically optimize your photos will definitely save you your time and your shop.
Tools like Removal.AI is one of the recommended SaaS to help you remove background and optimize your product photos. Removal.AI processes over 1000+ images in 10 minutes or so and it also allows you to download your images in High Resolution. For an eCommerce store owner, this will be a very advantageous tool especially if you have a lot of images for your shop.
For Removal.AI alternatives, you can also try Remove.bg, Slazzer, and Photoscissors.
4. Hubspot: SaaS for Marketing and Promotion
HubSpot develops software products that cater solutions for customer service, marketing, and sales. Its products and services aim to offer tools for customer experience management, social media marketing, and content management. They also offer consultation services and an online resource academy for learning inbound marketing methods.
Linking HubSpot to your Ecommerce store will help you make sense of that data and gives you marketing tools and skills to engage with your customers and sell your products to them better. Provide the best message to the right person, at exactly the right moment.
5. Slack: SaaS for Team Management and Collaboration
Modern technology has given birth to the “always online, instant access” mentality and environment. The SaaS tools have crossed the lines between the physical office and home.
Almost everyone all over the world now works from the comforts of their homes. Not only that, but it’s now possible for people to work on collaborative projects from any point in the world, and it’s quickly becoming the norm.
Slack is meant for teams and workplaces. It is equipped with sturdy features that allow you to chat with individual associates as well as groups.
You can upload and share files too, as well as accommodate other apps and services. You can also control almost every setting, this is including the ability to create custom emojis.
Slack is mostly free. You will only be granted to browse and search your team’s 10,000 most recent messages. You will also have a limit of 5GB of file storage as well as 10 apps or custom integrations.
Currently, there are three priced offers available: Free, Standard ($8 or £5.25 a month billed monthly), and Plus ($15 or £9.75 a month billed monthly). The fourth tier, named the Enterprise Grid, has arranged pricing for corporates.
There are also a lot of alternatives to Slack than you can utilise. Apps such as Microsoft Teams, Cisco Webex Teams, Blink, Google Chat, Workplace from Facebook, Amazon Chime, Brosix, Troop Messenger, and the rest offer the same service as Slack.
6. ActiveChat: SaaS to Improve Customer Experience
Why should you prioritize customer experience?
Customer Experience Management is a method to track all transactions with customers. This includes the strategy of navigating around the needs of each customer and prospects. Good customer experience management is an important factor in learning about the preferences of your customers and building loyalty through valuable interactions.
ActiveChat is chatbot software that can serve as a communication tool for your website. It has all the chatbot elements you require to create your chatbot. More importantly, it is possible to validate the input of the user for phone numbers, email and dates.
With ActiveChat, you can send broadcasts and sequences to your users and with the use of tags and fields that can be customized and you can filter almost any chatbot element in your chatbot.
You can also create a chatbot in any language. However, it is not easy to translate your chatbot to a different language.”
“Chatbots are utilised by different kinds of businesses. You can locate them in apps, online messaging platforms and websites, although it’s usually pretty obvious you’re conversing with a chatbot, they’re not entirely unhelpful..
Once a chatbot is set up properly, it can help with the more repetitive aspects of customer service and free up valuable time so your agents and you can get on with more hands-on, complicated tasks.
Alternative to ActiveChat are Respond.io, ChatBot, Bold360, Tidio, HubSpot ChatFlows, HelloTars, and Drift. These are great alternatives to Active chat.”
7. Xero: SaaS for Finance
Xero is one of the rapid growing international SaaS companies. It is leading in New Zealand, Australia, and the United Kingdom in cloud accounting markets.
Xero can be used on any device as a web-based solution, as long as you have active Internet connection.
With Xero’s efficient accounting functions, businesses, big or small can monitor their account, their cash flow, and activities anywhere. Bank transactions are automatically carried over and coded.
Choosing the right tool can be deceptively challenging, despite having no shortage of small business accounting softwares available these days.
With a lot of overlay in performance and differences in price, it’s possible for business owners to choose the wrong accounting tool.
Even with all the time in the world, trying out all the accounting programs can seem more cumbersome than convenient.
It’s worth trying alternatives to Xero like FreshBooks, Wave, ZipBooks, Holded, Sage 50cloud, Kashoo, and many more.
Wrapping things up…
Previously, most eCommerce businesses created their services to be exclusively desktop friendly.
These days, the tables have turned. eCommerce businesses are determined on designing and creating their website with mobile users in mind before even considering desktop users.
As odd as it may be, it actually makes loads of sense, considering that most commerce decisions will be made mobile in 2021.
Nowadays, everybody wants the full shopping experience on all devices. And it’s going to be fairly simple to please your audience if you’re running your store on Shopify. Having a mobile-friendly eCommerce website makes your business modern and more profitable.
Integrating SaaS to your business allows you to automate your organization’s workflow and optimize your cost, production and some of the manual burdens of managing your network.
Not only this, utilizing SaaS can also help you keep up with your business industry trends for more online visibility.
With these technologies on the rise, there is no doubt that now is the best time to think about starting an ecommerce business of your own.
Author’s Bio: Yen Pedrajas
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Yen is an eCommerce blogger and content writer. She is currently managing customer operations and public relations for Removal.AI. A SaaS AI technology used to automate photo editing and image background removal for eCommerce product images. This background remover is designed & developed to help simplify eCommerce developers’ workflow to foster efficiency, productivity and creativity.