Six Commerce Platform Capabilities You Need to Evaluate

Choosing a Global Software Development Partner to Accelerate Your Digital Strategy

To be successful and outpace the competition, you need a software development partner that excels in exactly the type of digital projects you are now faced with accelerating, and in the most cost effective and optimized way possible.

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Whether you’re upgrading to a new commerce platform or choosing one for the first time, you need to closely evaluate the technologies that will help you achieve your objectives and grow your business.
In a previous blog, we outlined the importance of establishing clear goals and objectives that focus on your customers and their experience. How customers interact with the site drives their experience, which provides the basis for recommended features and capabilities from the provider.
Overall, these are the top six capabilities to consider for your eCommerce implementation:

1. Products – look for features that provide easy ways to manage attributes and digital assets such as import/export capabilities, descriptions, images, pricing, SEO meta data, etc.
2. Content – consider platforms that offer self-service for creating and maintaining pages, banners, and other supporting content
3. Customers – look for platforms that have analytics capabilities that will allow you to learn more about your customers to serve a more personalized experience
4. Marketing – look for features that allow you to drive promotional activities including discount codes, pricing rules, related products, and custom email notifications
5. Sales – you’ll want a platform that allows your company to process returns, see discounts, update order statuses, append shipping information, and provide this information to your customers
6. Reporting – look for platforms that provide reporting, dashboards, and data filtering that also integrates reporting features from web analytics platform, such as Google Analytics

Learn more in our latest guide – Best Practices for Choosing a Commerce Platform, Part 2 – where we explore other topics around evaluating digital commerce platforms, including integration, platform scalability, and hosting environment.
Waiting until your business has nearly outgrown your existing platform doesn’t allow enough time for a thorough, thoughtful evaluation. As you’re making plans for 2017 and evaluating your options, take a look at these best practices. And, see how our clients’ recent re-platforming projects have boosted their eCommerce success.