As your e-commerce grows and scales, you’ll need to manage an ever larger amount of data, products, channels, customers and hopefully transactions. As complexity increases, you’ll need more advanced software to reduce your costs and maintain best in class margins to fund your next growth steps.
Here is a review of the main software families in an e-commerce infrastructure and why you might ever want to use them.
Keep in mind that a retail e-commerce with 150,000 products has different needs from a DTC e-commerce with 15 variations of the same product.
CMS – ecommerce Platform
That’s all you need to start, an e-commerce software per se.
Popular options are:
- Shopify
- WooCommerce (WordPress)
- Big Commerce
- Magento
- Prestashop (popular in France)
A few distinctions you have to understand are between:
- SAAS or platform vs self hosted
- headless or classic
Accounting Software
Accounting is also one of your most immediate needs. While some plugins might do the job, you’ll probably want to have a dedicated accounting software that accountants know well.
We recommend that you integrate the accounting software to the e-commerce platform and payment channels from day 1.
- Xero
- Quickbooks
- Zoho Books
- Pennylane (France)
Online Banking for e-Commerce
Banking is not software but modern online banks integrate easily with accounting, e-commerce and payment tools. If you can get your data to flow seamlessly between those different softwares you’ll save a lot of time and avoid costly mistakes.
Popular online banks include
- Revolut (Europe)
- Wise (Europe)
- n26 (Europe)
- Bunq (Europe)
- Mercury (US)
- JUNI (Europe)
- Currenxie
- Monese (UK, Europe)
- Monzo (UK)
Payment Service Providers (PSP)
Stripe, Paypal, Braintree, Checkout.com… you name it.
Dozens of options and depend heavily on your needs and country of incorporation.
Subscription Management
Subscriptions is a great business model, especially for DTC brands. There is a host of Plugins and SAAS to help you manage e-commerce subscriptions like:
- Chargebee
- Recharge
- Prive
- Bigcommerce Subscription
Those software have to integrate with your e-commerce platform (like Shopify) and payment platform (like Stripe).
Analytics, Tracking and Dashboards
Web Analytics tool
- Google Analytics / GA4 is the default player for many but is having issues with EU’s GDPR.
- Matomo is a self hosted open source option that is generally seen as a backup for Google Analytics
Big data allow you to integrate and query large amount of data
- Big Query (from Google Cloud, now natively integrated with GA4)
- Redshift (from AWS)
- Snowflake
Other big data tools complement the data stack like Stitch, Fivetran…
No code data tools like Supermetrics or Blockspring are used to easily pull and format data from hundreds of ads platforms, payment tool, SAAS software, etc. directly into spreadsheets, dashboards or big databases.
Tag Management tools separate your e-commerce codebase from tag management:
- Google Tag Manager
Other “Data Platforms” tools deal with extra complexities of modern analytics in an GDPR and iOS14 world, for example:
- Elevar
- Little Data
Finally Data Visualization tools help you build dashboards and reports to monitor your performance at a glance:
- Google Sheet, not a data viz tool per se but sometime all that you need
- Google Datastudio (free)
- Tableau (Salesforce)
- PowerBI (Microsoft)
PIM Software
Product Information Management software (PIM) are like the CMS of the catalog. They should be the single source of truth (SSOT) of your product data and stream those data to all your channels.
Those are not the cheapest and simplest software to set up so PIM are usually implemented at a later stage in e-commerce growth. PIM are used for large catalogs mainly by retailers or DTC with a huge product base.
Here are some of the most popular e-commerce PIM:
- Akeneo
- Salsify
- PIMworks
- Icecat
- Pimcore
ERP and Manufacturing
ERP stands for Enterprise Resource Planning software. An ERP might consolidate a lot of the software functions discussed in this article, for example:
- Inventory management
- Accounting and Taxes
- Vendors and purchasing
- Feeds management
- PIM
Generalist ERP include Odoo, Netsuite, Sage, SAP, Zoho…
Specialized ERP-like software are Cin7, Dear…
Feed Manager
As you grow you’ll probably want to add more channels, and managing inventory, prices and product details manually will not be practical.
Dedicated tools, SAAS or Plugins, manage product feeds between your e-commerce platform, your ERP and all your channels, from Google Shopping to niche marketplaces.
- Lengow
- Feedonomics
- CommerceHub
- Flxpoint
- Channable
Fulfillment and Shipping
Several services might enter this category.
3PL or third party logistics are logistic services that will actually store and ship your products from their warehouse, with a software interface and plugins:
- Byrd
- Ogoship
- BoxMe
- Fulfilio
- Redstag
- Shipwire
- Amazon FBA (but only for selling on Amazon)
Other tools are just SAAS helping you deal with syncing data between e-commerce platform and logistics, like:
- Sendcloud (Europe)
- Shippo (US)
- Shipstation (US)
- Myparcel (belgium, netherlands, benelux)
In Between are companies that provide an interface to you AND resell carrier contracts at negotiated prices, for example:
- boxtal.com (france, europe)
- shipper.ch (switzerland)
- packlink (europe)
Inventory Management
This category has overlap with ERP, Feed management and PIM depending on the solution you buy.
- Trunk
- Cin7
eMail marketing and automation, CRM for e-Commerce
You’ll want to send mass email blasts, segment your email list, but also send transactional e-mails, smart follow up, especially for cart abandonment, etc.
Integrated tools are a must for most e-commerce, for example:
- Klaviyo
- Active Campaign
- Mailchimp
- Mailerlite
- Hubspot
You could also rely on plugins for Shopify or WooCommerce but we don’t recommend this approach.
SMS marketing tools and Chatbots are connected to this type of software as well as ticket management software.
Support – Ticket Management
The need for customer support software should come early to your e-commerce and you might as well consider it from day 1 or so to maintain clean integrations and exhaustive data records.
Here are the popular options:
- Gorgias
- Zendesk
- Freshdesk
Alternative tools that are more focused on chat UI are:
- Intercom
- Crisp
- Xeno
VAT, Taxes and Duties
Depending on your target market, you might need software to automate VAT, taxes and duties calculation and filing. In Europe the rules changed recently and you now have to file your VAT for each country you sell to, but the system has been simplified so with the right software it’s relatively easy to comply.
In the US you have to comply with Sales Tax and other rules.
- Avalara
- Hello Tax
- Simply VAT
- Taxually
Internationalization / Localization
Main options for internationalization help you with currency and language.
- WPML (WordPress)
- Multilingual Press (WordPress)
- We Glot
SEO and Acquisition
SEO has different types of software with different roles. Some of those software are dealt with by your SEO agency, others by your internal team.
A common type of SEO software is a Plugin to manage your SEO tags, sitemap and help you do on page optimization. Those plugins are add ons for your SEO platform, here is a list of the popular ones:
- Yoast (WordPress)
- Rankmath (WordPress)
- The SEO Framework (WordPress)
- SEO Suite (Shopify)
- SEO Doctor (Shopify)
- SEO Booster (Shopify)
Other acquisition software might be related to social media management, bidding on various platforms, managing shopping feeds, managing large scale display campaigns, etc.
e-Reputation and Reviews
Specific tools can help you collect and manage customer review as well as monitoring public discourse about your brand on social media, forums, and press alike.
Review management software:
- Trustpilot
- Avis vérifiés (France)
e-Reputation monitoring;
- Mention
- Brandwatch
- Awario
Pricing Intelligence
For retailers facing a price conscious audience, a small price difference might make a huge difference very fast. To stay on top of the market, there are specialized software monitoring non stop every price variation. You can then automate pricing rules to retain your pricing edge.
Popular price monitoring tools for retail e-commerce are:
- Netrival
- Prisync
- Price2spy
- Pricefy
General IT and Productivity
If you’re just starting up you might want to pick the right solution from the start.
Here are a few platforms that might help you manage your IT without headache and with interesting integrations into e-commerce tools:
- Google Workspace (ex. GSuite)
- Microsoft Teams / Office 365
Extra tools for company organization include:
- Notion (documentation)
- Clickup (project + documentation)
- Asana (project)
- Monday (project)
- Slack (chat)
- Jikko.co (content, SEO, growth marketing)
- Jira (software)