10 Must-Have Services & Tools For Every Modern E-Commerce Project

Firebear Studio
22 min readMay 14, 2020

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In the following article, you will find a collection of ten services that substantially improve the default experience of every e-commerce project, no matter if it is a WooCommerce WordPress plugin-based storefront or a robust Magento 2 website with numerous store views (btw, check our digest of Magento 2 extensions). The majority of the tools mentioned below are platform-agnostic. It means that they offer integrations with all primary e-commerce systems. No matter what platform you use — Shopify, Magento, WooCommerce, or anything else, the services gathered in this article can improve major processes and fix the most critical areas of your store. Enhance your daily routine automating various time-consuming operations, provide customers with simplified and personalized shopping experiences, and make more informed decisions with in-depth insights. The following list is based on the Firebear expertise and feedback from dozens of our clients and partners. Before going any further, let’s take a look at pivotal e-commerce trends for 2020 to find out what services and tools help to follow them.

E-Commerce Trends 2020

You can find dozens of articles that describe e-commerce trends for 2020. However, almost all of them touch on the following ten topics:

  1. Personalization. Although this is not a new e-commerce trend, the personalized shopping experiences based on AI and big data is gaining new powers and authority in 2020. Customers seek an individual approach when they browse your e-commerce website. Luckily, there are enough services that can help you with that.
  2. M-Commerce. The rising dominance of mobile shopping is hard to overestimate. People prefer to use their smartphones to receive the products and services they want. It seems that more than half of customers shop via mobile devices. If your store is not mobile-friendly yet, you should seriously think about the update.
  3. Voice Search. What is exactly new in 2020, it is voice search. Tightly connected to mobile commerce, this new trend expands to new dimensions. Even Google is changing the way it handles search queries. The growing importance of voice search is undoubtable.
  4. PWA & Headless E-Commerce. Progressive web apps introduce another significant e-commerce trend for 2020 that incorporates the best way to orient every website towards a better mobile experience. PWAs offer lots of benefits in comparison with traditional sites. They are not only suitable for every screen size but also work in offline mode and deliver the fastest possible page load time, to name a few. In its turn, headless e-commerce is another trend that is closely associated with PWAs. By this term, we mean a storefront developed on top of any backend following the progressive web app principles.
  5. AR. Artificial and augmented reality will continue to expand the influence on online shopping. The default e-commerce experience doesn’t let customers feel the product or see it on the body. However, different AR technologies make visualizing the merchandise possible. It is the specific feature online shoppers want.
  6. Video. If you cannot implement AR-experience on your store, video content can be a reliable replacement, especially since most buyers watch product reviews before making a purchase.
  7. Chatbots. Most prospects don’t want to communicate with you via phone calls or emails. They need a fast and modern way to leave queries and get answers, and chatbots present the most friendly communication channel.
  8. Flexible Payment Options. The more payment options you offer, the higher the chances are to engage more buyers to complete their orders. At the same time, you can leverage subscriptions and recurring payments to automate all further purchases. Thus, your clients will become returning customers without any need to come back to your store to make a purchase. The store will do everything for them.
  9. Sustainable E-Commerce. More and more buyers no longer want to see this plastic wrap that covers your goods. They want recyclable material to be used instead. The best thing is that you don’t need any third-party e-commerce service to follow this trend. However, it is necessary to conduct an eco audit to understand what you can change in your business to deliver a more sustainable e-commerce experience.
  10. B2C-Like B2B Experiences. Everything is quite straightforward and clear about this trend. B2B buyers no longer want complexity. They require simple solutions like ones represented in B2C commerce. However, these solutions should still satisfy B2B needs. Major e-commerce platforms already revamp their B2B instruments to follow this trend. However, some services let you stay ahead of the curve.

10 Must-Have Services & Tools For Every Modern E-Commerce Project

Now, let’s take a look at e-commerce services and tools that will help you follow the trends above or at least prepare your website to them.

Algolia

This e-commerce tool lets you follow four of the trends above: personalization, mobile commerce, voice search, and B2C-like B2B experience. How can a single platform do that? Let’s find out!

Algolia offers a search-as-a-service solution with a full suite of APIs that allow creating fast and flexible search and discovery experiences across numerous platforms: in-app, on site, and globally — all available via APIs. From the perspective of an e-commerce merchant, you can leverage Algolia to improve product discovery, increasing conversion rates. The platform makes all of your content easily accessible, which leads to deeper engagement.

8,500 customer across the world use Algolia to serve 70 billion queries per month via the following four products:

  • Site Search;
  • Mobile Search;
  • Voice Search;
  • Geo-Search.

Site search experiences incorporate tools that integrate content from across your online properties, providing more user-friendly and precise mechanisms than any default search solution. If you add Algolia to your B2B website, it lets you give a complete B2C search experience for your partners.

When it comes to mobile commerce, Algolia offers an infrastructure, APIs, and UX tools that not only optimize the actual search performance but also make it tailored for small-screen devices. Thus, you can make your business more mobile-friendly with a single integration.

However, the most intriguing aspect of Algolia is voice search. More and more people prefer searching through voice than by keyboard. At least, it is more convenient considering the huge screen size of modern smartphones.

Algolia voice search

When it comes to voice search, Algolia delivers query understanding, personalization, and search relevance. As a business owner, you can implement this functionality across different channels and platforms, doing your e-commerce voice-first. What is even more critical, it is that Algolia supports dozens of languages.

The voice search UX is also worth mentioning here. It eliminates scrolling and browsing, delivering real results right after a query is formed.

As for geo-search, Algolia lets you implement more personalized e-commerce experiences with this feature. The platform provides results tailored to the location of a customer.

Another good news is that you can use Algolia for free unless you don’t exceed 50K operations and 10K records per month. The price of the starter plan ranges from $29 to $489 per month, depending on what you use. As for the pro plan, it starts at $499 per month.

Nosto

Since personalized search is not enough to implement a truly individual approach to customers, we also recommend you to leverage a fully-featured personalization engine called Nosto. ‘The world’s first commerce experience platform’ delivers an integrated suite of tools that enable data-fueled personalization and merchandising for every modern e-commerce project. Nosto makes it easy to deploy fully personalized commerce experiences backed by fully controllable merchandising rules across the following areas:

  • Product recommendations;
  • Triggered pop-ups;
  • Category pages;
  • Other content.
Nosto product recommendations

According to the company’s website, Nostro already helped to generate $2Bn of additional revenue for 2,5k online stores. The platform takes part in 25Bn personalizations and processes 712GB of data per day.

Another remarkable aspect is that Nosto keeps both product and shopper data updated in real-time. This approach ensures a genuinely personalized experience for each customer. Inappropriate images or product impressions will no longer hurt your brand perception.

It is also necessary to mention that no other personalization engine delivers the same amount of on-site interactions. Nosto is an evident leader on the market since it covers everything from complete category merchandising and pretty standard product recommendations to automated product bundles.

In an attempt to deliver the best results, the platform incorporates various tools. First of all, it enables precise segmentation of your audience and provides e-commerce specific insights. The platform’s armory also includes instruments for A/B testing and optimization. Thus, you can efficiently process your customer data to provide personalized shopping experiences across:

  • Product Recommendations;
  • Category Merchandising;
  • Dynamic Bundles;
  • Pop-ups;
  • Page Content;
  • Facebook & Instagram Ads.

In addition to in-store personalization, Nosto also enables seamless individual experiences for other channels, including emails and mobile applications.

At first blush, it may seem that Nosto is aimed at bigger e-commerce websites since its basic Growth plan starts at €1,000 per month. However, the company also offers an Incubator plan aimed at online retailers with less than €1M in annual online revenue. This one grants access to Nosto’s Onsite Product Recommendations for €99 per month. If your sales exceed €20,000 per month, the platform charges a 0.5% fee. It is also possible to use other products (personalized, on-site pop-ups, or Facebook ads) for an additional €99 per product per month.

Intercom

Intercom provides an ultimate communication channel for 30k+ e-commerce businesses and their clients. The platform lets you leverage a chatbot, following trend number seven. It also enables scalable messaging across all departments: sales, marketing, and support. However, chatbots are not the only solution that is under your disposal. Together with live chats, they help you capture more leads, converting them into sales.

Intercom delivers precision-targeted engagement at scale with tailored onboarding and activation messages. Real-time tools and rich insights let your specialists understand store visitors much better and, consequently, make well-informed decisions. The platform offers the following core tools to push your communication with customers to an entirely new level:

  • Outbound Messages;
  • Intercom Inbox.

The first solution lets you contact prospects using targeted, personalized messages. The system enables you to reach store visitors with an individual approach based on who they are and how they interact with your store. It is possible to personalize content, creating a dynamic series of campaigns that follow customer behavior.

Intercom communication channel

You can also specify the exact moment Intercom sends a message to a prospect. The ability to set rules for the notification levels is another feature that makes chatbots flexible and powerful. Furthermore, you can use automated and one-off emails as well as push notifications to reach customers more efficiently.

In addition to texts, you can leverage other content types, following the increasing demand for video content! Besides, Intercom lets you communicate with store visitors via images (memes!), apps, and emojis. Tell your story using the language your customers speak. It is the only way to drive action and get the most out of it.

As for Intercom Inbox, it is a universal team inbox for sales and support that helps your employees drive faster responses for leads and customers. The tool lets you manage conversations that occur anywhere: on your e-commerce website, in apps (both web and mobile), via email and social messages, etc. Besides, you can create separate inboxes for sales and support with different levels of permission. It is also possible to use notes and mentions within the system to collaborate more efficiently. With native iOS and Android apps, you can manage all communications and help customers anytime, anywhere.

As for bots, they not only initiate conversations but also qualify leads and route prospects to the right reps following the captured information.

Due to in-depth insights, you can always make your communication efforts better. Intercom lets you know how each message performs. The platform shows open, click, and reply rates and lets you track the actual performance of every phrase you send. Measuring the efficiency of your teams is also possible. Besides, you can export data for further processing and more in-depth analysis by external systems.

The price of the Intercom services starts from $87 per month.

Trustpilot

Trustpilot is a trend beyond time. It is one of the biggest review platforms with 85+ million revisions and 360k+ sites evaluated that lets brands engage customers to share their experiences to help others make better choices. Thus, consumers can influence businesses at no cost. Companies, in their turn, get a chance to ensure new buyers that they’ve chosen a reliable partner.

From the perspective of an e-commerce merchant, Trustpilot works as follows:

  1. Provide the platform with a CSV file that contains your recent orders.
  2. Trigger automated review invitation emails.
  3. Earn Google Seller Ratings and review stars.
  4. Add Trustpilot widgets to your website to inform customers regarding your reliability.

Although customers don’t necessarily leave five stars, you can leverage negative opinions too. Trustpilot lets you analyze all the feedback and get the information necessary to improve your brand.

From the e-commerce perspective, it is an instrument that allows you to grow and show trust in your brand. By letting customers tell their story, you turn their feedback into business results. Verified Trustpilot reviews count toward your Google Seller Rating, which, in turn, boosts CTR on your Google ads by up to 10%.

Trustpilot reviews

A Trustpilot profile page is a solid tool for showcasing the trust people put into your brand. It usually appears as one of the top search results for your website. And an independent review site inspires more trust than an on-site review section, which is fully controllable from the admin.

However, you can add Trustpilot reviews to your website with the help of TrustBox widgets. They are also suitable for email signatures, newsletters, or anywhere else.

Automated review invitation emails introduce a simple way to engage customers to leave feedback. Besides, Trustpilot offers reminder emails that let you collect more reviews.

Another handy feature is Trustpilot’s Image Generator that turns your reviews into images. You can easily share them on social networks, grabbing more attention from your prospects.

Like any e-commerce tool, Trustpilot lets you measure the performance of its services. You can find out how Trustpilot is influencing your sales due to the TrustBox Optimizer A/B testing tools. Explore page performance with and without Trustpilot reviews to discover the efficiency of this e-commerce solution.

You can get the basic Trustpilot functionality without any charges. However, the free plan is limited to a bare minimum of features. The cheapest program starts from $349 per month.

Cloudflare

Cloudflare provides services that are far beyond all trends. The web-infrastructure and website-security company makes every site more protected and, at the same time, faster. A content delivery network, DDoS mitigation, distributed domain-name-server services, and overall Internet security are among the solutions Cloudflare provides.

The project started as a simple application developed to find the source of email spam. Years passed, and now it is one of the largest services that protect websites from all manner of attacks and optimize their performance.

Cloudflare is designed for anything connected to the Internet. It offers a solid foundation for your infrastructure, applications, and teams, ensures the reliability of websites, APIs, and external-facing apps, as well as protects behind-the-firewall applications, devices, and employees.

The platform’s security instruments include firewall, DDoS protection, rate limiting, bot management, VPN, to name a few. Its performance features deliver intelligent routing, video and image optimization for mobile and desktop devices, as well as various cache options. Load balancing, DNS, and virtual backbone are among reliability enhancements.

From the e-commerce perspective, Cloudflare allows you to deliver rich media content and personalized experiences, reducing the negative impact on the store’s productivity and page load time. Thus, Cloudflare lets you prepare for resource-hungry personalization features without sacrificing the store’s performance.

Cloudflare content delivery

Year after year, malefactors increase the impact on e-commerce. Their activities lead to significant losses merchants have to cover at their own cost. However, you can avoid this scenario. Cloudflare offers tools that prevent fraudulent activity. It blocks SQL injections and cross-site scripting, protects sensitive data for PCI-DSS, as well as delivers TLS 1.3 encryption for customer data and transactions.

Besides, Cloudflare ensures uptime and reliability. It not only protects your e-commerce website from DDoS attacks but also optimizes the store performance for seasonal promotional events. As a result, you avoid traffic surges and outages that lead to lost sales.

Another essential thing about Cloudflare is that it lets you reduce operational overhead and costs. The platform is developer-friendly, so it speeds up all the related processes. You can get a secure and fast e-commerce website with a minimum amount of time and effort.

Cloudflare’s media management and optimization features include the ability to compress image files for faster load times, use caching to reduce latency, optimize visual content for mobile devices, as well as demonstrate products via video streams.

At the same time, the platform lets you enhance scripts that back your personalized content. A dynamic web page, used to deliver personalization, requires more time to load than a conventional page with static content. To eliminate the negative impact, Cloudflare accelerates dynamic content requests, lowers DNS resolution times, and reduces origin dependencies.

When it comes to prices, Cloudflare offers free options for personal or hobby projects that aren’t business-critical. Paid plans start at $20 per month.

Buffer

Social networks continue to gain importance in the life of individuals and, consequently, become more vital for businesses. Your customers are spread over different platforms, so you need to represent your brand over all of them. However, it is impossible to manage all social media accounts unless you have a dedicated team of SMM specialists. Or you can leverage Buffer — publishing, analytics, and engagement platform that offers social media tools for all social media accounts in one place. More than 75k companies choose it due to a wide variety of advantages.

Buffer offers two separate sets of tools. First of all, the platform lets you manage your content more efficiently. You can create, schedule, and publish it on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest from the same dashboard. The platform allows you to draft posts and coordinate with your team to orchestrate SMM campaigns. It is possible to custom-tailor content for each social network to deliver messages that perfectly suit each particular environment.

Buffer schedules

Secondly, Buffer lets you analyze your campaigns and measure their performance. You can create reports and get in-depth insights to grow your presence on social media. Data across all social media services are available under one intuitive dashboard. It is also necessary to mention that Buffer delivers very detailed reports. You can even compare the performance of different publications and content types (e.g., stories to other posts).

The price of publishing tools starts at $15 per month, while analytical tools are available at $35 or more.

Hotjar

Hotjar introduces the most spectacular way to illustrate customer behavior and understand store visitors. The platform delivers all the tools necessary to uncover insights and make well-informed decisions. From the perspective of the trends mentioned above, it lets you prepare for implementing various new features as well as evaluate their performance.

First of all, the platform visualizes clicks, taps, and scrolling behavior. You can easily understand what parts of a store page are the most engaging. Hotjar offers heatmaps for clicks, moves, scrolls, downloads, and sharing. Besides, it lets you split them by a device type.

Hotjar heatmaps

Recordings of real visitor behavior enhance heatmaps. Hotjar lets you identify usability issues by replaying sessions of real site visits. The platform provides the ability to tag such recordings, take notes, and share this data with your team or specialists beyond it.

Hotjar’s conversion funnels are another vital aspect of the platform. They show pages, places, and steps where most visitors leave your site. You can even watch the recordings of dropoffs.

Also, it is possible to improve online form completion rates. Hotjar shows fields that take too long to fill or are left blank. The system visualizes how your customers interact with forms. Consequently, you effortlessly identify problematic areas.

Besides, Hotjar offers broad possibilities for data collection via feedback polls. You can target questions to specific visitors anywhere on your e-commerce store. Instant visual feedback gives your prospects an easy way to inform you how satisfied they are. For more complex data collection, Hotjar introduces an editor. It lets you create responsive surveys and collect data in real-time from any device.

The price of Hotjar services starts at €89 per month for up to 20k page views per day.

Mailchimp

Mailchimp is a marketing automation platform that improves the daily duties of thousands of merchants all over the globe. It simplifies numerous e-commerce processes, provides in-depth insights regarding customers, and allows turning them into personalized marketing efforts.

The platform offers lots of different tools that can be divided into the following three categories: marketing, automation, and analytics. The first one includes a form builder and other similar mechanisms that let you get subscribers. Next, you leverage MailChimp email campaigns that fall into four groups: regular, automated, plain-text, A/B testing. The platform lets you shape your emails via customizable email templates or a drag-and-drop email builder. In addition to that, it is possible to leverage Facebook Ad campaigns and a landing page builder. Besides, you get the ability to leverage numerous automation features and analyze the efficiency of current and past campaigns. Let’s describe the core platform’s points in more detail.

When it comes to collecting new contacts, Mailchimp lets you add hosted, embedded, or pop-up forms to your e-commerce website. At the same time, the platform provides the ability to create landing pages designed to encourage signups and enable retargeting.

Productive social media marketing features are also among the available opportunities. Mailchimp offers tools for creating converting social posts and ads. Thus, you get the ability to find new prospects and turn them into followers. Moreover, with the Lookalike audience finder, you will effortlessly reach new clients who will definitely like your brand.

Building, launching, and measuring marketing campaigns has never been so easy. The most important thing about Mailchimp is that the platform lets you do that across all possible channels. It offers Marketing CRM to target campaigns, so you can rest assured the right messages are always sent to the right people. Note that it is possible to automate related processes, spending time on other aspects of your e-commerce business.

Mailchimp email automation

Another thing that is worth mentioning here is that Mailchimp analyzes the engagement of your audience and provides information necessary to make every new campaign better. The platform offers real-time reports, A/B tests, built-in analytics tools, and personalized recommendations to make your marketing efforts better.

You can achieve even more excellent results by connecting Mailchimp to other services. The platform is quite flexible when it comes to data synchronization. As a result, you can create a bridge between various tools, collecting and analyzing data from multiple sources under a single interface of this marketing automation platform.

When it comes to pricing, Mailchimp offers all its basics for businesses that begin their way for free. The first commercial plan starts at $9.99.

Sumo

Sumo is the number one email capture tool that you can use out of charge. Its primary purpose is to let businesses grow an email list and increase site traffic. The amount of Sumo users gradually comes to one million. It attracts such a massive amount of customers due to three categories of tools: email capture, content sharing, and analytics.

List Builder is the prime email capture tool that lets you create pop-ups that appear on clicks, timers, and before people leave. This easy-to-use solution enables straightforward and user-friendly email list building. Sumo also provides additional features that have the same purpose. For instance, Welcome Mat introduces the ability to create call-to-action pop-ups. The tool lets you display full-screen CTAs when visitors land on your site. You can use it to promote products or ask prospects to join your mailing list or check bestsellers. Smart Bar lets you place a bar atop of a page with the same intent.

Sumo List Builder pop-up

A slightly different intent is associated with Sumo’s Contact Form. It lets your prospects reach out to you to ask any questions. The email capture functionality is on the board.

When it comes to content sharing, Sumo offers the following three tools:

  • Social Share — a set of built-in social media buttons for store pages and articles;
  • Image Sharer — a set of built-in social media buttons for images;
  • Highlighter — a set of built-in social media buttons for highlighted text areas.

To provide in-depth insights into your business, Sumo introduces Google Analytics integration. The corresponding plugin lets you view and organize your Google Analytics data in the Sumo dashboard. Besides, it offers a Content Analytics tool that shows where your readers stop reading your blog posts. As for Heat Maps, they work exactly the same as the corresponding feature of Hotjar, highlighting page spots where people click the most.

Last but not least, Sumo offers a Live Chat. Of course, it is not a robust chatbot but is still a good solution for websites that lack this communication channel.

Although you can use Sumo for free, there is a Pro plan. It costs $39 per month.

Google Analytics

Good old Google Analytics is always important despite all trends. It is the most affordable web analytics service that tracks and reports website traffic. You can use it to monitor your sites and apps, get the most in-depth insights into how users find and use your e-commerce store, and measure your advertising ROI for free.

Google Analytics provides the ability to sort visitors according to dozens of parameters: device, browser, country, etc. You can easily find out what pages are most visited, what forms are submitted, and what content disaffects your prospects. The tool lets you track any advertising, social, PR campaign on any platform. Add a tracking code to the pages of your e-commerce store to enable these features.

As you can see, Google Analytics helps you make well-informed decisions that are always based on in-depth insights divided into the following three categories (ABC):

  • Acquisition — reports that illustrate how your traffic arrives at your website;
  • Behavior — reports that show what visitors are doing on your website, revealing the performance of your content;
  • Conversions — reports that display how people convert on your website.

Besides, Google Analytics provides a better understanding of your store visitors with Audience and Real-Time traffic.

Google Analytics traffic channel

When it comes to e-commerce websites, Google Analytics provides the ability to process purchase and transaction data. The corresponding reports allow analyzing purchase activity on your store, including product information, transaction data, average order value, time to purchase, e-commerce conversion rate, and so on. Also, note that e-commerce metrics are available in many standard reports on an appropriate tab.

You can enable the e-commerce functionality of Google Analytics by adding code to your website or app. That’s it. No charges, fees, or pricing plans are associated with the service.

Final Words

These are e-commerce services and tools the Fireber’s clients use most frequently. Of course, you don’t need to integrate your digital storefront with all of them simultaneously. The necessity to connect a specific solution should be based on particular business needs. However, all of them can make your e-commerce store better not only from the perspective of the latest trends but also the expectations of your prospects and the requirements of search engines.

As for the e-commerce trends 2020, we still have something to add, since not all of them were covered by the services above.

PWA & Headless E-Commerce

Although PWAs are among top trends, we didn’t mention any platforms that let you create a headless website. Rather than being a mainstream trend, it is a sturdy vector that will reshape the entire industry within the next few years. The majority of e-commerce merchants still stay away from PWAs, but we firmly believe that the headless approach will soon make the entire industry better. However, it is a topic of another vast blog post, but you can already read several articles in our blog that shed light on various PWA solutions for Magento and other systems:

AR

Artificial reality is not a mainstream trend if for no other reason than the lack of AR devices in everyone’s home. For most people, it is just a way of entertainment, so an average prospect doesn’t consider it seriously. However, the perspectives of artificial and augmented reality for e-commerce are tremendous. You can read these materials for further information:

Flexible Payment Options

Feel free to visit a marketplace of extensions suitable for your e-commerce platform and add as many payment options as your customers require. You may need to conduct a survey to understand which solutions your website currently lacks.

Sustainable E-Commerce

Sustainability and e-commerce can be efficiently combined. Although not every merchant understands the necessity to sacrifice the conventional way of things to make their business more environmentally-friendly, more and more people are aware of the trend and its long-term importance expressed in a positive impact on the environment. Things are gradually shifting, and you can already prepare your digital storefront. You will find the topic described in these articles:

B2C-Like B2B Experiences

E-commerce platforms start to revamp their native B2B solutions by adding B2C experiences. However, it is possible to accelerate this process by using third-party extensions and plugins that already add the missing features or provide more reliable alternatives to the default ones. Visit your marketplace to get the necessary improvements:

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Firebear Studio

We make Magento integrations and import easier for you. Blogging about Magento ecosystem & e-commerce https://firebearstudio.com/