5 SAAS Platforms Critical To My E-Commerce Tech Stack
Life is all about perspective.
I often hear from people how amazing our websites — both industrywest.com and infavorof.com — look.
From the homepages to the product detail pages, people always rave about the look and feel of our site. But those internally, closest to it, often will pick every nit because they stare at both sites for 12 hours a day if not more.
Similarly, I am also told how mature our tech stack is and how we’re doing things most companies aren’t in terms of our e-commerce backend. Yet I, who deals with the back end of the site for hours upon hours every day, feels like it’s being held together with duct tape and crazy glue.
But of course it’s not. Our sites run off a robust platform optimized by some great SAAS partners. Which got me thinking, which SAAS couldn’t I live without today?
Well here are my answers …
- DRIFT
Drift is a great chat partner for us and one we’ve used for a couple of years now. What you’ll see is a common thread throughout all of these is that while Drift is a tool that we use every day and is leading to measurable revenue lift for us, we’re really only touching the tip of the iceberg in terms of its potential. We’ve used a couple of different chat platforms over the years and have found Drift’s UI to be the best, and as we look to launch a new CRM (we’re moving to Salesforce, not sure if you’ve heard of them) we’re excited about being able to track additional metrics in terms of how chats lead to online and offline revenue. - KLEVU
Klevu has been an amazing on-site search partner for the past two years. Prior to launching Klevu our on-site search simply didn’t work. Klevu for starters WORKS! Search ‘sofas’ and you actually are shown sofas. It’s also highly customizable in terms of the front end, which was important to us. All this before even getting into the personalization aspect, which again we underutilize. But again, the beginning and end for me with on-site search is does it work? Can people find what they’re looking for? And with Klevu the answer is definitely yes. - NOSTO
Full disclosure I’m a bit of a Nosto fanboy and have been part of a number of their articles and case studies. At the most basic level Nosto powers our on-site recommendations that can be found on the homepage, PLPs, PDPs and a number of other areas. Nosto also powers our modals and offers on-site personalization and A/B testing. We really have only touched the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Nosto, but I can’t wait to see what else we can accomplish with them. Oh and one of my favorite things about Nosto is its real-time analytics dashboard showing customers, carts, products and potential revenue. - ShipperHQ
ShipperHQ is one of the most robust shipping calculation platforms in the game. It connects to a number of small package and LTL shipping carriers and really does whatever you need to make calculating shipping rates as easy as possible. We are certainly not taking advantage of everything ShipperHQ offers but despite that it has made our lives so much easier and helped us avoid the previous losses in shipping costs we’ve experienced. Additionally, Karen Baker (the company’s founder) is an absolute rock star and has been doing amazing things to help businesses during the COVID-19 crisis. - YOTPO
Finally there’s Yotpo. It took us way longer than it should have to start collecting reviews, but once we did we definitely landed on the right partner in Yotpo. The UI is extremely easy to use and the support team is very responsive. In addition to powering our reviews, we use Yotpo to curate our user-generated photo galleries on our homepage and PDPs. (Oh and did I mention their new office space in NYC has a bunch of Industry West furniture?)
The common thread with all five of these partners is that over the years they’ve earned my trust and I indeed consider them a partner, which is a huge component of success for both parties.
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