E-commerce has become an integral component aspect of every business today. Why? Because nearly 2.14 billion people purchase goods online globally, leading to $4.891 trillion in global e-commerce sales. This means businesses that aren’t selling their products (or services) online are at great risk of subsidising.
With the increase in e-commerce popularity, there’s fierce competition out there. Hence, businesses need to make their e-commerce websites feature-rich to stand out and acquire more customers. Further, setting up an e-commerce website, managing it, and tracking sales can be tough and take a lot of work.
Luckily, with a content management system, it’s all easily possible!
CMS for e-commerce is a life savour for businesses that do not have the technical hands-on experience to manage their online shopping websites. Further, a good content management system has many features to enhance the shopping experience on an e-commerce platform.
E-Commerce CMS platforms allow e-store owners to create, edit and publish web content without writing code. Additionally, they can incorporate features like payment gateway and inventory management into their traditional online store.
So, you might think that what are the advantages of using CMS for e-commerce website? Here are some advantages by the best web development company Melbourne:
Advantages Of CMS For E-Commerce Websites
Integrating CMS with e-commerce websites offers several benefits. It can make a traditional e-commerce website a feature-rich solution offering a smooth customer experience. Here are some benefits of integrating e-commerce with CMS platforms.
Seamless User Experience Throughout The Website
A CMS adds more flexibility and dynamics for building landing pages and working with content. With CMS, you can experiment more with site structure, content types, and design templates. This helps you customise and optimise every aspect of your online customer journey. This further enables you to deliver a seamless and improved user experience across your e-commerce websites and apps.
Incorporate Content Marketing To The Shopping Experience
Adding content marketing to your e-commerce stores can help you comprehend how your users interact with your site, its products and content. You can leverage this information to drive more conversions and sales while improving your offerings.
Users who read blogs about specific products are directed automatically to their purchase pages. Hence, integrating content with e-commerce allows smarter and faster marketing, driving more sales.
Integrate Mobile Shoppers Into The User Experience
When websites utilise various platforms to manage digital channels, they tend to overlook the mobile user experience. This can result in lost commerce conversions on mobile devices. To prevent this, integrating content and commerce into a single site that is optimised for mobile can help. This will offer a consistent user experience across all devices and screen sizes. Additionally, this approach can simplify website maintenance and workflow tasks while boosting conversion rates.
Things To Consider When Selecting A CMS For E-Commerce Website
With the market swamped with numerous CMS for e-commerce, it’s difficult to choose the right one for your specific needs. But no worries! Here are certain crucial considerations which can help you make a wise decision.
Popularity
It’s true that mass appeal doesn’t always guarantee quality. However, it is definitely worth considering when too many people put their trust and money into a specific product. Hence, look for a CMS with the most user base and positive reviews. For instance, WooCommerce powers nearly 660 549 businesses, with the largest market share of 23.75%.
Interface And Usability
Look for a CMS that has an intuitive interface and facilitates easy management. The entire process, starting from registration, progressing through deployment, website development, and continuing with post-launch management, should be seamless or devoid of any avoidable obstacles. Further, the interface should be easily navigable and implement the needed updates and changes.
Payment and Pricing
Choose a CMS that offers varied pricing and payment plans according to the needs of all types of businesses. Know about the licensing fees, fixed charges, up-front expenses, extra infrastructure required to set up the website, and similar parameters when choosing a CMS. Do not forget to check if the terms and conditions related to payment suit your needs or not.
Ability To Customise
Regardless of what a platform offers by default, you may need additional features or functionalities for your site. As such, find a highly customisable CMS, allowing smooth integration of plugins and APIs. WordPress is one such CMS that offers immense customisation and endless options for integrating themes and plugins.
Security
As an e-commerce store owner, you would want to deliver your customers a smooth and secure shopping experience. They should feel safe when purchasing on your site, whether making payments or sharing personal information.
As such, you should look for a CMS that abides by global security standards and fulfils your security needs. It should also allow you to add security layers using third-party tools and services.
Besides, other considerations include core functionalities, SEO friendliness, scalability, customer service, and mobile responsiveness. Consider all these things when selecting an ideal CMS for your e-commerce site.
5 Best CMS For E-Commerce
Here are the top 5 CMS for e-commerce websites you could think about:
WooCommerce
It is a flexible, open-source CMS platform offering numerous features and capabilities to online stores. This WordPress-based platform offers extensions, such as 1-click selling and PayPal integration. E-commerce stores can easily customise themselves using WooCommerce because of its ease and convenience. Because of its offerings and capabilities, WooCommerce became the World’s leading e-commerce platform in 2021.
BigCommerce
A SaaS-based e-commerce platform, BigCommerce helps online business owners start, run, and maintain their websites. Many big brands like Skullcandy, Toyota, and Burrow use it as a CMS. Its highly-flexible and powerful editor is the key reason behind its popularity among high-profile brands. You can benefit from their customisable templates and can edit all its CSS and HTML code.
Shopify
One of the most popularly used e-commerce platforms today, Shopify, is used by more than one million eCommerce stores across 175 countries. But why is it so popular? Because Shopify is a high-quality eCommerce platform suitable for businesses of all sizes. It boasts varied features for payments, marketing, sales, customer engagement, etc.
As such, vendors using Shopify can manage their stores without the need for additional software. Further, eCommerce stores can use Shopify mobile application to manage their shop from anywhere.
Magento
With over 267,000 Magento stores active currently, it is another giant in the e-commerce CMS market. With Magento, you get an array of customisation options for small e-stores and large businesses. It also offers excellent performance and a number of third-party integrations.
In addition to the standard CMS functionality, Magento also provides merchants tools for marketing, catalogue management, and SEO.
Umbraco
Umbraco, an open-source Content Management System, powers nearly half a million websites. It’s versatility and excellent editing experience have garnered immense popularity among its users.
While Umbraco does not offer e-commerce functionality out-of-the-box, it has open APIs and open-source code. As such, you can use Umbraco for your e-commerce store in various ways, including:
- Using Umbraco Packages for their prebuilt functionality.
- Choosing a popular third-party extension available in Umbraco Marketplace.
- Tailor your setup to meet your specific requirements by constructing and seamlessly incorporating your own solution using Umbraco APIs.
Some other good CMS for E-Commerce include Wix, PrestaShop, SiteCore, Joomla, Drupal, and OpenCart.
The Takeaway
So, coming back to: Do you need a CMS for your e-commerce site? Well, not every e-commerce store needs a content management system. To find out whether or not your e-store needs a CMS to analyse your content strategy.
E-Commerce websites producing new content regularly, either as product page updates or blogs, would benefit most from the CMS flexibility. But if your store does not need consistent, real-time content updates, you certainly don’t need to build your site using a CMS.
If you are among the second set requiring a CMS for e-commerce site, make a wise choice by weighing all the plus and minus of each of your options.
