Whenever the topic of eCommerce software is raised, the first tools that come to mind include Shopify, Salesforce, PrestaShop, Magento, etc. No wonder – they pioneered the industry and served millions of merchants worldwide.
With drag-and-drop functionalities and lots of ready-made templates, everyone got an opportunity to set up an online store in minutes, without having to write a single line of code.
But are Shopify and the likes the only eCommerce solutions out there?
The truth is the choice of eCommerce software on the market is much wider than a bunch of heavily promoted platforms. At the moment, popular software directories have hundreds of eCommerce solutions on the list, e.g. Software Advice – 715, GetApp – 783, Capterra – a whopping 1.3K! And imagine how many companies haven’t added their products there yet… No wonder many less-known tools just vanish in such a big crowd.
Did you know that there’s eCommerce software tailor-made for a specific niche like clothing, food, or hospitality? It means you’ll get access to basically all the necessary features for that niche, without having to plunge deep into endless customizations or pay for extra functionalities. Other tools aren’t focused on any industries but can personalize product recommendations, streamline product discovery, prevent fraud, ease post-purchase experiences, and come in handy for many other needs in eCommerce.
In this article, we’ll share a hand-picked selection of eCommerce solutions to try in 2024. While they’re overshadowed by giants, it doesn’t make them less efficient in terms of functionality, and just as importantly, pricing policy.
Commerce Vision
CV ecommerce is a fully configurable eCommerce platform built specifically for the complexities of B2B businesses and has a deep integration to all leading ERPs. It comes with all the must-have eCommerce features, allowing you to set discounts, stock restrictions, quoting options, and much more. You can configure them all your way or disable, whenever you don’t need them, to enjoy a distraction-free eCommerce environment.
The platform ensures customer journey personalization throughout all stages. From offering branded ordering portals to generating custom product catalogs, you can address unique needs and challenges of each customer. Their intuitive CMS with drag-and-drop functionalities makes website management easy even for non-tech savvy users, even if they have multi-site businesses.
Lucy can help your sales team with 24/7 purchase order automation, which will reduce the number of errors and the amount of time that manual processing usually takes. You will be able to send purchase orders directly from your email inbox to your ERP. Powered by AI technology.
Opmetrix is a field sales tool that gives an opportunity to manage all sales processes and customer communications in one place, gaining valuable insights into your business performance. Your team will have instant access to the sales history, notes, and all the other information required to service customers up to the mark. You can also integrate Opmetrix into your accounting system to automate invoicing and data population, which will save you a lot of time.
EcoReturns by Saara
EcoReturns by Saara is an AI-powered returns software that helps eСommerce brands reduce and automate returns. It’s designed for web stores running on popular platforms like Shopify, WooCommerce, and Magento. With its help, e-commerce brands can reduce the cost related to returns and save 80% on operational costs by automating their returns and exchanges process.
Fraudulent activities aren’t uncommon when it comes to product returns. Some customers return counterfeit items instead of original products, while others create fake accounts and mention non-existent contact details. Protecting eCommerce businesses from scammers is what EcoReturns is strong at. Their AI fraud detection system identifies all suspicious return requests, suggesting possible reasons and actions to take to prevent scamming.
To help you save on returns-associated costs, this software utilizes an AI-driven incentive engine. With this technology, you can incentivise customers to exchange unsuitable items rather than return them and make you pay a refund.
The ChatGPT-powered widget can bring personalization of customer support to a higher level. The bot will handle customers’ queries with empathy, building a positive attitude towards your business, just like human agents do. Not only can it set you free from disappointed buyers but can also reportedly cut returns by 30%. If the idea of getting people to return to your brand instead of returning your products appeals to you, EcoReturns is definitely worth a try.
ReturnGO
ReturnGO helps improve post-purchase experiences, making it easy to manage sustainable returns, exchanges, and order tracking for both store owners and customers. If you want to reduce operational costs and grow profits through repeat sales, this eCommerce solution is worth a try.
To retain customers, ReturnGO lets you integrate a self-service return portal right into your store, allowing buyers to easily initiate returns and exchanges themselves. Enterprise-grade automation gives an opportunity to speed things up, set your support team free from extra workload, and save you money.
No matter how complicated your return policy may be, the platform is flexible to adapt to any complexities. There’s a wide choice of eligibility conditions to set up for product returns, including specific customer segments, their purchasing history, locations, product categories, return windows, and much more. The system is smart enough to figure out if an item is eligible for a refund, exchange, or store credit and can handle these processes automatically, without human intervention.
Refunds affect the bottom lines of eCommerce businesses dramatically – this is where ReturnGO can step in and retain as much of your revenue as possible. With its help, you can offer customers refund alternatives such as product exchanges, bonus credit, and gift cards to incentivize them to keep products.
The platform also has an AI-driven analytics dashboard, which gives actionable insights into return trends, outliers, and patterns. It will come in handy for planning your sales strategy. By understanding why customers return products, you can take necessary actions to optimize your inventory strategy and improve buyer experiences over time.
Prime AI
Prime AI is an innovative eCommerce software designed for fashion retailers of all sizes, from small boutiques to large-scale platforms. Taking a highly individual approach, the company adapts their proprietary technology to each client’s specific needs and budget. Their size-fitting and visual search tools are fully customisable to match a brand’s unique specifications and data requirements, delivering a personalized shopping experience that improves consumer confidence.
Prime AI’s Clothing Size Finder is a predictive AI tool that provides personalized fit recommendations based on a customer’s unique body shape and type. With its help, you can ensure that your customers get clothes that fit as preferred and get done with the age-old problem of returns and missed sales opportunities due to out-of-stock and unfittable items. If an item is out-of-stock, the tool will instantly suggest visually similar alternatives that are in stock and match the customer’s fit profile. Instead of missed sales, your KPIs will grow – you could reduce returns by 24%, improve conversions by reportedly 10% and average order value by 15%.
Buying shoes online can be tricky, as sizing varies between brands. Many people have a frustrating experience when they order shoes in their normal size only to find out they didn’t fit at all. Prime AI has a groundbreaking solution to cope with this problem. Their Shoe Size Finder lets customers find their appropriate shoe size with a single photo of their foot. They don’t even need to download an app – everything happens directly in their browser. Due to such simplicity, the whole process takes a few moments while maintaining accuracy and convenience.
Unless you’re a fashionista, you can’t always pick the right words to go into all the nitty-gritty details to describe your preferred clothing item. This is especially true for international buyers, non-native speakers whose vocabulary may be limited. Prime AI’s Visual Search lets global customers overcome any linguistic barriers. All they need to do is upload an image, and the tool will suggest visually similar clothes, eliminating the need for text-based searches. Not only can it enhance the shopping experience but also the findability of your products across the entire catalog rather than top sellers only.
Prime AI tools can reduce returns by reportedly up to 29% and therefore carbon footprint, which will have a positive impact on the environment besides your bottom line.
SyncSpider
SyncSpider is an innovative eCommerce software solution designed to streamline and automate the integration of various online sales channels. As businesses look to enhance their multichannel retail strategies in 2024, SyncSpider stands out by offering seamless connectivity between different eCommerce platforms, marketplaces, and inventory systems.
One of the key advantages of SyncSpider is its ability to serve as a single source of truth for inventory management, ensuring that stock levels are consistently updated across all channels without manual intervention. This feature not only reduces the risk of overselling but also simplifies inventory control for retailers. Additionally, SyncSpider allows businesses to expand their offline sales to online marketplaces effortlessly, broadening their market reach.
Unlike many competitors, SyncSpider focuses on ease of use and flexibility, enabling users to customize their workflows according to specific business needs. Its robust automation capabilities help save time and reduce errors, making it an essential tool for eCommerce businesses aiming to optimize their operations and drive sales growth in an increasingly competitive landscape.
SyncSpider distinguishes itself from competitors in the eCommerce software landscape through its robust integration capabilities and user-friendly automation features. Unlike many other platforms, SyncSpider offers seamless connectivity with a wide range of eCommerce solutions, including Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento, and Amazon Seller Central, enabling businesses to synchronize inventory and orders effortlessly across multiple channels.
MOBI
MOBI is a powerful eCommerce software tailor-made specifically for businesses in the restaurant & hospitality industry. From large franchises and quick service restaurants (QSRs) to casual dining, pubs, and hotels to ghost kitchens and entertainment venues, the platform supports all the major restaurant types of today, supplying them with full sets of must-have digital ordering functionalities.
With MOBI, you can get a branded storefront across all channels your business is present on – web, mobile, and app. Thanks to a single sign-on and one-click payment, your customers will have a comfortable ordering experience, while new visitors will enjoy hassle-free checkouts requiring no login. Natural language search, vertical menu navigation, dietary tags and filters can all add to the usability of your store, which will bring cart abandonment rates to a minimum.
Artificial intelligence has been making progress like never before, and MOBI doesn’t lag behind the trend, empowering storefronts with AI technologies to increase sales by reportedly 10%. The system can generate personalized product recommendations for each customer, based on their ordering preferences. The cool thing is that the AI engine is self-learning – the more sales you make, the smarter it becomes, and so do your product recommendations.
Besides visual appeal and personalized shopping experiences, MOBI storefronts are backed with an analytics dashboard, which will transform all the information about your restaurant into actionable insights. You’ll be able to analyze key performance indicators, trends in customer behavior, weak spots in the buyer journey, and everything else you’ll need to make data-driven decisions for your marketing campaigns.
Afosto
Afosto is a SaaS platform designed to help ambitious retailers scale their businesses by streamlining eCommerce operations. Their major areas of strength include a headless commerce system and an advanced suite of tools for managing orders, customer relations, and product information.
With multi-channel integration and real-time inventory management, you can manage all your sales channels from one place. Whether your products are available on large marketplaces like Amazon or smaller B2B/B2C stores, all the dots get connected in this centralized system. Automated processes for invoice generation and VAT verification simplify order management dramatically. Due to the support of all global currencies, you can target international audiences, creating extensive price lists in basically any currency.
Afosto’s innovative functionalities for inventory management will help you enhance your warehouse efficiency and team’s productivity. Their user-friendly purchasing and receiving function can put an end to the mess across your premises. No item will go out of sight, as you register purchase orders and put them in the right place. Whenever you need to find products, automated pick lists and smart walking routes will lead you in the right direction. Cross-docking functionality can minimize storage times and speed up product delivery to customers. Afosto’s app supports all types of barcodes and handheld scanners to make sure no barriers stand in your way when registering new items.
The team behind Afosto prides themselves on delivering customizable solutions that support international operations and are built to handle complex product catalogs in an uncomplicated way. They allow integrations with popular webshop platforms (Shopify, Woocommerce, Lightspeed) and have connections with different shipping providers and bookkeeping services to get shipping labels and send invoices to.
SKULabs
SKULabs is a full-featured eCommerce software to sync orders from your online stores, marketplaces like Amazon or Etsy, and even brick-and-mortar sites all in one place that’s well organized and easy to manage. From there, you’ll be able to track multi-channel inventory counts in real time, get prompt alerts about low stocks, and review sales analytics.
This cloud-based platform can simplify order management with item summaries. The feature gives detailed information about open orders and the items to be fulfilled to make sure you don’t miss a thing. Handling loads of orders can go easy if you set colorful tags that will highlight different fulfillment statuses. Whenever an item is out of stock or held for tomorrow, it will catch your eye immediately among the other orders.
Inventory flows never stand still even for small retailers. With regular submissions of purchase orders and shipments, stock levels are constantly fluctuating. SKULabs gives a quick view of what’s coming and what’s leaving so that you could have a timely picture of all your goods and plan for future supplies accordingly.
SKULabs also provides deep insights into all your eCommerce operations, allowing you to break them down by store, user, item, and other categories. You’ll find it easy to compare anything from shipment costs and sales figures to something more granular like performance of each member on your team. Tracking their average order speed and accuracy, you’ll quickly detect weak links in your employee chain.
Bottom Line
There’s definitely no shortage of eCommerce software to streamline your business operations. Whether you want to sort out the chaos of inventory management or facilitate order processing, these tools can turn your eCommerce environment into a true zone of comfort. Besides usability, they give an opportunity to personalize customer experiences, increase their satisfaction, and reduce refunds, which will all have a positive impact on your revenue.
Note that functionalities of these eCommerce solutions are not limited to what’s been reviewed in this blog post. We covered the main features only to give you the idea of what purposes they serve. But the truth is there’s a much wider range of useful features on board. If you got interested, you can sign up for a free trial or order a demo to find out what else each software has to offer.
