For US Merchants Guide for Choosing the Right E-Commerce Platform for Your Business
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Platform guide. For US merchants Guide for choosing the right e-commerce platform for your business. Should your online store run on Shopify? Or on WooCommerce? Or Magento? Or a platform specially adapted to your country or market? The answer is… it depends. This guide highlights the things you need to consider before making this major decision for your business. If you make the right decision, you’ll add more revenue, attract more customers, get more repeat business (retention) and become more cost- effective. But when your platform isn’t the right fit, all these things can suffer. Maybe you are totally new to the business, maybe you are a seasoned retailer but new to selling online, or maybe you have outgrown your current e-commerce solution. Whatever your situation, taking the next step and choosing a platform can feel overwhelming. There are many aspects to weigh up: how quickly it can be set up, ease of use, reliability, costs (including apps/ extensions), conversion capabilities, integrations with existing and future systems, products management, tax management, access to support… and we’re just getting started. Unless you have looked at the bigger picture and identified a few guiding principles for your decision, you’ll be going in blind as you try to create the best environment for your business to succeed. This guide will help you move forward with clarity. 2 Your first criterion. Choose a Klarna-integrated platform Pay in 30 days (…and here’s why) comes integrated with all of the platforms listed further down in this guide. This Klarna- enabled payment option gives consumers the To be a winner in online business in 2019 and beyond, it’s critical convenient benefit of postponing payment to offer a smoooth shopping experience, including modern, until after they receive their order. All credit consumer-friendly payment alternatives. That’s what you get and fraud risk is on us, so you don’t need to when you use Klarna. worry about not getting paid. Our merchants are experiencing impressive conversion Pay later in installments improvements after taking full advantage of all the payment benefits. Big jumps in conversion, from 35-40 percent up to 60 is already integrated with these platforms, percent, are not uncommon. too. Giving your customers the option to slice (www.klarna.com/us/business/case-studies/) their payments into affordable parts boosts conversion and increases order value. For the Retention is improved as well, and many merchants see their UK market Klarna provide the option of “Pay average order value increasing. (Read more about exactly how in 3”, in the US “Pay in 4” where payments are expensive cart abandonment is for your business – because it’s split into 3 and 4 installments. way more hurtful to business than you may think – in the article The true cost of cart abandonment. (www.klarna.com/knowledge/articles/true-cost-cart- Financing abandonment/) give your customers the flexible option to buy now and spread the cost with monthly payments. You can create instant shopping buttons, for a much quicker checkout. These can be used offsite too, so that your store can take orders directly via influencers’ YouTube-channels, blogs or Instagram. And there’s more.... New Klarna-enhancing features are being added all the time. For example, Shopify added Klarna’s effective onsite product messaging in 2019, and more platforms are in the process of including it. (With onsite messaging you can display preferred payment and shipping options dynamically in your shop, customised down to individual products, making your customers more likely to buy from you). Bottom line: If you choose a Klarna integrated platform, your customers and stakeholders will thank you for it. 3 The next thing to consider. How much time and resources are you ready to put in for setting up and maintaining your online store? There are a few different routes to take when choosing a platform. The easiest and quickest one: Look no further than Shopify, Etsy, or a freestanding out-of-the-box solution in your country that doesn’t require the time-consuming involve- ment of developers. Just follow the tutorials and setup processes these platforms provide, and you are ready to go. You can launch a store within a couple of days. If you don’t mind some tech development efforts, in return for being able to customise your store exactly the way you want, you can choose an open source platform like WooCommerce, which can be installed on a WordPress site. This usually requires at least a few weeks to set up. If you are on your way to becoming a big enterprise e-commerce business, you may look at a full-scale solution like Magento. It runs on your own server and is able to do pretty much anything you want. Just be aware this kind of solution requires the investment of ongoing IT resources plus training on how to use the platform. 4 Examples of Klarna-integrated If you use an open source platform like WooCommerce, the platform itself is free to use, and there’s a huge SaaS platforms community of coders, merchants and tech developers that help each other with bug fixing, maximizing con- SaaS (software as a service) platforms are website version, and how to integrate with third-party vendors, builders you subscribe to. They make it quick and among other things. easy to go live with an online store. Just sign up for an account, then once you have picked a storefront theme, done your settings, uploaded your products, images and descriptions, and set prices – and maybe added a few applications to customise your store (within the given constraints; there are limits to how much you can make the store “yours”) – you can begin selling. You don’t woocommerce.com need to worry about maintaining the platform itself. And The most popular e-commerce platform on the web, you get the support you need. You pay a fee for the according to Builtwith (LINK: https://trends.builtwith. service, and usually a percentage of each transaction com/shop), having 27.7 percent market share. Runs on on top of that. WordPress. www.shopify.com www.opencart.com Perhaps the quickest and easiest way to get an online A lightweight, easy-to-learn platform that runs on store up and running. MySQL databases hosted locally. www.etsy.com www.prestashop.com/en An online store solution for people who craft their own Another open source solution used worldwide that runs home-made products. on MySQL databases hosted locally. www.bigcommerce.com www.magento.com One of the most feature-rich subscription platforms, A commerce solution that is highly flexible, and can which means a slightly steeper learning curve. scale beyond tens of thousands of products. Local stores For a complete list of Klarna-integrated platform Out-of-the-box solutions for local markets, for example partners in the US, go here: www.klarna.com/us/ Mystore (www.mystore.no) in Norway, Wikinggruppen business/platforms-and-plugins (wikinggruppen.se/e-handel/) in Sweden, and CCV Shop Other countries, in case you are operating on other (www.ccvshop.nl/) in the Netherlands and Belgium. markets as well: 1. Go to www.klarna.com/international/ Examples of Klarna-integrated 2. Choose your country, and go to the footnote section plug-in platforms at the bottom of the page to find the right link. Plug-in platforms are the customisable solutions that require a higher level of tech development effort to get everything to work. Unless you have the tech skills un- der your own roof, you need consultative services – in- cluding system integrators – to set up your online store. 5 Next. Ask yourself how important different features are for your success and growth. Before making the decision about what platform suits your business the best, you need to do your due diligence. Evaluate a few different platforms, keeping in mind the industry you are in, what your vision is for your e-com- merce journey, where you are in terms of business evolution, and so on. But what should you look for? Some features will play a valuable role in growing your business, while oth- ers are simply a distraction. To avoid getting caught up with unnecessary bells and whistles, you need to ask yourself which features are “critical”, which are “highly desirable”, which are just “nice to have”, and which are altogether irrelevant. Below we have included a list you can use to evaluate different features. It’s not a complete list of all the features you can find on the platform mar- ket, but it should make you aware of the kinds of things to consider. 1. 2. 3. Before looking at our list below, take Print the list below and mark each Once you know your “critical”, “de- a piece of paper (or create a new point’s importance with these let- sirable” and “nice-to-have” features, document in the cloud if you want ters: you are ready to check out different to get fancy) and write a list of all C = Critical solutions. the critical, must-have features you D = Desirable Note: Some features and functionality are can think of off the top of your head N = Nice to have built in as standard in certain platforms, while many others can be put in place for your store, considering what you I = Irrelevant sell, who your customers are, local thanks to extensions/apps. (Just beware of requirements, and so on. This helps Tip: If you want to get more insights before the costs, if that’s a concern at this point making a decision, discuss the list below of your business development.