Website Infrastructure Tools

Website Infrastructure Tools to set you up for Success online

Starting and growing an online business is so much more than just setting up a website and running ads. Once you’ve made that investment, it's important to ensure that your barracks are well-equipped to tackle everything that’s thrown at you. This means that you need to increase your ease of doing business to the extent that you can do more by doing less. We’ve listed a few across each segment to help you along your journey!

Supply

You can only sell if you have a product! It's important that you have supply figured out so that you can keep bringing in products just as fast as you get orders.

Sourcing & Procurement

This is the most crucial part - the cost at which you’re sourcing products determines how you’ll make your money and how much you should spend making it. There are several tools that drop shippers (a form of retail business wherein the seller accepts customer orders without keeping stock on hand) to keep costs low.

Click here to learn about them!

Packaging

Once you’ve sourced your products, it's important to have packaging that sums up what your brand is about.

💡 Teal Tip: The way customers (especially new ones) receive your products determines whether they’ll reorder, or recommend you to a friend or not!

The tools listed here will help you create great packaging!

Website Infrastructure

Part of your supply section is the place where you display your products: your website! Even before you have an e-commerce site, there are domains, SSL certificates, and more that you need to purchase. Our website cheat sheet (sans developer assistance) is listed below:

Domain Hosting

To have your own website, you need a domain. While WordPress and so many other sites offer free subdomains (https://yournamehere.wordpress.com), to show credibility you need to have your own domain (https://yournamehere.com). For this, you need to own or rent a domain that is hosted on a server.
The tools that are listed here are recommended places that safely house the domains of most businesses across the globe. You can trust them with your website!

Site Builder

Once you’ve bought a domain, the next step is to build a website. There are several tools that you can take advantage of to build websites without the need for a developer. We’ve listed the best ones here.

GDPR Compliance

As data privacy and data security are becoming increasingly relevant, once you’ve built your website you need to ensure that it protects the personal information of everyone on it. You need to ensure that you’re General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) compliant to sell. We’ve listed a few tools here to help you remain compliant.

Email Outreach

After bringing traffic to your website, it's important to capture their intent in some way or the other. While getting a large fraction of people who visit your website to buy your products is difficult (however, ideal), you need to have something lower in commitment to allow you to reach them more often.

💡Teal Tip: Email sign-ups are the best way to reach cold audiences who haven’t bought your products. They’re also a great tool to keep people who’ve bought your products engaged. Listed here are some of the best tools for email outreach.

Marketing

Even before you start running ads for your business, you need to ensure that your website is ready. This is done by making sure your paid media campaigns are allowing people to visit your website, capture their data, map their interactions and relay all that information to you for analysis.

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These are ways that you can help build your online infrastructure (website, social media, etc) to grow your sales.

Tracking

A crucial factor of media buying that is often overlooked is tracking infrastructure. Now, tracking does not simply mean setting up events for purchases. You need to set your website up like a minefield - each move that someone makes on your website needs to send back data to your ads manager. Once your website has been set up to capture data from the entire customer interaction, you can start looking at that data to see how you can improve the experience and potentially get more purchases.

Follow this checklist to make sure you’re ready to convert people who visit your site.

You can also learn more about Marketing attribution in our blog here.

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Heatmap Analytics

These tools record actual sessions that take place as a result of people visiting your website. This covers how they land on your website, what pages they visit, how they interact with the website, where they click, and a whole lot more. This information is crucial to helping you understand where you need to optimize your website and customer journey.

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‍Chatbot

Website chatbots use live chats, automated flows, and more to allow you to interact with customers on what appears as a one-to-one basis. Additionally, certain tools allow you to capture information about customers so that you can eventually retarget them. The best of the lot are listed here.

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Offline

These are strategies that you should consider or be aware of before creating a website and offers. While a lot of the journey takes place on the website, so much takes place offline.

Phone: This is when you get brands to call up their potential customers or their previous customers who have made a purchase with them to make them aware of their product

WhatsApp: It is the type of messaging that brands do to send their customers by using the social media platform WhatsApp.

Email: These are usually promotional offers and newsletters that brands send to your email address.

SMS: These are short text messages that brands send to their customers mostly with a link or a code that urges them to buy the products.

Online Purchase Journey

While you can do everything in your power to create great ads, if your website isn’t equally (if not more) great, you won't make any money.

💡 Teal Tip: You need to streamline your online purchase journey for new customers so that you have a funnel that converts traffic consistently.

Website

On the website front, you need to ensure that your offer is communicated effectively every single time. Offer distribution and communication strategies are detailed below. Another objective of this section is to give you enough data and ways to test different hypotheses to further your marketing goals.

Discovery

This section will help you optimize your website in such a way that anyone who visits your website can easily find products, read reviews, gather social proof, be aware of the offer, and more. For a business owner, we’ve listed some tools that empower you with data to help you in your ad campaigns.

There are multiple Discovery tools available and below are our recommendations.‍

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Add to Cart

It's important to optimize your add-to-cart journey to address all users’ pain points and frustrations.

💡 Teal Tip: Offering payment financing and subscription to products are some easy ways to optimize your conversion rates.

Below are our recommendations for Add to Cart Tools

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Initiate Checkout

When someone has checked a product out, you need to ensure that you’re maximizing the value you generate from these people. Upselling, cross-selling products, and more are a must. Some of the best tools to help you with this are listed here.

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‍Purchase

Finally, once someone has made it all the way, you need to ensure that the payment process is easy. Some standard payment processes are listed here.

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‍Post-Purchase

You should not stop reaching out to users after you’ve sold them your products. You can remarket them to buy more products, share amazing discounts with friends, and more! Ideas to increase your effective reach and customer lifetime value are below.

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Warehousing & Shipping

Selling your products is a small segment of the purchase process; people who’ve bought your products still need to receive them. Some tools to help you with this journey are listed below.

Inventory Management

After sourcing a product, it's important to know just how much you have. This is where inventory management comes in. Listed here are some of the best tools for inventory management

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Logistics

These tools help you ship products to your customers easily. You don't have to worry about tracking, visibility, and a whole bunch of things.

💡 Teal Tip: Some of these tools have lower costs the more you ship. So it's a win-win-win - you’re happy because of cheaper rates, these businesses are getting your business, and most importantly: you have happy customers!

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Customer Feedback & Community Management

We believe that at the end of the day, your customers need to be happy. That’s the only way they’ll keep coming back to you, referring you to friends/family and more. The tools listed below allow you to receive customer feedback that allows you to create social proof, learn more about common issues to solve them, and a lot more. These are important issues that help your business in the long run.
Tools for Customer Feedback & Community Management

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Repeat Purchase Process

Once you’ve acquired customers, it's important to maximize the revenue you get from them. This is also called their lifetime value, i.e. the value they give you in a lifetime. You can only do this by engaging with them regularly and continuously plugging your products. Some tools to help you do this are listed below categorized based on channel.

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Working Capital Financing

While all of this is great, you still need capital to keep you afloat. Neo-banks and lenders have some amazing policies that help e-commerce businesses start up, grow and keep scaling. Whether it’s startup capital, invoice discounting, ad spend loans, or more, these tools will help you keep your business’ momentum rolling!

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