A Comprehensive Guide On Building an E-commerce Tech Stack In 2024
Introduction
Setting up an online store is not just about developing a website with a beautiful interface and displaying the products. There are various moving parts involved in making it successful.
For example, you need the following:
- A content management system (CMS) that displays all the content, such as the product pages
- A customer relationship management (CRM) that stores customer data
- An inventory management system to track and manage stocks
- A payment gateway to process payments
These applications cannot function in silos. They must work cohesively to streamline operations and enhance customer experience.
That’s where an e-commerce tech stack becomes crucial for your business.
In this blog, we’ll explain:
This should help you get started on the journey of building a successful e-commerce business.
What is an e-commerce tech stack?
An e-commerce tech stack is a suite of software solutions, frameworks, platforms, and programming languages that help companies build and operate an online store smoothly.
Each component of a tech stack serves a specific function within the e-commerce business but works together to achieve a common goal, such as improving sales or customer experience.
The components in a tech stack must be well-integrated, compatible, and facilitate smooth operations and data exchange.
Benefits of e-commerce tech stack
Here are a few reasons to consider investing in an e-commerce tech stack.
● Automate operations
The e-commerce tech stack automates various routine processes, enabling your employees to focus on other high-value tasks that require cognitive skills.
● Improved customer experience
The e-commerce tech stack helps you create a smooth customer experience at every stage, from searching and comparing products to ordering and tracking the shipment status. It also provides real-time customer data, allowing you to personalize customers' experiences and address their queries more effectively.
● Better decision-making
The tech stack provides a holistic, real-time view of customer and operational data, helping you determine what’s working and what’s not and make informed business decisions.
For example, you can fix the checkout process if the cart abandonment rate is high or change the search function if customers struggle to find and add products to the cart.
● Effective communication
Real-time customer data will help you understand the customer’s preferences and behavior patterns and personalize communication accordingly. For example, you can send targeted emails to customers asking for feedback on a recently purchased product or a reminder to renew their subscription service. This will help you engage with customers better and improve conversions.
What are the core components of an e-commerce tech stack?
To build a successful e-commerce business, you must have the following components.
Note: Although we’ve enlisted the core components for your business, you must choose only those that align with your business goals.● e-commerce platforms
E-commerce platforms are the building blocks for your online store. They provide the infrastructure to manage your products, process payments, send and track marketing campaigns, and connect with customers. They eliminate the complexities of operating an online business, enabling you to focus on growing it.
Here are a few features you must look for while choosing an e-commerce platform:
- An easy-to-build storefront
- Payment processing gateways
- Inventory management tools
- Marketing automation features
- Customer management system
- Shipping management solutions
- Integration with third-party apps
- Advanced Analytics
There are two popular e-commerce platforms that we widely recommend to our clients.
- Shopify is a cloud-based, user-friendly platform ideal for small and medium-sized e-commerce companies.
- Shopify Plus is an enterprise-level solution for large-sized e-commerce companies with high-volume sales.
Choose a platform according to size, budget, and business needs.
● Accounting system
An accounting system is a single source of truth that tracks your cash flow and provides a clear picture of all your income and expenses. It can generate reports to calculate taxes and monitor your business's financial health. It will help you make informed decisions to save taxes, streamline investments, and grow your online store. Integrate the accounting system with the e-commerce platform to receive updated and accurate financial information.
● Data and analytics
E-commerce is no longer about just selling products. It is about predicting market trends, understanding customers, and making data-driven decisions. Data-driven companies perform better than non-data-centric companies. We recommend integrating your e-commerce platform with data and analytics tools to make informed decisions.
- These tools will help you track customer behavior across the website, identify the pages that gain the most traction or where high drop-offs occur, and make decisions to improve customer experience.
- You can also gain rich insights into the top-selling products, high-conversion marketing channels, and other details that can help you personalize marketing campaigns.
- You can use these tools to monitor sales, predict demands, and optimize the product inventory to avoid overstocking or stockouts.
Data and analytics tools are essential to grow your business and gain a competitive edge over other players.
● Order and inventory management system
An order management system helps you receive, process, fulfill, track, and deliver orders from when a customer places an order to dispatching it. An inventory management system provides a holistic view of stock levels in real-time, predicts demand, and automates the replenishing process. Integrating these tools with an e-commerce platform will allow you to receive and fulfill orders on time, avoid losing sales due to stockouts, and ensure smooth business operations.
● Automation tools
Automation tools do heavy-lifting activities like managing and monitoring marketing campaigns, developing custom workflows to create a seamless customer journey, tracking orders, and managing customer support tools. They look after the business's operational aspects so your employees can focus on high-value tasks requiring human intervention. Automation tools improve productivity, decrease errors, and help you run the business smoothly.
● Shopping cart management tools
Customers often add products to their carts and abandon them. This could be due to various reasons, such as a complex checkout process or the customer forgetting about the products added to the cart. You could end up losing a sale due to an abandoned cart. Consider using shopping cart management tools to avoid this problem and generate sales. A good shopping cart management tool will help you with:
- Reducing the steps in the checkout process, making it easy for customers to place orders
- Helping customers save products in the cart for later use and nudging them subtly to complete the checkout process
- Sending reminder emails to customers to purchase the products added to the shopping cart or informing them if the product goes out of stock
A shopping cart management solution will improve conversion rates and ensure that sales are retained at the last stage of the customer journey.
● Content Management System (CMS)
The content on e-commerce sites is dynamic. You must regularly create or update product information, design, images, and videos to keep the website engaging and fresh. While a programmer can create and edit pages, relying on them can be time-consuming and stop you from experimenting with the content. That’s why CMS is crucial. CMS provides the flexibility to manage the website content without depending on programmers. You can create, edit, and design pages without coding experience, save time, and quickly update content to capture customers' attention.
Choose a platform like Shopify with headless architecture and user-friendly interfaces to update content without disrupting the site.
● Payment processing system
Customers prefer shopping with brands that offer flexible payment options. A payment processing system will help you accept customer payments through their preferred payment choices. Choose a payment processing system that supports and accepts multiple payment options and currencies and promises secure transactions. A smooth and secure payment processing system will encourage customers to complete their checkout process and increase sales.
● Warehousing system
A warehousing system is essential to running your online store like a well-oiled machine. Besides processing orders, a warehousing system will help you manage inventory, fulfill orders, and manage logistics efficiently. It will provide real-time data on stock levels to forecast demand and replenish the inventory to avoid stockouts and prevent customer churn.
● Shipping and logistics solution
A robust shipping and logistics solution will help you automate the order fulfillment process and quickly deliver products to customers. It will automatically find the best shipping route, verify orders, and dispatch the products to the closest warehouse for packaging and delivery. It will also give you real-time data and more visibility over the logistics solutions, enabling you to improve the shipping process and delight customers with timely delivery.
● Returns management
A smooth return experience can foster customer loyalty and increase the chances of repeat business. That’s why a good returns management tool is essential for your business. It will improve the post-purchase customer experience.
A returns management tool allows customers to initiate and track a return request in real time without following up with the customer support team. It also provides automatic updates on the status of the return request, which makes the entire process transparent. Choose a tool that gives valuable insights on improving processes and reducing future returns.
● Marketing and sales tools
Marketing and sales tools are the cornerstones for attracting new customers, converting prospects into customers, and building engagement with them. These tools can help you with activities such as:
- Understanding customers, segmenting them into different categories, and designing and deploying targeted marketing campaigns to acquire or retain customers
- Creating sales funnels and guiding customers through them to increase conversions
- Personalizing customer experiences by leveraging customer’s data
● Customer support system
A customer support system helps you deliver exceptional customer service across all channels and develop customer loyalty. It makes you more responsive and builds trust and long-term customer connection. Here are a few features to look for in the customer support system:
- Live Chat Support: Customers should be able to connect with the support team in real time and get satisfactory answers to their queries immediately.
- Self-service options: You should be able to upload resources like FAQs, troubleshooting videos, and guides to empower customers to solve their problems independently.
- Unify customer interactions: All interactions with the customer must be made available on a centralized platform to gain a holistic view of the common pain points and ensure that no query goes unresolved.
● Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
Customer relationship management (CRM) is a central hub that stores valuable data like customers' purchase history, preferences, and behavior patterns. It also tracks sales performance, monitors cart abandonment rates, and provides vital insights to convert window shoppers into buyers. You can use CRMs to understand customers and send personalized offers and promotions to boost sales. Integrating a CRM with the e-commerce platform will help you enhance customer experience, deepen customer relationships, and grow your business to the next level.
How to build a successful e-commerce tech stack?
So, you have all the essential components to build a successful e-commerce business. Let’s learn how to use them to build a successful e-commerce business.
● Assess the business requirements
A tech stack is necessary, but you must evaluate your needs before starting the process.
Start by assessing your business requirements and the goal of building a tech stack. This includes evaluating market trends, identifying the short-term and long-term goals to achieve, and more. Discuss the potential use cases and benefits of investing in a tech stack with your main stakeholders and business heads and reach a consensus.
● Evaluate the options
Once you set your business goals, find the right tech stack option to achieve them.
Here are a few features to look for while choosing the option:
- Integration: The tech stack you choose must seamlessly integrate with the CRM and other third-party tools, facilitating smooth data sharing.
- Security: Since you’ll store customer data, ensure the tech stack is updated with the latest security protocols. It must have encryption, multi-factor authentication, and capabilities to protect the data from phishing, malware, and other cybersecurity threats. Ensure the security protocols align with your company’s policies and are updated frequently.
- Vendor lock-in: Vendor lock-in is a huge problem, as it makes you dependent on one technology or service provider. You cannot switch to another vendor because of that. Vendor lock-in stops you from innovating or adopting newer technologies that suit your business. It will also pose challenges if the technology becomes redundant.
- Cost: The cost of an e-commerce tech stack will vary depending on the functionalities and complexities. It also depends on whether the site will be built from scratch or revamped with modern features. We recommend working with a trusted tech partner to determine the cost. However, no matter what tech stack you choose, do a thorough cost-benefit analysis to ensure it’s worth the investment.
- Complexity: A tech stack becomes complex as you add more features. In addition to requiring more resources, a complex tech stack will attract high operational costs. Maintain a balance between the functionalities and complexities of the tech stack. It should be easy to operate, maintain, and provide all the functionalities you need to run the business.
- Compatibility: Ensure that the tools and platforms in your tech stack are compatible and work well together. Assess the compatibility and check if it allows you to add or replace components easily. This will give you the flexibility to customize the tool.
- Support: Choose a service provider who offers timely support in fixing technical issues, bugs, and other problems that could stop you from using all the benefits of the tech stack.
● Choose a modular architecture
The e-commerce industry is dynamic and changes with market demands. For example, a service like same-day delivery wasn’t popular a few years ago but has become necessary for the business to thrive. Thus, your tech stack should be flexible enough to add or replace components and tap into new business opportunities. A rigid architecture will not allow you to change the components. However, a modular architecture will allow you to customize the tech stack how you want and future-proof your business. Choose solutions like Shopify’s Commerce Components or work with your tech provider to customize your tech stack without incurring too many integration and maintenance charges.
● Use fewer plug-ins
Although plug-ins improve a site’s performance, too many can slow down the site and ruin the customer’s experience. Instead of adding several plug-ins and overwhelming the site, choose the ones that will enhance your website’s performance.
● Use flexible languages and frameworks
Use flexible and modern programming languages and frameworks that give you more control over the site’s design and performance. You should be able to make changes faster to meet customer demands.
● Optimize the e-commerce tech stack
Building a tech stack is not enough. You must review it regularly and evaluate its performance to run it smoothly. This is important not just from the business perspective but also from a security and compliance angle. A well-optimized e-commerce tech stack will help you run your business successfully without any roadblocks.
Introducing Marmeto - Your Partner in Building E-commerce Business
Developing an e-commerce tech stack or migrating to a new solution, such as from Salesforce to Shopify, requires assistance from a technology partner.
At Marmeto, we help e-commerce businesses to kickstart their journey by building or migrating the e-commerce tech stack.
Marmeto offers all the required technological support to run a successful e-commerce business. Whether it is the footwear company Superkicks transitioning from an old e-commerce platform to Shopify and increasing sales by 10% or Kohler, which needed a functional e-commerce store created using Shopify, we develop and manage the tech stack for you based on your business needs.
We’ve worked with 1000+ clients across 31+ countries to build successful and innovative e-commerce businesses. So, we will understand your business well and extend support at every stage.
Want to build an e-commerce tech stack for your business? Get in touch with us to know more.
Wrap-Up
An e-commerce tech stack is essential to operate your e-commerce business smoothly. However, choosing the right components and implementing the correct strategies is vital. Without a robust and flexible e-commerce tech stack, you’ll face operations, scalability, and adaptability challenges. Hence, you must remember the following guidelines while building the tech stack:
- Know all the components you need to build the tech stack and choose only those that meet your business needs. Not every element is vital for your business.
- Work with a trustworthy tech partner like Marmeto. They will build and maintain the tech stack for you and ensure that it performs to your satisfaction.
- Track the trends, and do not hesitate to follow them. Choose a modular architecture to make customization easy.
- Last, review the tech stack regularly and update it to overcome challenges and optimize its performance.
FAQs
What is an e-commerce tech stack?
An e-commerce tech stack combines tools, platforms, programming languages, and frameworks to create, operate, and maintain a successful e-commerce business.
What components should the e-commerce tech stack have?
There are plenty of components available to build an e-commerce tech stack. However, choose only those that are essential to growing your e-commerce business. Components like e-commerce platforms, CRM, ERP, Accounting Management Systems, and order and inventory management systems are ‘must-haves’ for a successful e-commerce business.
How to choose the right e-commerce tech stack?
Assess your business goals and requirements, determine the budget, and evaluate the various options available based on criteria like features, complexity and compatibility, customer support, ease of use, and more. We recommend consulting a tech partner to make the right choice.