The Foundational Backend E-Commerce Platforms You Need to Run a Successful Biz – Part 2
Welcome back! This blog is the second in a two-part series about the top operational and foundational tools you need for successful e-commerce business systems organization. In Part 1, we discussed the essential customer-facing e-commerce tools you need. (Check it out here). Today, we’ll examine the backend e-commerce platforms that are key to your operations, like project and team management, bookkeeping and accounting, inventory management, shipping platforms, and analytics.
Manually managing these tasks will cost you money, time, and effort. Worse? Things are more likely to fall through the cracks, which isn’t good for business! Streamlining and automating your business’s backend will decrease your workload while increasing efficiency, revenue, and vendor and customer satisfaction.
So, let’s look at the backend tools you need to get sustainable and scalable results for your e-commerce business.
Tools for Project and Team Management
Choosing your software for team management and systems organization can feel daunting – there are so many on the market. Let me save you unnecessary stress and narrow it down for you, starting with ClickUp. I can’t recommend ClickUp enough!
ClickUp gives your team a centralized location to interact, keep track of projects and assignments, and plan. And the amount of ClickUp integrations is pretty impressive. You can connect Slack, GitHub, Google Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox, Zoom, Teams, and Zendesk, to name a few.
Another thing I love about ClickUp is that you can use it beyond just basic project management. You can really tailor it for your e-commerce business and include centralized promo calendars for holidays and sales, inventory management, and standard operating procedures – the possibilities are practically endless. Need to house your training, how-to guides, standard operating procedures, and instructions? ClickUp's got you covered!
To rock your e-commerce marketing, you can easily map out your promo calendars for the year, noting holidays, sales, Black Friday, and Cyber Monday, and then see what worked and what didn’t. Then, you can then duplicate your calendar and make adjustments for the following year.
Let’s say you have different employees and contractors working on various aspects of your business. It’s easy to change permissions and grant team members access to everything they need to get a project done. You can use ClickUp as a hub to share images, subtasks, notes, and questions (and answers). This transparency and accessibility can be helpful when selling across multiple platforms. Team members can quickly and easily keep track of raw materials, inventory, ordering, invoicing, freight scheduling, and forecasting – no matter which e-commerce platform(s) you’re using.
One of my favorite ways to use ClickUp is to set up buckets of to-do lists – for example, calendars, customer service, inventory management, e-commerce marketing, and brain dumps. Having a separate, easily accessible space in ClickUp to capture ideas, random thoughts, and to-dos helps streamline your processes and systems organization because you can simply highlight a note and turn into a task. Beyond helpful!
Tools for Bookkeeping and Accounting
As your e-commerce business grows, your finances become more complicated. And the more complicated your finances become, the more critical it is to have the proper e-commerce accounting tools in place. You need to carefully categorize and track sales, returns, overhead, supplier payments, copacker fees, and more. Having these figures at your fingertips helps you plan for your taxes, assess your income statements, and create a business budget.
A robust e-commerce accounting solution can keep your finances organized in one place, reducing paperwork and stress. You could use your accounting software to store:
Receipts
Bills
Invoices
W2 and 1099 forms
Previous tax returns
Bank account statements
Credit and debit card statements
Online payment wallet statements
Revenue records
Here are some of my favorite programs for e-commerce accounting and bookkeeping:
Accountfully: A fully outsourced accounting team of bookkeepers, accountants, controllers, CFOs, and CPAs, Accountfully performs the day-to-day accounting and bookkeeping work and serves as a long-term strategic partner, helping you navigate all the challenges and complexities of your finances.
Bench: This service gives you a dedicated bookkeeper who uses proprietary software to automate your bookkeeping and help you stay on top of your finances. Best of all? A team of knowledgeable small business experts is a few swipes, clicks, or taps away.
Stripe: Stripe offers payment processing software and APIs so your e-commerce business can accept payments, send payouts, and manage your business online. It can also help you send invoices, get financing, beat fraud, manage business spending, and more.
Quickbooks: Quickbooks is a go-to accounting and financial software program many companies use to manage their finances and sales accounts. Even if you hire outside accounting help, having Quickbooks for yourself is incredibly helpful.
Honeybook: This platform lets you manage projects, book clients, and send invoices. It helps small business owners manage, scale, and streamline to provide a better customer and client experience.
Many people debate the benefits of Honeybook vs. Quickbooks. The two might sound similar at first, but they actually serve different purposes. Quickbooks manages and pays your bills, accepts business payments, tracks invoices, and offers payroll functions. Honeybook is more of a customer relationship management platform that manages and streamlines invoices combined with a project management platform (though you can accept payments with more limitations).
Tools for Production, Raw Material, and Inventory Management
Which ecommerce platform is best for managing everything involved with inventory and orders? DEAR is my number one recommendation for startups and small e-commerce businesses that want to streamline and optimize their business processes. DEAR Inventory is a cloud-based application tool that offers complete backend management solutions, including:
Sales
Purchasing
Warehouse management
Shipping
E-commerce and payment gateway integrations
You can build your own workflow with your favorite tools, like Shopify, Square, Stripe, PayPal, Quickbooks, Amazon, and many more, and integrate them with DEAR. Love the simplicity!
Tools for Shipping
It goes without saying, but if your e-commerce business can’t get its products to customers in a timely fashion, you don’t have much of a business. That's why it’s critical you have a shipping platform that syncs with your third-party logistics. Not sure which systems organization and e-commerce platforms will help your e-commerce business manage shipping? I’ve worked with multiple shipping tools and can recommend the best fit for your business. My personal favorites are:
Shipstation: This platform imports and manages orders, prints labels, and sends tracking to customers and selling channels. With Shipstation, multiple packages can be shipped and tracked, ideal for any growing business. They also provide custom emails, packing slip templates, SMS tracking updates, branded tracking pages, and a branded returns portal.
Shippo: Shippo is a software company that integrates shipping with multiple carriers through their web application and API. You can easily sync your sales channels to manage orders in one place, create discounted shipping labels, generate free return labels, and get the lowest rates possible from UPS, FedEx, DHL, USPS, and others. With Shippo tracking, you can notify your customers, track shipments, and streamline returns.
Despite how organized you are, shipping times aren’t a perfect science, especially now. You should always have a plan for transparent customer communication in case of any shipping delays. (In fact, this is one of the biggest lessons learned for 2022.)
Tools for Analytics
If you want to understand how customers use your site, where they spend the most time, and – most importantly! – what’s stopping them from buying from you, you’ve got to dig into your e-commerce key metrics. These are my favorite analytics tools:
Shopify Dashboard: I always recommend Shopify, and its analytics is just another reason I love it. With the Shopify Dashboard, you can integrate and analyze your e-commerce key metrics, like ROAs and CACs. And they provide your data analysis in a simple, easy-to-understand way.
Google Analytics: This is a great way to measure your advertising ROI, monitor website traffic, and track your metrics for your social networking sites and other applications to see how and where you most effectively convert your customers.
Hotjar: This tool shows heatmaps of your website. You can see where visitors click, scroll, and spend time on your site. Hotjar is a visual and intuitive way to discover and consolidate your user’s actions and needs.
Implementing Tools for Your Sanity, Success, and Systems Organization
As a busy e-commerce business owner, you have a lot on your plate. That’s where I come in! If you want someone to implement these essential operational and foundational backend tools and do it right, I’m your girl. With my Done-in-a-Week Systems Organization package, I’ll help you discover your roadblocks and get you on the path to automated organization quickly.
It’s time you let your systems to the work for you, so you can enjoy that fempire you’re working so hard to build. Schedule a discovery call today to see how I can help you succeed.