#35 Top 20 Best Ecommerce Tools and Services Part 2

 

Get Your Free Online Store Success Pack Here:
https://www.effectiveecommerce.com/ESstarting/

Get Bluehost:
https://www.effectiveecommerce.com/bluehost/

Get Klaviyo:
https://www.effectiveecommerce.com/klaviyo/

Get Mailchimp:
https://www.effectiveecommerce.com/mailchimp/

Get Sumome:
https://www.effectiveecommerce.com/sumome/

 

Everybody in this episode of the effective e-commerce podcast we’re gonna be doing the top 20 best e-commerce tools in services part two if you haven’t seen part one yet go check that out you don’t need to see part one or listen to part one to see part two it I mean it’s just ten more ecommerce tools and services and this is hugely helpful I’ll recap at the end of this episode the ones from last week last week’s podcast episode but. So let’s just jump into it right now. So number eleven remember this is a continuation of the top twenty. So we’re gonna start with number 11 we have Zendesk and we’ll talk more about what Zendesk is and how it can be really helpful number two SEO Mo’s Maz I believe it is number thirteen Optimizely number fourteen LastPass number fifteen Bluehost which I love number sixteen good business credit card you should have a good business credit card that’s a great I think service or tool it’s a great tool and I’ll explain why later number seventeen MailChimp and Klaviyo number eighteen sumo me number nineteen zapier and number twenty some kind of remarketing setting up remarketing basically I hate a dural do not use admiral they will charge you way more they’ll overcharge there’s a bunch of stuff I set up a troll originally which if you don’t know it’s a platform that will remark it for you but they don’t optimize it it’s it’s very poorly done.

It doesn’t take that long to set it up yourself I will have some episode if I don’t already have some videos out on it yet I will have some videos out soon on how to set up remarketing but definitely skip Admiral. So let’s start with number eleven now umber eleven is something that I haven’t used too much to be honest but all my friends talked about how great it is and it’s something I’m going to set up eventually and that is Zendesk. So Zendesk is basically a customer service ticketing type platform. So if you ever gone to a website and submitted something to customer service and said oh right you know you have a ticket created it’s ticket number whatever pretty much all big companies do this the way it works is my full understanding it once again I haven’t used it yet but it it makes a lot of sense as for bigger companies the way that it works is that you people you know let’s say someone gets ticket number one someone gets ticket number two all the way to a thousand.

Let’s say you’re gonna a thousand requests today you can have multiple service people working on it and they can assign tickets to themselves and they can escalate them they can do all kinds of stuff it just keeps everything organized right now the way I handle the customer service would be to answer is honestly just using Gmail and my method is they our email is set up. So when someone sends us an email it goes to Gmail and we have a policy of zero inbox zero basically. So if you handle an email and once it’s done you delete it if you have to escalate it quote-unquote you put it in a special folder and. So we have one folder called the Cindy check folder or the Travis check folder and and we’ll check it depending on what it is but for the most part we just use delete the email once you’ve responded to it don’t start responding to it until you’re ready to complete it basically but this ticketing system is a better way of doing it we don’t have enough issues right now and we only have really one or two people that handle customer service it’s not that big of an issue first but Zendesk is a good way to make it a little bit more efficient number two on this list number twelve really is SEO Maas that’s SEO mo zhee and this is I’ve done the free trials I’ve never actually paid for the service but it’s worth doing especially at the beginning of a company you can look up your competitors and you can look up their backlinks you can look up a bunch of their things.

What I recommend doing is making a list of all your competitors or companies that are somewhat similar to yours see where their backlinks come from and reach out to those blogs reach out to those websites whatever it is and see if there’s a way you can get a backlink from them as well this is a pretty powerful tool and it’s something also you can just kind of keep tabs on your competitors and see where they’re getting their backlinks from but also like what is their ranking and anytime someone asked me oh I have a website oh I have a blog and I don’t know if it’s a legit blog or not I’ll pop it into SEO Moz and look at their black backlinks and look at what their score is and if they don’t have a very high score I’ll tell them no I’m not gonna send you a free box but if they have a high score I’m like hell yeah I’ll send your free rocks why not. So number thirteen Optimizely number thirteen yeah Optimizely I think they’re changing their pricing model it was pretty cool before I think it was free as long as you have under fifty thousand visitors a month and the way it works is it’s a split testing platform.

It’s definitely worth it if you’re if you wanted to do some split testing it makes it very very easy to split test things. So you can basically say hey should the the button on my website be green or should it be red should you know the header image say free shipping or should it be a picture of our product you can test a bunch of things I’m not gonna belabor that point too much but Optimizely is great if you want to split test number 14 we got LastPass LastPass is a great tool even if you’re just a one-person business but it’s very important if you’re a multi-person business and what it does is it saves your passwords and I know what you’re thinking like that’s not that big of a deal first off it saves you a lot of time and you don’t have to go looking up passwords. So that in itself makes the service worth it but the other thing that it does that I find very much worthwhile is it will I can have my virtual assistant put in the last pass plug-in login with their own personal account and I can share passwords with them and they won’t even know what the password is which is great because it provides some privacy for you. So if all of a sudden I need to fire a virtual assistant and don’t worry Adriene I’m not firing you but like if I if that in which has happened in the past where I’ve had to fire a virtual assistant it’s very easy just to say you know click on their LastPass account and unregister them. So as opposed to let’s say I’ve shared 50 sites with them having to go and change the password to 50 sites I can just very simply change I can just very simply click one button on LastPass and it’ll delete them.

LastPass I think it’s like nine dollars a year it’s very inexpensive number 15 is Bluehost and I think it was on my 25th birthday I bought myself either a two or three year plan I think it was a three year plan to Bluehost the best birthday present I’ve ever given myself I don’t give myself a lot of birthday presents but Bluehost is a hosting service provider basically. So if you’re looking to host websites. So right now Shopify for instance which is a great platform you’re pairing paying them not only for the service but also to host your website Bluehost isn’t going to give you any service they will offer to host a wordpress site which I have probably 10 WordPress sites at least at least 10 works. So every time I want to come up with a new site if I have a Bluehost account it’s free I mean you know I have to pay for the Bluehost account for the first time and it’s I think somewhere between four to seven dollars a month depending I think there’s higher-end plans of course but it’s right around that cost range for unlimited websites for unlimited email storage for like all this great stuff and I do have a link for that effective e-commerce column slash Bluehost sign up using my link as always I will give you a free one-on-one consulting session and I think this is any serious internet marketer should have a Bluehost account because it allows you to put up a new WordPress site effortlessly it’s like the easiest thing in the world to do. So definitely check out Bluehost number-16 some kind of a good business credit card. So a lot of people I know they start a business and they just use their personal credit card for all their transactions which is a nightmare and part of the reason it’s. So bad is for accounting purposes. So right away you should get a new bank account you should get a new credit card but there’s other benefits to a good business credit card you can get points. So I just recently flew to Hawaii totally for free I’ve flown to Italy for free Buenos Aires for free I actually flew my parents to Italy for free as well I’ve flown to a bunch of different places and stayed in a bunch of hotels all for free using my a good business credit card which ones do I recommend it depends if you’re doing a lot of advertising spend you might want the gold MX card if you’re just doing a lot of general spend you can get like a 2x cash back card like the spark business card which is pretty good I think it has a $500 sign up bonus something like that there’s also there’s a bunch of cards on my website go to effective e-commerce com click on the little online store tools section and you can see all the top cards and there’s some bonuses in there and those are most most of them are affiliate links which means you still get a great offer you get the best offer on the market but on top of that I get a small kickback. So as a thank you always happy to do that one-on-one consulting session if you use one of my services but getting a good business credit card I’ve gone through 15 business different credit cards over the last few years and it’s paid for a lot of flights and it doesn’t hurt your credit score contrary to what people think it doesn’t really hurt your credit score pretty much at all. So number 17 is MailChimp and or klaviyo MailChimp is your four first two thousand email subscribers for free which is a great thing. So if you’re setting up a business set up a mail ship account right away and then if you want to graduate to a more premium version we do have or not not we they do have Klaviyo in Klaviyo what makes Klaviyo is. So helpful is it has a lot of like triggering things. So you can say you know if someone is ordered more than once I want to send them this special offer I want to send this it can basically it makes it a lot easier to put people into different buckets and send them different types of emails you can do that a MailChimp – don’t get me wrong but Klaviyo is a little bit more user friendly it gets a little bit more data from Shopify. So it plugs into Shopify it plugs into commerce and you can get a lot of information it’s basically a complete CRM customer relationship management tool. So you can see ok not only did they purchase from us on this state they came back and visited the website on this state and you know whatever they seem like they’re interested and I think it’s more powerful if you have a larger company personally I think mail chimp does 90% of what you need 95 percent of what you need maybe even and they do have an automation tool and MailChimp as well. So when someone places an order from be dancewear for instance i send them a new email every week for like 12 weeks and it’s automatically set up. So for first time customers they get our first email is our DIY handbook and it shows them how to DIY a dance costume then a week later they get introduced to our youtube channel and all and all this good stuff and if you sign up go to effective e-commerce comm I do have a I have a link to both those effective e-commerce comm slash MailChimp and effective e-commerce comm slash Klaviyo which is cal que el a/b I Y o which is like worst name ever there’s links on the website but what I was gonna say actually is sign up to my email for the the free online store success pack and you’ll see I use MailChimp and I have an automated sequence for you to check out number 18 is sumo me and through sumo me they have a lot of different services but the one I like the best is their pop up. So you really want just like a cheap easy exit intent pop-up it’s like 10 bucks a month check out sumo me I’m not gonna talk too much about this I mean they have a ton of features but basically if you’re looking for a good exit intent pop up soon with me ten dollars you can do a little bit of customization I think there’s a free version too there’s a free version that works really well but I think it’s worth paying 10 bucks a month. So let’s get to something a little bit sexier and that is zapier and zapier is spelled zap2it are and what they pur does is it connects different api’s and what API is it’s basically it connects different websites together and what I mean by this is I connect I can connect Shopify with MailChimp for instance or I can connect MailChimp with Google sheets. So one example is every time I get a new email subscriber in MailChimp I want Google sheets to put their name in a goo in a Google sheet and and zapier does this connection in between very very easily you could write your own code using Google script but if your will do this pretty easily I’ll also use it to send out ID well I used all kinds of things connecting different services it’s anything that you you wish that you could have one website talk to another website there’s a good chance that zapier does that and it does connect with Shopify. So that is very helpful but yeah I’ve used it for a number of different things I highly recommend checking it out seeing where you can automate your business and then finally number 20 this is last on the list do not use Admiral I highly recommend against using Admiral but set up some kind of remarketing and I recommend just going directly through Facebook Ads doing remarketing ads through Facebook and going through Google and the Google Display Network and setting up remarketing using Google. So that was a lot of stuff right there let’s go over the entire list one more time number one online jobs dot pH number two Google sheets and Docs number three Google script number four Google Analytics number five up work number six 99designs number seven fiver number eight jungle Scout number nine feedback genius number ten hot jar number eleven Zendesk number twelve SEO Maz number thirteen Optimizely number fourteen LastPass number fifteen Bluehost which is a great service highly recommend that number sixteen getting a good business credit card number seventeen MailChimp and or Klaviyo probably or don’t don’t get both of them number 18 sumo me number nineteen zapier and number twenty personally I very much dislike Admiral but setting up some kind of remarketing I guess I don’t need to beat that into the ground too much remarket number 20 is remarketing and make sure if you listen to the podcast go to effective e-commerce comm click on the tool section sign up using in these tools it’s going to be a better price usually using my link or at most the same price and I’ll give you that free 30-minute one-on-one consultation session plus you’ll just be helping out the podcast if you’re watching the YouTube video I do have links up above and down below for a lot of these different services and that’s pretty much it for this episode make sure if you enjoy it leave that 5-star review on iTunes for a chance to win a another free one-on-one consulting sessions I’m just giving these out like crazy to people that helped me out. So thank you guys for your support I really do appreciate it and have a great rest your week