E-commerce is the “new oil” for most Nigerians as the drift towards the use of the internet to carry out business transactions keeps increasing by the day. While this might be an avenue for most entrepreneurs  to take their businesses to the next level, it is important to ensure that they explore all the necessary tools at their disposal as there is a need to stand out  within the highly competitive online commerce-sphere. 

We have collated a list of tools that  E-commerce Vendors could adopt to keep their heads above the parapet, and run their businesses efficiently, these tools have been categorized into sub-groups to help Vendors understand the uses:

Marketing tools

Mailchimp

Mailchimp is an all-in-one marketing platform that helps you manage and talk to your clients, customers, and other interested parties.  Mailchimp puts your audience at the center so you can send marketing emails and automated messages, create targeted ad campaigns, build landing pages, send postcards, facilitate reporting and analytics, and sell online.

Why we like it: You can easily manage your mailing lists from a central system and you get reports on how these emails fare.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is an extremely essential tool for your eCommerce store. This tool manages extended in-depth insights into the audience and their activities on your platforms. 

Google Analytics will show you the social media platform that redirected most traffic, ROI evaluations on social media campaigns, conversions gained from social media, content performance metrics, pages that derive most social traffic, and much more detailed insights. You can even prepare reports and relationship metrics among different variables. The best part is that Google Analytics is free and you just need to link your eCommerce platform. 

Why we like it: It helps you to gain insights into what you are doing right or not in your business and the areas to improve upon.

Design tools

Canva

Do you want to capture the attention of your audience on social media? Then, you need to create attractive visuals. If you aren’t a designer and don’t have a professional photographer on your team, then it could become challenging.

Canva offers you a drag-and-drop design solution. Besides basic image cropping, editing, text addition, and enhancement features, the tool lets you turn your ideas and inspiration to create stunning visuals. It also offers easy-to-use templates for various industries.

Why we like it: Its easy learning curve and myriad of templates mean that you can begin churning out designs on a consistent basis.

Notion

Notion is an all-in-one workspace where you can write, plan, collaborate, and get organized – it allows you to take notes, add tasks, manage projects & more. You can create your own layouts and toolkit to get work done. It allows you to write in a beautiful clean space, build your own personal wiki, plan using a kanban view, a calendar or a simple list view, and last, but not least, to capture your workflows and record everything creating spreadsheets and databases.

Why we like it; This swiss-army knife can double as inventory management tool, CRM or even for public announcements and recruitment drives.