Enterprise e-commerce is something a quite different to the ‘shell shop fronts’ that were the earliest generation of online merchant venues. While definitions of an enterprise ECommerce platform can vary, there are some key features:

• Scalability
• Customization
• Premium web features
• Omnichannel and multi-store features
• Integrated customer relationship management (CRM)
• Inventory and order management

While virtually all the leading enterprise ecommerce platforms are cloud-based, there are still a few hybrid (installed + cloud) examples around, which makes them a bit like those dinosaurs which were so unwieldy that they could only function with a brain at either end of their body!

SaaS ECommerce platforms - the next generation of multichannel vending

A SaaS ecommerce platform is necessarily cloud-based to allow for anytime, anywhere browsing by customers and similarly unrestricted access for administrators. These next generation ecommerce platforms make multi-channel vending straightforward and with unlimited products, online storage, bandwidth, and unrestricted site traffic they provide a very different retail environment to the labor- and time- intensive shell sites that constrain a merchant to a ceiling of products, a limited range of pricing offers and - all too often - a bandwidth that penalizes the vendor for exceeding the ceiling.

Scalability is integral to a successful eCommerce platform - from SME to Multinational, SaaS enterprise eCommerce has to be able to able to support an enterprise of any size and to resource that organization as it expands, regardless of which direction business growth appears from. Another aspect of scalability is integration, for example bringing CRM activity and marketing together in real time to ensure that strategies in each department are aligned with the evidence base of analytics. Similarly inventory, POS and even white glove services all need to be aligned to ensure that customer service is paramount and can be adjusted according to need without long time lags as data is assessed and departmental priorities are adjusted.

What makes a business ‘enterprise level’?

First and foremost, old school ways of measuring business size are unhelpful. Neither revenue nor employees help determine if an organization is ready for enterprise-level e-commerce and even the number of customers can be a poor indicator. Instead, business features to consider include:

• Offering a wide range of products or services to customers
• Possessing a diverse customer base all of which which is serviced through the same financial administrative and managerial structures and calls on the same resources.
• Multi-level business: for example wholesalers who are also distributors, warehousing across multiple national borders or ERP as a majority function of the organization.

If your business fulfils these criteria then it would probably benefit from a SaaS enterprise ecommerce platform.

What to look for in an enterprise e-commerce platform

• Your storefront is the core of your e-commerce business and choosing the right SaaS for you should begin with exploring the storefront options available to you.
• Few features frustrate an enterprise level business more than finding out that the system they have invested in is bugged by slow page loading or impossible to rank on the first page of Google - be certain that your chosen e-commerce platform offers both high quality SEO and load speed.
• Multiple marketplaces as standard is essential for enterprise ecommerce, so look out for a platform that supports you in as many marketplaces as possible.
• In line with omnichannel marketing, inventory mastery is essential whether you are working across multiple marketplaces or have inventory in many national jurisdictions.
• Customer relation management has changed a lot since the days when salesmen kept a Rolodex of their customer’s likes and dislikes! But it’s still a big part of online commerce, so seek a SaaS ecommerce solution that makes customer relations central to its operations.

Storefront features for enterprise ecommerce

Shopping Cart Elite (SCE) has a suite of storefront options that ensure your online business is eminently attractive to customers:

• Predictive search allows customers to find products rapidly, especially if they’re unsure of the spelling or nature of the product they’re seeking.
• Live chat as standard is a given with enterprise ecommerce platforms, but it’s important to be able to filter customer contacts effectively - Shopping Cart Elite ensures purchase related queries go straight to somebody who can deal with them, whilst allowing ‘clutter’ to be handled by email.
• Up-sell and recommend - for enterprise level businesses, being able to cross-sell and suggest additional products before checkout maximizes the value of every cart and draws on inventory technology to keep products moving. In similar vein, SCE product bundling calls upon excellent inventory management to only offer bundles where all products are available, reducing the likelihood of abandoned carts.

SEO and load speed

SEO is at the heart of online commerce. No matter how good the inventory, if a merchant doesn’t rank highly then it is unlikely to attract customers. SCE focuses specifically on Google SEO practices to ensure its users have high ranking pages. This means that automated sitemaps, metadata and rich snippets are standard practice with Shopping Cart Elite. Load times with SCE are guaranteed - your pages will load within two seconds! This means that your customers will never be left hanging … and nor will your business. Because SCE offers Global Content Delivery, 74 data centers are available to deliver files faster, giving you the edge not just in getting your information out there, but also in ensuring you are always up-to-date, always online and always available. Next generation caching also gives you the opportunity to cache static content, cutting back the amount of information that customer’s browsers need to retrieve for each new page they load.

Sell web-wide

Multiple marketplaces such as Amazon, eBay, NewEgg, Overstock, Sears etc are vital to success at the enterprise level - Shopping Cart Elite offers seamless access to all the major marketplaces. In addition it provides automatic listing so that products can easily be placed in marketplaces without tedious admin.

Total inventory mastery

One of the most attractive features of Shopping Cart Elite is that it offers True Live Inventory - a system that synchronizes all inventory across warehouse and marketplaces so customers are never disappointed and maximum stock is available for purchase in all your markets.

Analysis - the core of enterprise level management

Standard analytics allow merchants to investigate raw data in a number of ways, and the more sophisticated the analytics the more chance a business has to refine its approach to multiple marketplaces. Shopping Cart Elite goes a step beyond even sophisticated analysis … a completely new style of analytics, called Threat Engagement Analytics (TEA) gives SCE customers the opportunity to track shoppers’ mouse movements. This serves two purposes: it detects suspicious activity and allows vendors to refine whether existing marketing strategies deliver the necessary traffic to convert to purchases.

Customer Relations Management

SCE permits interaction tracking not just between customers and sales team members but customers and web pages, ensuring that its powerful analytic systems are able to interrogate all your customer interactions to refine the process of engaging them. Contact management is also important to enterprise level ecommerce and Shopping Cart Elite allows each customer to have multiple email address listings so that you can market to several contacts within a client business - a key feature for business-to-business sales.

Is your business enterprise ecommerce ready?

If your organization is approaching enterprise level or perhaps is already there and struggling to integrate a range of disparate software and systems to create an efficient omnichannel business, then SaaS ecommerce solutions are probably right for you. Seek out an ECommerce platform that offers you the necessary richness of features, alongside the highest possible range of customization to meet your needs. Explore the SEO and page loading capacity of potential solutions and look for honest customer reviews to help you understand how any SaaS e-commerce platform works in practice. Above all, explore how any SaaS will be able to grow with your business, to support it in its development and interrogate how it can help automate functions to keep your business lean and effective. Shopping Cart Elite excels in both trial period and in customer reviews, giving us the absolute confidence to recommend it as the ideal solution.