President & CEO of Corberry Digital Marketing Agency, a full-service digital marketing agency offering web design, SEO, PPC, social & more.
In 2021, global e-commerce sales amounted to approximately $5.2 trillion. With the current trends, this is expected to only grow through the years.
To be part of this booming market, you’ll need the right tools to help you. After all, your target audience wouldn’t want to order products through a website that doesn’t look good and trustworthy. One of the tools you’ll need to create your online store is an e-commerce content management system (CMS).
What Is A CMS?
According to Oracle: “A content management system (CMS) helps companies manage digital content. Whole teams can use these systems to create, edit, organize, and publish content.”
Most CMS platforms are made especially simple for those who have no technical or IT knowledge, as it allows you to build a website without having to code everything from scratch. Your CMS will take care of all the background processes. This helps you focus on how your website will look once it reaches your customers.
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What Is An E-Commerce CMS?
Most CMS platforms make it easier for you to create, format, store and publish content to your websites. But a CMS that is specially made for e-commerce is a bit different. An e-commerce CMS focuses on helping you create your online store. It allows you to create, edit and publish product pages, add promotional banners and create product listings.
An e-commerce CMS becomes a shopping cart solution for your audience to purchase your products online through your website. On your end, it allows you to manage the process of advertising, showcasing, managing and selling products. It’s a user-friendly tool that helps you with all the back-end store management you need to run an online shop.
Features You Need For A Good E-Commerce CMS
There are lots of e-commerce CMS solutions online like HubSpot, Shopify, Magento, Wix and more. All of them are very good at what they do, but not all of them will be suitable for your specific needs. To help you get started in choosing a good e-commerce CMS for you, here are a few things to consider:
• User-Friendliness
Your CMS should be easy to understand and follow. A CMS is supposed to make creating an online store easy for the average user. You should not have a hard time figuring out how to make things happen and where to find the tools you need. You should have a good grasp of how to operate your CMS and be able to easily handle product listings, upload images of your products and edit product information.
• SEO Optimization
A good e-commerce CMS will help you optimize your content for on-page SEO and help you implement SEO best practices to make sure that your e-commerce website will rank well in search engine result pages—for example, organizing your page URLs. Google ranks URLs that are short, readable and understandable.
A good CMS will also remind you to add meta descriptions. This is the gray text that shows up right below your page title in search engine results pages. It gives users a snippet of what they can expect when they click on the link. These are great for increasing click-through rates.
A CMS should make it easy to format page titles and H1 tags. These elements are important for SEO because they help search engines understand what your page is about. As for users, it helps them easily navigate their way around your website because each page is labeled properly.
Your CMS should also allow you the ability to customize your URL structure or automatically generate SEO-friendly URLs. This gives you the opportunity to incorporate your target keywords in your URLs and helps organize URLs so that both search engines and users can easily understand them.
• Customizable User Experience
Your e-commerce website is a reflection of your business and what it stands for. That’s why it’s important to look for an e-commerce CMS that lets you customize and design every part of your online store. This includes creating an enjoyable and seamless user experience. According to a report released by Microsoft, 96% of customers report that customer experience is an important factor in brand loyalty.
With a good CMS, you are able to design, edit and manage the contents of your pages. This includes designing how product listings appear and what happens when users add products to their cart. It should also allow you to update your online store design to adapt to trends, special occasions, store promotions and other marketing efforts.
• Flexible Customization
Most CMS platforms have basic features you would want for your e-commerce website. They act as the base foundation so that you can start selling online. But as you integrate more features and functions to enhance the user experience, you’ll want to explore and add third-party tools and plug-ins.
Your CMS should be able to integrate these third-party tools and plug-ins easily and seamlessly. This allows you to fully customize your e-commerce website and create a user experience that is tailored to your target audience.
In Summary
You need a CMS for your online store if you want to be successful in selling your products online, especially if you have no background knowledge of coding. You simply design your page visually and let the CMS do all the coding in the background.
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Author: Michael Fox, Forbes Councils Member