Enhance your web presence and grow your e-commerce business

With high street stores ordered to close during lockdown retailers faced an unprecedented situation, forcing many to bolster their e-commerce offering in order to remain adaptable as buying habits evolved and demand changed

Over the same period, thousands of businesses switched to home working, creating both opportunities and challenges for office product suppliers. Certain product ranges witnessed a huge surge in demand, while others, almost overnight, became surplus to requirement.

Here, Ben Jarvis, product manager at ECI, explains some of the key attributes to look out for when considering which e-commerce solution is right for you and how they can help your business remain adaptable and dynamic, to keep you one step ahead of your competitors no matter the situation.

Perhaps more than ever before, the impact of COVID-19 has highlighted the true value of an effective e-commerce system. Over recent months I’ve spoken to countless small and medium sized businesses who now realise the importance of a strong online presence.

In an increasingly digitised and connected world, an online presence alone is simply not enough. As office product suppliers have found, without the right tools in place to personalise or amend your e-commerce platform you may struggle to keep pace with changing customer demand and as many have found, an outdated page that holds inaccurate information often results in lost sales.

Website personalisation is now viewed as one of the key ways small or medium sized businesses can compete against the ‘giants’ of Amazon or Ebay and our research found that on average, end users browsing an ECI custom designed platform spend 84% more than those browsing a standard out-of-the-box website platform.

Another frustration we often hear is that businesses are tied into a standardised e-commerce template by their website provider, which leaves them unable to quickly adapt to market trends or a sudden surge in orders – a real issue throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.

With this in mind, we’ve developed ECI HorizonWeb Plus, a powerful system designed to put an end to selecting from a list of basic design templates, instead giving customers the freedom to control their own webshop design, whilst continuing to provide the full benefits of a tightly integrated eCommerce platform.

Not only will this help set office product suppliers apart from the competition, HorizonWeb Plus customers will also benefit from ongoing access to ECI’s expertise in order to help them design and deliver fresh marketing campaigns to help achieve a personalised and relevant web experience for customers all year round. To find out more about HorizonWeb Plus and how it could help your business, please visit www.ecisolutions.ws/ds-horizonweb-plus