A great e-commerce site entails a great website that is intuitive and responsive and great content that can really sell your products. With Sitefinity e-commerce, both these aspects merge into a single versatile tool.
Sitefinity brings you the advantage of CMS and e-Commerce in a single platform. How great is it if you are reading about a new product in a blog and right there, you see a link to purchase the product or access reviews and product information? This not only gives an enhanced user experience, it also makes your e-commerce more agile.
We have seen e-commerce services that provide basic CMS features and vice versa. Sitefinity is unique in that it provides a fully loaded, comprehensive and contemporary platform for both CMS and e-commerce.
Creating e-commerce sites easily
You have the choice of using one of the Sitefinity templates or creating your own template. You can simply drag and drop widgets for products, shopping carts and checkout. It provides end-to-end webshop management where you can configure products, review orders, set up payments, shipping methods, discounts etc. Offline and online payment options are possible. Its multi-currency and multi-lingual feature helps you take your products to major markets across the world.
Manage your inventory
Sitefinity has built in inventory reports, which you can use to manage your inventory. You can set in stock/out of stock messages and add logic to send emails to warehouses for reordering an item. Avoid overselling your products and at the same time, ensure your popular products are always in stock. Inventory can be tracked both at product and at product variation levels. You can even integrate with a back-end inventory management application like NetSuite.
Provide a personalized shopping experience
You can use information like items browsed, items searched for, wish lists, average spending etc. to personalize your site for your repeat customers. The next time when the customers log in to your site, they are shown items of interest to them. This personalizes the shopping experience leading to better customer satisfaction.
Great for Mobile Commerce
Sitefinity provides a responsive design engine, which makes your e-commerce site look great on mobile devices. It also includes a mobile app builder, which you can use to customize apps for your site. The mobile device emulators give you a peek into how the actual site will look and work on a mobile.
Benefit from Claims Authentication
Claims Authentication allows users to login to websites with social accounts like their Facebook and Twitter credentials. Users reading a product review can directly view discussions around the product on Facebook. Similarly, satisfied customers can take the opportunity to recommend the product on their social walls without the hassle of logging into the site. Making it easy for people to talk about your product also helps in boosting your SEO and increasing traffic to your site.
Multi-channel campaign support
With Sitefinity, you can run campaigns on multiple channels like social media, emails, newsletters etc. The event module lets you schedule and promote events. A multi-channel campaign gives you a wider reach and attracts more buyers to your site. You can extract content from a channel or sync content across channels. RSS or Atom Syndication allows distribution of press reports and media releases. You can even publish to social media directly from within Sitefinity.
PCI-DSS compliance
Sitefinity integrates with Paypal Payments Standard and WorldPay to deliver a website that is secure. Transactions happen on an external site like Paypal, which is equipped to handle and store sensitive data so that no card data passes through your site. Integrating with PayPal and WorldPay also gives customers flexible payment options like credit/debit cards and e-wallets.
Flexible Pricing
You can set flexible prices for your valued customers and target certain offers and promotions to a few selected customer segments. This helps in achieving higher customer retention and when you show your prized customers how much you value them, they are bound to keep coming back and also act as great advocates for your cause by encouraging others to come to your site and give your products a try.
Customizable API
Sitefinity’s API allows you to develop new features and enhancements in line with your business needs. You can categorize products as you like and create custom fields for each product type.
Build great e-commerce sites with Suyati
At Suyati, we have the experience and expertise in building, customizing and maintaining cutting edge e-commerce websites. Our end-to-end e-commerce solutions are powered on your choice of popular platforms. Contact services@suyati.com to know more.
Image Credit : Sitefinity
1 comment
While I agree with everything you say, I think that a truly great eCommerce solution needs to go further. it needs to be integrated to the companies ERP and CRM as well. that way, when that customer comes and reads the blog and clicks to buy the product, their unique pricing and currency are automatically populated and and the order is automatically written into the ERP without any additional input. and once the order is in the ERP and it is picked packed and shipped the tracking number should automatically go back to the website. all of the customer order history and payment history should be available to them whether the order was placed online or phoned in. they should be able to see open invoices on line and even pay them by credit card and the ERP should automatically be updated. you should be able to create filtered lists in the company CRM and have them show up in the WCMS mailing system. B2C Customers should automatically be registered in the CRM so they can be marketed to. Unsubscribe should update CRM not just the web site. This is what Iciniti built inside Sitefinity; a web store deeply integrated to the Sitefinity WCMS, but just as deeply integrated to Sage 300 ERP and now to Sage CRM. IDC said that this is what the WCMS of the future would look like. Well the future is now.