Top 5 Ideas For Consolidating Your E-Commerce Tech Stack for Optimal Performance

Shubham Kumar

Mar 30, 2023 — 7 min read

Online retail business is anticipated to grow and surpass 7 trillion by 2025. This raging popularity of e-commerce worldwide instantly grows your competition and customer expectations.

Hence, to sustain your business in the e-commerce arena, leveraging technology to the best is essential.

It helps enable seamless interoperability and accommodates various other operations of your business, including handling customer requests and analyzing business data quickly.

For this, you should identify the best tech stack for your online store and how they can help grow and manage your business.

This article explains the importance of consolidating your firm's tech stack and lists the top ways to induce your business for optimal performance.

Let’s begin!

What is E-Commerce Tech Stack?

An e-commerce tech stack is a collection of all the tools and technologies that helps in the successful running of an e-commerce store.

Here are two types of tech stacks that help in the proper functioning of an e-commerce website:

Back-end tech stack: The tools and technologies involved in this tech stack are responsible for keeping the e-commerce websites and applications functional and updated. The elements of this tech stack are interdependent and interact with each other for the better and more efficient functioning of the e-commerce store.
Front-end tech stack: This includes tools and technologies that directly deal with the end users. Generally, this tech stack is compiled to improve the user experience and make the website appealing to them.

Here are the main components of a tech stack:

Framework
Digital Platforms
Tools
Applications
Programming Languages
Databases

Importance of a Tech Stack for E-Commerce Businesses

Here are the top reasons to consolidate your e-commerce tech stack:

An effective tech stack determines the speed, security, efficiency, and maintenance of your e-commerce website.
The databases and storage of your digital store are managed well by your tech stack.
Using the right management tools in your tech stack can help you manage customer-related data, including order placements and reviews.
Front-end tech stacks include elements that are viewed and used by end users. Hence, proper use of these helps provide users with an engaging and friendly experience. It influences the visitor's decision to convert into customers.
A well-thought consolidation of the tech stack helps simplify complex website programs and eliminate redundancy.
With the right tech stack, you can combine software and tools wherever needed for better functioning of your website and business.
A consolidated tech stack saves your team’s time and effort. A long time-taking process can be finished within minutes using the right technologies and tools. Not just time, but a tech stack is also designed to control your store’s cost by investing one time and reducing the cost of the workforce.

Key Areas to Create Your Tech Stack Around

Here are the key areas to focus on while consolidating your tech stack for optimal business performance:

Order Management: For e-commerce to work efficiently, keeping track of inventory and orders as you receive them through various channels in real-time is essential. For this, you need an effective inventory management system.
Fulfillment and Shipping: Selecting the proper order fulfillment and shipping tools is one of the critical aspects of consolidating your tech stack. These tools are meant to speed up the process of packing, picking items, shipping, and tracking processes.
Payment Processing: It is essential to focus on the payment area of your e-commerce store. Finding a reliable and secure payment portal like PayPal or Square that marks and identifies risky and fishy transactions. Easy integrations, encryption, and security should be among your top criteria for choosing a payment portal for your e-commerce store.
Product Information Management: Focusing on finding product information management is essential for any business, including an e-commerce store, as they store, organize and handle all your product data, content, and material required to promote and sell your products on various channels.
Conversion Management: It is essential to analyze your customer’s queries and behavior and provide them with ease of contacting you on all the channels. Choosing the right conversion analysis tools like Finteza to measure conversion rate and customer behavior based on their interaction with your e-commerce website is essential to provide a user-friendly experience to the users in future. Using top analytical tools, you get a clear idea of how your website is performing with audiences in terms of page views, traffic, session time, and visitors. You can check your website performance in real-time as shown in the below image and take actions to improve your overall conversion funnel. You can also filter the data to compare performance on a daily, monthly, and yearly basis.

Source

Data and Analytics: Another essential aspect of consolidating your tech stack is to include data analytics and performance management systems. This will help your e-commerce store have a complete track of your company’s performance.
Employees Management: For effective team management, you need to focus on incorporating an employee management system like Zoho to speed up your work optimally. Implementation of an employee management tool in your business operations helps you with all the functions related to your team as displayed in the below image for an efficient and optimal business performance.

Source

5 Best Methods To Consolidate Your E-Commerce Tech Stack

Here are the ideas to consolidate your e-commerce tech stack:

1- Consider Customer as Top Priority

Before selecting your tech stack for your e-commerce store, always consider incorporating the tools and platforms for your websites that work towards improving your website’s interface, user experience, and customer access.

Here are key features you should consider while building your tech stack for a better customer experience:

Customers want easy and personalized interactions. Include tools and channels for your e-commerce store that provides a well-built personalized interface, 24x7 chatbot and assistance, optimized product descriptions, and easy navigation.
Getting customer reviews and feedback is essential to provide them with the best experience. As an e-commerce store, you must include your tech stack with a real-time customer insight tool to understand and serve them better.
With evolving and growing customer expectations, you must focus on adding elements in your tech stack that are flexible enough to change with the ever-changing trends.
When stacking your tech suite, customer security should be among your top priority lists. Go for software and platforms that offer sure-shot customer security and are unrelated to any data breach.
Customer and your brand relationship are not restricted till sales. To keep your customers engaged with your business for a long time, incorporate a tech kit in your e-commerce functioning that emphasizes acquiring new customers and works to retain the existing ones at the same time provides insights on their engagement on your website as shown in the following image.
Website speed is one of the critical areas to retain your customers. This can lead to losing your customers to competitors. Build your tech stack with optimized high-speed software and tools that can provide a hassle-free, smooth user experience.

2- Audit Your Existing Tech Stack

Before proceeding with your tech stack consolidation, you should know what tools add value to your e-commerce platform's performance.

Make a master sheet for all the components of your tech stack. This will help in knowing what kind of tools and platforms work best for the optimal performance of your store. Also, you will be able to identify the gaps in your workflow.

3- Conduct an Internal Survey To Know Your Team’s Need

Ultimately, it's your team members who will be using the tech stack. Hence, it is crucial to understand their needs and what could be done to make their work easier.

The whole purpose of consolidating the tech stack is to resolve their challenges with less effort and workforce.

Consult each of the team members and survey each team. Based on their industry knowledge and expertise, they’ll convey their requirements.

You also need to ensure that all the elements of the stack they choose are compatible and align with the other team’s stack.

4- Incorporate Data Management System

Effective data management and analysis are essential for any business. Gathering and managing your company and employee data can be time- and effort-consuming.

Data management software can do wonders by generating and managing higher volume data within a few minutes.

Here are the key benefits of implementing a data management system in your tech stack:

It centralizes the source of business information and stores all types of business data.
It ensures accurate and updated data. It also eliminates the scope of scattered and useless data.
Centralizing your business data on a data management system makes it available to multiple individuals within many departments. This ensures that every section of the organization works and contributes to the company's success.
Data management software not only improves the company's internal management but also ensures proper management of customer data. This automatically consolidated customer data helps you understand your consumer demographics to serve them better.
A data management system helps in your business's efficient and effective functioning by enabling informed decisions and updates. It also eliminates the chances of blunders, data loss, and data breaches.

5- Estimate a Budget

Decide a monthly, quarterly, or yearly budget for your tech stack. Designing a tech budget for each team’s tools and software for managing your company's cost. This helps ensure that your tech stack is affordable for the longest time.

Compare the prices and services of each tool and software and select the one that fits your fixed budget. Try not to go overboard with the cost to automate your company’s performance.

You can also opt for the complimentary trials of the tools and software and make your team use them before investing in them for a longer time.

Conclusion

The secret sauce to optimizing your e-commerce store is having a consolidated list of tech stacks ready with you that helps manage various aspects of your business with ease and automation.

Above listed ideas would have helped you with the tips and tricks needed to stack the critical technical elements for your e-commerce keeping customer, profitability, and efficiency in mind.