5 Ecommerce Apps to Streamline Your Holiday Selling Operations

Let’s face it: there are less than 12 weeks until Black Friday and Cyber Monday. If you’re like me, you may be playing a bit of catch up on the production side to get ready for the cooler temperatures, gift giving and the inevitable holiday self-gifting. After all, holiday shoppers will spend 15% of their shopping total on themselves.

With all your offline activities happening around the clock, it’s important to mitigate any potential issues that may arise with your online store. Whether you’re brand new to the holiday selling season or a notorious veteran, there are always emerging apps to help relieve some of your biggest pain points.

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With holiday shopping happening around the clock, it’s important to mitigate potential issues.
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Here are some of my favorite ecommerce apps to help keep things moving quickly and efficiently through and beyond the holiday season.

1. Skubana — Free

Skubana is an all-in-one app that combines your multiple sales channels and warehouse locations into one dashboard. By combining all of your information into one interface, there’s no need for multiple tabs open in your browser. What’s more, Skubana will make real-time recommendations and provide inventory action items to help keep a finger on the pulse of your store and mitigate any issues before they become a problem.

To help get your holiday orders out the door quick and to your customers on time, try Skubana’s built-in shipping module. Within the same platform, you can print shipping labels, set up dropshipping or route your orders to a 3PL.

2. Inventory Planner — Free Trial + $19.99/month

When I moved to a third party warehouse last summer, my daily process and how I ran my store was changed forever. I needed something to fill the void of not having eyes on my inventory.

Inventory Planner helps to monitor, plan and optimize your inventory. The app provides lending advice on overstocked items and uses sales data to forecast items that are understocked. You can also sort items by a number of product variables to better understand what is sitting in your warehouse. Considering 79% of holiday shoppers will switch brands if an item is out of stock, inventory management could not be more important this holiday season.

3. Zendesk — Free Trial + plans starting at $20/year

If you’ve read any of my past posts, you know I am a Zendesk fan. Zendesk is a help desk software that manages email inquiries as well as front-end FAQs. Help reduce the amount of emails you receive this holiday selling season by publishing articles on shipping and return policies, product instruction guides and more. If you find that you’re responding to emails with the same answer, you can create macros on the backend to save you time and effort. With a few clicks, you can pass emails between departments without the customer noticing a thing.

4. Olark Chat — Free Trial + $243/month

Having a well trained live chat operator available to answer questions can be the difference between making or losing a sale. As an online retailer, it is vital to make the shopping experience as easy as an in-store one. In fact, 64% of shoppers say in-store experience has a greater influence on their purchasing decision than online research, while 78% of consumers have bailed on an online transaction because of a poor service experience.

Don’t leave any room for bad customer experience. Try Olark Chat to give your customers an easy way to get all of their questions answered by a brand representative. Olark helps funnel customers into a well-designed backend that makes it easy to see where the customer is browsing on your site. Be sure to clearly display live chat hours in your online store’s header or footer so customers aren’t left hanging.

5. Picreel Exit Offer — plans starting at $19/month

Picreel Exit Offer converts website visitors into targeted leads. This app deploys intent software within your Bigcommerce store to keep track of customer mouse movement and triggers a promotion popup to drive conversion and revenue. Using retargeting, the software will keep your products top-of-mind for customers by showing up on third-party websites.

In all, these apps are just the tip of the iceberg in making this holiday season your best yet. By optimizing your operation, you’ll prevent poor customer experiences from snowballing and drive revenue while you sleep.

Visit the Bigcommerce App Marketplace to find more apps to help optimize and streamline your ecommerce operations.