So you’re interested in building an ecommerce business, or perhaps you have a shopify website already and want to supercharge your results a little.

Well, we’re not one to gatekeep, so here are 4 of our core choice platforms for running a smooth, intuitive ecomm business.

What we love about all of these businesses is that they all integrate together seamlessly, making for a smooth journey for your customers and an easy way to create killer marketing campaigns for you and your team. We’ve tested a lot of platforms and these are our go-to’s!

Need a little help setting up your online store? Get in touch with us, building brands that convert is our bread and butter.

For building your online store: Shopify

Shopify website perth

It’s become a household name that your dad probably still confuses with “Spotify”, and has been continually recognised as a staple for new businesses: It’s Shopify.

As an agency that focuses in ecommerce, we’re often still hit with the question of which platform is best to build an online store on, and our answer is always unequivocally Shopify.

Similar ecommerce platforms such as Squarespace or WooCommerce are strong competitors, but in our opinion, Shopify continually trumps them with server availability, intuitive and easy to operate backend, and highly customisable, optimised themes.

Why we ❤️ Shopify

  • Excellent inventory management: Create, edit, and manage large or small inventories easily, no matter your experience level
  • Optimised check-out & payment: Shopify’s checkout conversion rate outpaces the competition by up to 36%!
  • Theme store: Customise your store with beautifully designed themes, all of which you can try and customise for free before hitting ‘buy’
  • Always optimised: All Shopify themes come automatically optimised for all screen sizes
  • Reliable servers: In all of our years of experience with Shopify, we’ve not once had an issue with servers being overloaded or crashing
  • Comprehensive analytics: Learn everything you want to know about your customers, products, or store with comprehensive analytics at your fingertips
  • App library: Access a huge library of free and paid plugins to make your website work even harder

For smart email marketing: Klaviyo

Email marketing is a cornerstone to building an engaged and warm audience who feel connected to your brand, and our go-to choice for this is always Klaviyo. Paired with Shopify, Klaviyo is a highly advanced tool for segmenting your customer base down to the most specific detail.

Want to message people who live in Perth, have been on your website in the last 60 days, and have placed at least one order — easy! Want to message someone at 5am on their birthday, but only if they’ve purchased a specific item from you at a specific time — odd strategy, but you absolutely can with Klaviyo.

Klaviyo’s drag and drop email builder does admittedly have a steeper learning curve than most ESPs such as Mailchimp, however with the right understanding you can build stunning emails that feel elevated, professional, and optimised on any screen.

Why we ❤️ Klaviyo

  • Super specific segmentation: As we mentioned above, Klaviyo has world-class segmentation systems that allow you to get as deep or shallow with your audience targeting as you like
  • Powerful flow builders: Klaviyo’s automated flow builders are, in our opinion, the superior system for any ESP on the market. With a visual builder, high level filters and conditional split functionality, Klaviyo makes it easy to automate as much as you see fit
  • Customisable sign-up and pop-up forms: Klaviyo pop-ups and sign-up forms are the sleekest on the market. With endless customisation, automatic accessibility checks, and an intuitive building interface, you’ll have your next lead magnet created faster than your pop-up, well, pops up.
  • High-level drag & drop builder: Build beautiful emails with easy drag and drop functionality, and with an easy option to toggle between mobile and desktop views, and an ability to upload screen-specific elements.
  • Email optimisation made easy: On top of the ability to customise both desktop and mobile views of each email communication, Klaviyo also automatically analyses the size of your email and warns you of any potential clipping issues.

For collecting feedback from your audience: Typeform

Interactive forms are a powerful way to gather information directly from your customers and prospects. Whether it’s a ‘Find the right product for you’ quiz, or a feedback survey form, having easy access to a fast and customisable interactive form is crucial, and our choice is Typeform.

Why we ❤️ Typeform

  • Easy customisation: Making your Typeform on-brand is easy with replicable visual themes. Add imagery, custom fonts, edit the colour palette and more to make your Typeform feel seamlessly integrated with your website
  • Integration: Typeform integrates with Shopify, Klaviyo, and a whole host of other softwares, meaning you can take your collected data and email people directly based on their answers
  • Powerful logic builders: Typeform’s logic maps and functionality is superior and easy to get a hang of — and once you do, you will realise just how powerful of a marketing tool interactive forms can become
  • Your collected data, at a glance: Typeform collects and compiles all of your data in a clear and easy to interpret display. Take a look at means and averages, most common answers, individual users’ answers, or the general sentiment across the board.

For social media scheduling: Later

Organic social media is a bittersweet beast: It can be a sandbox of play and experimentation with your brand and audience, and can be a lot of fun, but it can likewise be laborious to manage, upload, and coordinate large content libraries on the fly.

That’s where scheduling apps come in, and with a million to choose from, we favour Later.

Easy to use, easy to organise content, powerful abilities to cross-platform post and expedite your scheduling process, Later is a must for any busy brand owner.

Why we ❤️ Later

  • Content library: Upload all of your content and creative to the Later library, tag it, and upload as you need — a gamechanger for keeping numerous assets organised and at the ready
  • AI caption suggestions: While we warn you to not rely on AI for captions (people can tell!), when the creative block hits on post #20 of your scheduling block, AI caption suggestions can really help the creative juices start to flow
  • Grid preview functionality: Send preview links of the upcoming scheduled content to yourself or any collaborator to preview what your Insta feed will look like once all content is live
  • Saved hashtags & captions: Have a list of your go-to hashtags or regularly used copy for your captions? Save them within Later and add them to any post at the click of a button. Easy as!

Bonus: For restock notifications: Back In Stock Customer Alerts App

There’s nothing worse than warming a potential customer up to your product to the point where they’re on your product page, ready to purchase, and it’s out of stock. It happens! But what we don’t want to do is miss out on that sale all together. That’s where apps like Back In Stock come in handy.

Back In Stock Customer Alerts is a free app that you can plugin to your Shopify site. When an item is out of stock, it creates an automated option to allow people to sign up for restock notifications. So when your item comes back in stock, they will be alerted that their time to shop is now.

We’ve found significant success with using restock notifications — we find that people act on the notifications at a fairly steady rate, capturing many sales that we otherwise would have lost.