The choice of an ecommerce platform in Singapore comes prior to the design & development of an ecommerce website. In fact, the platform you choose dictates the overall capability and strength of your website that will represent your business in Singapore. There are dozens of platforms, each claiming to be good at what they're built to do. How do you choose the right one for your Singapore-based ecommerce business?

Factors to Consider Before Using an Ecommerce Platform in Singapore

As the business owner or manager in Singapore, you can make the choice yourself or rely on a reputable ecommerce web design and development agency, you need to keep these five factors in mind.

Security Measures

With millions of cyber criminals at large, ecommerce businesses and their customers in Singapore keep facing constant threats in every step they take online. Since the ecommerce industry in SIngapore involves more financial transactions than most other business sectors, the likelihood of cybercrimes is always high in this area. This situation makes it compulsory for any platform in Singapore to have support for some industry-standard security protocols and compliance like HTTPS/ SSL, PCI, etc. Besides supporting the conventional measures, your ecommerce platform in Singapore should also be flexible enough to be compatible with the latest security implementations which are released to prevent unforeseeable vulnerabilities.

Even though you have all of these tools and guards in place, your customers in Singapore may look for more as they don't know what you have to protect your server side. You should focus on the front-end side of your ecommerce website or application. Choose an ecommerce platform that allows you to design and customise the UI in a way that customers get a feeling of credibility and security as they proceed to pay for products. On most occasions, customers leave a website at the last minute before initiating an actual transaction just because the customers in Singapore feel apprehensive of providing their financial information (details of their payment methods).

Scalability and Integrations

You may be planning on starting an ecommerce business or are already running an established company in Singapore. You probably don't want to cater to a limited number of customers without having any expectations for growth. How do you see to it? Every ecommerce website or web application, be it for a small or large audience, needs to cope with the growing number of visitors who might be concurrently using or interacting with the site. It's called scalability, an important attribute that all ecommerce websites in Singapore should have.

So, the ecommerce platform you're going to choose in Singapore should offer the flexibility to allow you to run your store as it's growing. The ecommerce platform or website has to be powerful enough to be suitable for all aspects of your operation, from the server bandwidth limit to your cross-channel business capabilities. In other words, the ecommerce platform or website itself shouldn't pose any kind of obstacles to your business growth. When providing our ecommerce web design and development services, we try to offer as much flexibility as we can to our clients in Singapore. In doing this, we may even recommend them to opt for a trendy solution called “headless commerce”. A solution like this allows for native integrations along with APIs to allow companies to experiment with various sales channels. They can also try different tech configurations for their ecommerce websites to see which bring them the desired flexibility.

Any popular ecommerce platform or website comes with an assortment of functional features to facilitate the operation of companies in Singapore. What if your ecommerce brand in Singapore is in need of a very particular function that doesn't come as a built-in feature? Well, there are third-party integrations and plugins, but the ecommerce platform you want to use should accept those tools. Here comes another consideration. All plugins may not be available for free, and they might just cost you top dollars. So, an ideal ecommerce platform is the one that includes most of the useful ecommerce tools for free. If you need to pay for a tool that does a simple job, you may end up losing a considerable portion of your capital only to set up the business.

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Support for Multiple Payment Methods

Customers in Singapore don't want to face a lot of limitations as they attempt to pay for products. Your ecommerce website or web application should have as many payment methods integrated as your customers would like to have in Singapore. In Singapore, some of the most trusted and acceptable payment methods are PayPal, HitPay, Omise, Stripe, Hoolah, Atome, and payments may be handled via some digital wallets or third-party processors. Make sure the ecommerce platform or website you'll be using supports them.

Some ecommerce platforms in Singapore support more than a dozen gateways, but digital wallets are not acceptable while some support both digital wallets and credit card processors, offering customers more flexibility as they want to make payments. This particular consideration may not be the only thing to care about, but it certainly has a huge impact on customers' tendency to rely on your ecommerce brand in Singapore. You can conduct surveys to find out which methods are preferred most by your target customers in Singapore. This way, you can avoid seeing many people abandoning their cart just because they don't see their favourite payment method on the checkout page.

Omnichannel and Accessibility Features

Singapore's e-commerce landscape keeps changing at a fast pace in an ever-changing direction. It happens because consumers here show great diversity of demands. With the rise of mobile commerce in Singapore, businesses cannot put off the thoughts for an omnichannel approach, being accessible via multiple platforms like mobile apps and websites. An ecommerce platform or website that supports this particular adoption helps you create a perception of your brand as an accessible and readily available one, which can result in better acceptability and more conversion in Singapore.

SEO Considerations

As long as you are in an ecommerce business in SIngapore, you cannot deny the importance of being able to draw customers to your ecommerce website. Is it going to happen without you doing nothing special? People don't just get to know about your ecommerce website because it is up and running. You need to get them to land on it, and search engine optimisation (SEO) is the way to go. Not all ecommerce platforms or websites have been built to support your SEO campaigns equally well. Only a few platforms are exceptionally SEO-friendly while others may not be so much. Make sure your preferred ecommerce platform features blogging tools, review functionalities, a proper way to use the domain name of your choice, and all essential and advanced SEO features. Based on the above considerations, you can make a choice, but it's always advisable to consult an ecommerce web development company in Singapore. Need to talk? Let's meet today.