
Written by
John Shieldsmith06/26/2026
Your Complete Guide to Must-Have Ecommerce Features
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Key highlights:
Ecommerce features are any capabilities that come with a platform, requiring no integration.
The right ecommerce features can make a big impact on conversion rates, helping you remove friction from the customer experience.
There are several core ecommerce features, including product catalog functionality, shopping carts and checkout, inventory and order management, and a mobile-friendly site.
Many features are considered nice-to-haves or business-specific, including those that enhance marketing efforts, automate workflows, and provide further analytics.
Must-have ecommerce features in 2026 (and beyond)
Whether you’re a thriving large business or just starting your ecommerce journey, it’s difficult to know which ecommerce platforms are going to lift you up, rather than hold you back. This is especially true in this day and age, where advancements are coming faster than ever with no signs of slowing down.
It’s not like you can just ask someone who works for an ecommerce platform if they’re great, because of course they’ll reply, “Well, duh.” But, knowing which ecommerce features are a must-have in today’s climate? Now that, that just might work.
You wouldn’t bite right into a calzone without knowing what’s inside. So, why take the plunge with an ecommerce platform without first understanding which features matter, and why?
Let’s take a look at the key features you need to do everything from build trust, deliver a mobile-friendly web design, create a killer storefront, and beyond.
What are ecommerce features?
Ecommerce features are the various elements or functionalities that make up an ecommerce platform.
Every ecommerce platform has unique features, but typically they all include the basics needed to run an online store. This can mean everything from support for multiple pages to some form of checkout and support for payment gateways.
Core features vs. advanced features: what's the difference?
There’s no single set of rules around which ecommerce features are core and which are advanced. But, in general, you can categorize them by whether they provide barebones functionality, or something more. Basically every calzone has pizza sauce inside, but not all of them have chopped peperoncino.
Core ecommerce features:
Catalog support: The ability to host products on your site and store product information.
Payment processors: Support for payment processors, enabling purchases.
Cart and checkout: Basic cart functionality that stores products, and a checkout flow.
Inventory management: Basic tracking of SKU levels.
Advanced ecommerce features:
Customer segmentation tools: Automation that suggests customer segments based on data.
Personalization: Automatically personalized product pages, recommendations, emails, and more.
Automated tax calculation: Automatic sales tax calculations for your business.
Abandoned cart tools: Automated email sends, SMS messaging, and more.
In general, advanced ecommerce features are typically data-driven, focusing on optimizing workflows, driving customer loyalty, improving store performance, and more. Meanwhile, core functionality ensures your store simply works.
Why the right features directly impact conversion rate.
A set of great power tools won’t build a house, but they certainly make it easier than using your bare hands. The same is true for the right ecommerce features.
You’d be hard pressed to find any reputable stats that draw a 1:1 correlation between a certain feature and conversion rate, BUT, plenty of evidence reinforces the methods those tools enable.
For instance, 93% of marketers say personalization drives conversions by way of more purchases or leads. Meanwhile, retailers offering curbside pickup have a conversion rate that’s 4.1%, versus the conversion of 2.9% for the top 1,000 retailers.
Without the right ecommerce features, personalization and curbside pickup aren’t happening. The same is true for countless other efforts that drive conversions.
Core ecommerce features every store needs
From core to advanced features, there are a number of must-haves in this day and age. People want personalized marketing, deliveries have to be timely, and out-of-stock might as well mean “out of order.”
Fortunately, the following list contains everything you need to thrive. First, let’s start with the core ecommerce features you can’t live without.
Product catalog.
A functioning catalog is paramount to an ecommerce store. You can’t sell products very well if you have nowhere to list them.
A product catalog should have the following, at minimum:
Support product information: Title, description, materials, etc.
Stock indicator: Whether something is available or not.
Price: Original or sale price of the item, along with SKU data on the backend.
Images: Support for one or more high-quality product images without extreme compression.
Video: The ability to add at least one video to a product page is huge, as 85% of consumers say a video convinced them to buy something.
Search functionality: Basic search that pulls keywords and categories.
Product categories: Product categories are another must, allowing you to classify if something is a shoe, jacket, calzone, barrel of toxic sludge, and so on.
Related products: Similar products should show up on the page underneath the product someone is looking at. (More advanced offerings will personalize this based on user behavior and customer data.)
The right product catalog should make it easy for people to find what they need. Not only this, today, your product catalog plays a big role in getting noticed by AI search engines, like Gemini or Perplexity.
Speaking of, make sure you’re current with the latest strategies on having agentic AI-ready product pages.
Shopping cart and checkout experience.
Once people find what they’re looking for on your site, the next order of online business is making sure they can easily save it for later or buy it.
Any worthwhile shopping cart should come with:
Add to cart: Allow for products to be added.
View cart: Let people view their cart.
Persistent storage: The ability to hold products even after a browser is closed.
Checkout: A button that leads users to the checkout.
Once people have done their shopping, the checkout experience needs to step in and deliver:
Order summary: A list of what the customer has in their cart and is about to purchase.
Subtotal: A clear view of the order subtotal.
Shipping selection: Clear options for shipping with shipping costs.
General fields: Address, name, billing, and so on.
Secure payment: Support for numerous payment options, credit cards, Paypal, and so on, via a secure payment gateway.
Beyond core functionality, the checkout process itself should be user-friendly and quick to navigate. No matter how great the platform, it’s a good idea to actively practice checkout optimization.
Inventory management.
One of the core tenets of online shopping is the convenience it offers. Accurate, comprehensive inventory management is a big part of this.
To ensure you’re staying on top of stock and avoiding overselling, your ecommerce platform should have the following inventory management features:
Stock notifications: Automatic updates for low and out-of-stock items.
Purchase orders (PO): Easily generates PO documents for B2B models and suppliers.
Multi-channel support: Monitors stock and orders across marketplaces.
Poor inventory management won’t just lead to missed sales, but can have a big impact on the customer experience. If you’ve got something the people want to buy listed on your site, you better make sure it’s in stock. Inventory management is the key.
Order management and processing.
A handful of essential order management features can help you stay on top of the post-purchase timeline, while also improving the odds of a good user experience for shoppers.
Your platform should help you stay on top of orders with:
Real-time order updates: Accurate, real-time status updates on where an order is in the system.
Dashboard view: A centralized view of your orders, sales, customer data, and so on, regardless of the channel.
Shipping generation: Automatic shipping updates and label generation for your warehouse team, and an order confirmation email for customers.
Return management: An easy way to handle customer returns and communications.
The above are incredibly barebones, so almost every platform should have them. If they don’t, run. (And grab a calzone on your way home.)
Product management features
Now that we’ve got the barebones things you can’t live without, the marinaras and cheeses of the dish, it’s time to cover the nitty gritty. The bulk editing tools. The custom SKUs. The ground Italian sausage. (Never write hungry.)
First, let’s take a look at advanced product management features that can help you showcase your products in all their glory on your ecommerce website.
Bulk product import and editing.
As your ecommerce business grows, so will your catalog. Importing products into new marketplaces and updating listings can become a real hassle the larger your product roster.
With bulk product imports and editing, you can easily edit product descriptions, prices, and more en masse across your site and any marketplaces.
For example, if you’re selling on your site and Amazon, you could edit your product description or price once, and then the tool will handle the rest.
While some ecommerce platforms don’t offer this kind of functionality out of the box, you can accomplish it with product information management (PIM) integrations.
Variant management (size, color, SKU).
If you have various types of a product, variant management is a must.
For instance, if you have a product that comes in different sizes, colors, flavors, and so on, you need a way to easily manage these. Without proper variant management, you’re left with different product entries for each version, which leads to tons of bloat.
With variant management, you can have one product listing that supports different sizes, colors, SKUs, finishes, and so on. Your backend data stays clean, and your ecommerce site stays nice and tidy.
Inventory management and low-stock alerts.
A healthy inventory management system avoids stockouts and overstocking, quickly fulfills orders, and optimizes warehouse space. This means less revenue leakage and happier customers.
To make this happen, look for a platform with these advanced inventory management features:
Product demand forecasting: Pulls from historical sales data to predict stock needs ahead of time.
Multi-channel syncing: Real-time inventory syncing across your store and additional marketplaces and channels.
Automatic ordering: Once a set stock level is reached, the system can automatically order products from suppliers.
Routing support: Automatic, intelligent routing assistance can optimize use of your fulfillment network and warehouses.
The above features can help you wrangle products, sometimes even on the go with a mobile app. But, even with the best inventory management tools, it’s still important to follow general inventory management best practices.
Digital product support.
If you currently sell or plan on selling digital products, like reports, software, ebooks, and so on, your ecommerce platform needs to specifically offer digital product support.
With digital product support, you can list digital products just as you would a physical good. You can also offer a checkout experience, order management, and everything else a traditional ecommerce sale entails.
Payment and checkout features
Have you ever wanted to buy something at a store and wound up having to wait around for an employee to get a key, unlock a cage, and free the product as if it’s some kind of animal? This is the last thing you want in an online experience.
With the right payment and checkout features, you can ensure customers have as few hurdles as possible when buying your products.
Accepted payment methods and gateways.
Your online store needs to not only offer a secure payment process that protects customer data, but also has to accept the right payments. Otherwise, you risk alienating those who would otherwise buy from you.
In fact, insufficient payment methods are one of the top ten reasons people abandon their carts.
Ideally, your ecommerce platform should come with expansive payment support right out of the box. On top of this, it should support payment integrations, allowing you to add any missing payment types.
For example, BigCommerce offers 65 pre-integrated payment gateways, including BigCommerce Payments powered by Paypal, and more than 80 payment and security integrations readily available.
Guest checkout vs. account checkout.
In a perfect world, people would gladly make an account with your site. The world isn’t perfect, dragons aren’t real, and people don’t want to make an account. So much so, that 19% of cart abandoners say they left a purchase because they were forced to make an account.
If you don’t want to miss out on these sales, make sure your platform supports guest checkout.
You can still promote the benefits of making an account — faster customer support, exclusive discounts, and so on — without penalizing those who only want to buy and get out.
Cart abandonment recovery tools.
Speaking of cart abandonment, it happens. Just over 70% of the time, as a matter of fact.
Your ecommerce platform should help recover these rollaway carts with:
Automated emails: Customizable emails that send when a cart is left.
Coupons: Automatic coupon generation and inclusion in emails.
Cart analytics: In-depth data on abandoned cart rates and trends.
You can’t recover every cart, but with a little support and ongoing efforts, you can make up lost sales and drive customer loyalty.
Shipping and fulfillment features
Timely, affordable, accurate shipping is a pretty big deal. Costly shipping alone can lead to 90% of shoppers taking their business elsewhere.
Fortunately, the right platform features can help you ship a great experience.
Real-time shipping rate calculation.
It happens to all of us at some point: you find the perfect product, add it to your cart, and then realize shipping costs a small fortune.
With real-time shipping rate calculation, you can help customers avoid a nasty surprise during the final stages of checkout. This also enables them to make a more informed decision around which shipping option they want to take.
Multi-carrier support.
Vendor lock-in is the pits, and package carriers are no exception. Find an ecommerce platform that supports multiple carriers, like UPS, FedEx, and so on.
With multi-carrier support, you can ensure customers are getting the best rates on shipping. Coupled with the real-time shipping estimation tool, and you’ve got a recipe for success.
Returns management.
Returns aren’t fun, but they happen. Having the right functionality in place makes this unpleasant process more pleasant for you and customers alike.
Make sure your ecommerce platform delivers the goods on returns with:
Label generation: The moment a customer confirms they want to return an item, the system can generate a shipping label.
Return rules: The system should support predefined return rules, like the return window, which products are eligible, etc.
Real-time tracking: Tracking should follow the product on its journey in the system, and physically as it ships back.
Self-service returns: Customers should be able to easily initiate a return in the portal.
A smooth return process will only help both parties involved. And, if you make it easy to return, loyal customers will feel more confident purchasing and taking a chance.
Dropshipping and 3PL integrations.
Both dropshippers and third-party logistics (3PL) companies can be valuable pieces of your ecommerce shipping strategy. And with the right integration support for them on your ecommerce platform, it can be a breeze to kick off.
Find a platform that offers integrations with major dropshippers and 3PL providers, as this will make it easier to get up and running with this shipping support.
For example, BigCommerce has 160+ shipping and fulfillment integrations readily available, with product reviews displayed for each so you can make an informed decision.
Marketing and SEO features
Both marketing and search engine optimization (SEO) are a must when you’re running an online business. Both of them are also a major nightmare for many business owners.
(Spoiler alert: They don’t have to be.)
There are a number of marketing and SEO features that many ecommerce platforms come with, all of which can help you streamline efforts and drive traffic to your store.
Built-in SEO controls (meta, URL, structured data).
Staying on top of ecommerce SEO is no small task. The bigger your site gets, the bigger the SEO headache, too
With built-in SEO controls, like the following, you can manage SEO, and continue to scale:
Metadata control: Ability to edit meta descriptions, meta titles, and image alt text.
Optimized URLs: Automatic generation of SEO-friendly URLs across pages.
Automatic redirects: Automatic creation of 301 redirects anytime you change a product name, remove a page, and so on.
Mobile optimization: From your homepage to your product pages, everything should look great on a mobile device.
Even with the best SEO functionality and tools around, keep in mind: SEO takes time. The above will help you keep SEO in check and follow best practices, but expect things to take weeks and months before they really take off.
Email marketing and automation.
Email marketing is both a great way to recover lost sales and abandoned carts, and a powerful marketing tool in general.
Find a platform that supports email marketing efforts with:
Customizable email templates you can tailor to your brand.
Automatic email sends with custom triggers you set.
Analytics on how emails are performing with each segment.
Order confirmation emails that send automatically.
Integrated functionality is the bee’s knees, but a platform with extensive integration support can help you do even more here as well. For instance, BigCommerce integrates with major email players like Klaviyo, Mailchimp, and Privy, allowing you to automate segmentation, send SMS blasts, and more.
Discounts and coupons.
Thirty-percent of shoppers say they recently bought something online, as opposed to in-store, because of online-exclusive deals. In other words, discounts and coupons are kind of a big deal.
Your ecommerce platform should help here, providing you:
Product discounts: The ability to add a percentage or flat amount off entire brands, specific products, or categories.
Order-level: Discounts that apply to a specific order, either when the cart meets a threshold or on a per-customer basis.
Shipping discounts: Free shipping thresholds, along with discounts on shipping as a promo option you can run.
Customer group-specific discounts: Discounts that apply to customer groups, which are especially useful in a B2B setting and for promoting discounted products or sales to specific audiences.
Just a friendly reminder to avoid running wild with discounts, as you want to make sure you’re staying in the green. Unless they’re hugs, you don’t want to be giving everything away.
Social commerce and channel integrations.
Social commerce, the act of using social media to help sell your products (and even selling directly within social platforms) is a core part of modern ecommerce. Like it or not.
The top ecommerce platforms today can make this easier to manage, both with built-in features like the following, and integrations:
Social media integrations: Sync products with TikTok, easily create shoppable Instagram posts, integrate your catalog with Facebook Shops, and more.
Unified inventory: Platform should centralize product inventory across marketplaces AND social platforms.
Retargeting: Platform should use your catalog to inform personalized retargeting campaigns for social media.
An added perk of social commerce is that it helps you amass user generated content (UGC) and build social proof, like customer reviews and posts singing your praise. Given 47% of people won’t buy from a company that has less than 20 reviews, reviews are a must.
Security and compliance features
Keeping your customers and their information safe are a must, and will only become more important and difficult to manage as your business grows. But, it’s well worth the effort, both for maintaining trust and protecting your company’s integrity, too.
SSL certificates and HTTPS.
SSL certificates and HTTPS are modern security protocols put in place to make websites more secure. Once a nice-to-have, these are now a must, and fortunately available with virtually all reputable ecommerce platforms.
PCI DSS compliance.
Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) compliance is required if you’re processing payments and storing card information. There are 12 steps to PCI DSS compliance, which can make it overwhelming, especially for many newer ecommerce businesses.
With an ecommerce platform that prioritizes PCI DSS compliance, you can streamline the process, stress less, and keep customer data safe.
For example, BigCommerce security comes with tokenization for credit card information, third-party monitoring for constant scanning, advanced encryption, and more. This makes PCI DSS compliance easier to achieve while giving you peace of mind.
Fraud detection and prevention.
Running an online business, you’ll inevitably come face-to-face with fraud at some point. With the right detection and prevention in place, you can make sure the fraudsters don’t get the best of you.
Take BigCommerce, for example, which provides:
Multi-layered fraud prevention tools.
reCAPTCHA to stop bots from bombarding checkout flows.
Optional 3-D Secure, which requires a customer to verify their identity via bank.
Third-party integrations with Signifyd, FraudLabs Pro, and other reputable security providers.
The longer your business exists, the more likely it is you’ll encounter fraud. That doesn’t mean you or your customers have to fall victim to it. The right platform can serve as an excellent line of defense. (Like the crust of a calzone.)
GDPR and privacy compliance tools.
The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is a set of European policies required for businesses operating in Europe, and for those with customers in Europe.
In other words, if you have any plans of selling outside the US, or if your site uses cookies for analytics and tracking of people in Europe, GDPR compliance is a must.
Your platform should facilitate this, with features like:
Right to be Forgotten: Permanent removal of a customer’s account from your site within 14 days of deletion.
User Access: Customers have full access to log in and see their personal information, and the ability to make corrections.
Data Privacy Settings: Clear requests for customer consent whenever it’s required.
Data exports: Export customer data into a CSV file upon customer request, making it easy to give them a copy.
If your platform lacks the above, you’ll likely require numerous third-party tools to handle various pieces of GDPR compliance.
Analytics and reporting features
Imagine running a restaurant where nobody is allowed to tell you how their food was. All you can do is watch in horror as they take bite after bite, and hope it’s good. Running an ecommerce site without analytics or reporting is exactly that scenario, only it’s surely bitter.
There are thousands of marketing analytics and reporting tools out there, making it difficult to find the right one. Instead, find an ecommerce platform that takes some of these burden on with:
Real-time reporting: Easily access comprehensive views of store performance, average order value, conversion rates, and more.
Site performance: General overview of site visitors, bounce rates, and other core metrics.
Cart reports: Quickly check abandonment rate, which segments abandon the most, average cart value, and more.
Product performance reports: Product and category-level performance, top and bottom sellers, review scores, and beyond.
A platform with proper integration support can also go a long way. For example, BigCommerce provides all of the above (and more), while also offering nearly 40 analytics integrations right on their marketplace, with additional support for more.
Sales and revenue reporting.
You know the old adage, “In this business, nothing can be said to be certain except a dire need for sales and revenue reporting.” Or was it death and taxes?
Quality sales and revenue reporting can help you stay on top of tax liabilities, but also allow for forecasting, better inventory management, and so much more. This is why you need a platform that offers:
Accounting reports: Stay on top of tax liabilities with sales tax and accounting reports.
Customers: Average customer lifetime value, revenue per customer, and rate of return vs. new customers.
Sales tax: Sales taxes collected during a set period, helping you stay on top of tax liabilities.
There’s no replacing a real human accountant, but you can make both your life and theirs easier when you’ve got the right functionality preventing a total numerical disaster.
Inventory and product performance reports.
It’s important to know how your site as a whole is doing, but it’s also important to know which products are the cat’s meow, and which belong in the litter box.
Your ecommerce platform can help you determine which products to lean in on, but only if it offers:
Merchandising reports: Which SKUs are doing the best by total sales and revenue.
Purchasing behavior: View customer shopping behavior around individual products, see which are added to carts and abandoned most, which convert the best, and more.
Marketplace reporting: See how products are performing on your store versus your marketplaces, like Amazon or social media.
Once again, a platform with extensive integration support can also do much of the above and more. But, finding a platform with these features right out of the box can keep things nice and clean on the backend, and financially.
Integrations and app ecosystem
With a little gumption and duct tape, many platforms can integrate with a number of tools. But, expanding capabilities as needed is much easier if you find a platform that comes with a bunch of integrations and apps right out of the gate.
For instance, BigCommerce offers 1,200+ integrations and apps right on the marketplace. Not to mention, many tools support integrations with BigCommerce, even if they’re not featured on our market.
App marketplace and third-party integrations.
Diving into the world of integrations can feel a lot like stepping back into the wild west. And not the fun Hollywood kind.
A platform that comes with a marketplace can take a lot of the guesswork and risk out of your search, giving you a safe place to find supported integrations. (See: BigCommerce’s giant integration market mentioned above.)
As you review ecommerce providers, check whether they offer a marketplace or tout major integrations anywhere on their site. If the platform is open-source and doesn’t mention a marketplace, grab your cowboy hat.
API access and headless commerce.
Finding a platform with API access and support opens up a whole world of possibilities. You can more easily integrate any number of tools, let developers run wild, and embrace headless. No, not the horseman.
Headless commerce makes it possible to decouple the frontend from the backend of your ecommerce site via an API-first approach. From there, your developers can continue to work on the backend, while marketers stand up new pages and make small customer-facing tweaks without interruption.
BigCommerce is a great example, taking headless to the next level with a composable commerce approach. This enables you to build a best-in-class platform that uses your favorite tools, all linked on the backend. From there, data can flow freely, automations can function, and you can streamline operations like never before.
ERP, CRM, and POS integrations.
Speaking of integrations, your platform can do a whole lot more when it’s able to integrate with a few major tools and systems. Make online business life a little easier for yourself with:
ERP integration: Tear down data silos between teams, power automated order processing and inventory management and more, and benefit from a unified customer profile.
CRM integration: Give salespeople a unified customer view, enable automated customer segmentation and more, sync purchase history, and scale your customer database right along with your business.
POS integration: Connect your POS with your ecommerce platform to sync sales and inventory across every channel, enable batch data updates, more easily power loyalty programs, and even sync in-person sales with online.
If you’re already heavily invested in any of the above platforms, it’s a good idea to check whether an ecommerce platform supports integrations with them. This will make migration that much easier.
How to choose ecommerce software features
It’d be great to snap your fingers and have all of the above functionality at once. Some platforms can do basically everything mentioned so far (Wink, wink, BigCommerce) while others can’t, or can if you’re willing to pony up for a high-tier plan.
To make sure you find the right platform that has the features you need, and some you might need shortly down the road, take the following approach.
Step 1: Audit your current store gaps.
Auditing your current online store can take time, so it’s best to break it into various categories.
Customer experience audit.
First, put yourself in your customer’s shoes and see where the online experience falls short.
Was checkout awful?
Mobile experience lacking?
Product pages not clearly organized?
Did site search yield accurate results?
Anywhere the experience feels lackluster is a clear gap or problem area to address. Think about the aforementioned features and how they speak to any issues you’ve identified at this point.
Processes audit.
Next, look at where processes are a bottleneck. Time tracking, everyone’s favorite form of micromanagement, can actually be useful here.
Run through your typical backend workflows and see which are consuming an inordinate amount of time. Flag those that are consuming the most time or irking employees the most, and go through the features to determine if a tool or automation could help. (Odds are, it can.)
General tech audit.
Look through your current tech stack and gauge whether everything is:
Scalable
Manual when it could be automated
Capable of syncing with every system possible
Overlapping with functionality from other systems
During a tech audit, take note of which features you use the most and which you aren’t using much at all. Odds are you can drop these, and rule them out when searching for your next ecommerce platform.
Metrics and data audit.
This one is simple enough: go through a list of the core metrics an ecommerce business should be measuring in this day and age, and check whether you have the capability to measure them or not.
If you’re lacking certain metrics and/or your dashboards aren’t unified, but scattered like a bucket of spilled Legos, it’s time to reevaluate your platform.
Step 2: Match features to your business model (B2C, B2B, DTC).
Depending on whether you’re a B2C, B2B, or DTC company, core features and their goals will vary.
B2C ecommerce prioritizes the person, not the business, meaning you need a pain-free checkout, great personalization, featured reviews, and social commerce.
B2B ecommerce places a focus on custom pricing and catalogs via buyer portals, account hierarchies with custom privileges, and bulk ordering and PO support.
DTC ecommerce falls in the middle, requiring subscription functionality, omnichannel and loyalty programs, analytics, and rich customer knowledge.
Step 3: Prioritize must-haves vs. nice-to-haves.
Unless you’ve got bottomless coffers and hate money, it’s unlikely you can just have everything. Don’t throw a fit, it’s okay. Instead, you can prioritize must-haves vs. nice-to-haves.
Go back to the core features mentioned earlier to see which features are non-negotiables. Then, think about your business goals and biggest challenges, mapping additional features to each.
For example, if you’re struggling with cart abandonment, then cart abandonment features and CRM integrations can go onto your must-have list, as they’ll both help address this.
After you’ve identified the must-haves, everything else can fall under nice-to-have. If there’s any business case for it at all, it’s nice. If it’s just something shiny, it can stay on the shelf.
Step 4: Evaluate scalability.
A big strength of ecommerce over traditional brick-and-mortar is that you can scale without having to plop down more bricks or mortar. Scalability is only possible if the foundation on which you’re built can scale, otherwise your business will slide right off.
Go through your platform and systems and check:
Will the manual tasks outlined earlier feasibly scale?
Do you have as much automated as possible?
Will any third-party integrations require higher-priced plans as you scale?
Is your ecommerce platform capable of supporting more user seats?
You’ll want to further scrutinize each operational category from earlier as well. For example, if you’re already receiving complaints about how long orders take to depart the warehouse, you’ll want to have a more streamlined warehouse and order management system in place.
The final word
Every business has unique needs, and every ecommerce platform has a unique combination of features. With the information above, you can make the most informed decision possible and find the perfect oven in which to bake your business brilliance (Calzone not included).
Or, you could explore what BigCommerce has to offer, from a powerful visual builder to low/no-code development to a host of built-in marketing features and automation. And, it gets better: migrating to BigCommerce is not only feasible, but backed by our 24/7/365 support with optional guided migration.
Why pick and choose features, when you can just pick the best?

Find your favorite features.
Explore all of the capabilities of the BigCommerce platform.
FAQs about ecommerce features
Which ecommerce features are most important to your business can vary, but in general you need a mobile responsive site, product catalog functionality, a shopping cart and checkout, and a secure payment process.
BigCommerce is a comprehensive SaaS ecommerce platform that offers a number of features, including automated abandoned cart emails, headless and composable commerce, vast B2B-specific capabilities, and more.
The best way to choose an ecommerce platform is to think about your business and its specific needs, as well as whether a platform has the essentials: product catalog, checkout, payment processing, and mobile responsive pages.
You can improve conversions via ecommerce features by removing fiction with features like mobile-friendly pages, guest checkout options, acceptance of numerous payment methods, and social proof.
Ecommerce features are those that come with a platform, whereas ecommerce integrations are capabilities added through a third-party tool that integrates with the ecommerce platform.
New features are often added through microservices or third-party plugins.
Most ecommerce platforms offer a marketplace or app store where you can browse and download new features and tools.
Measuring the performance of ecommerce features requires tracking and analyzing relevant metrics, such as conversion rates, bounce rates, and cart abandonment rates.
Many ecommerce platforms offer analytics and reporting tools to help businesses track purchase decisions.

Find your favorite features.
Explore all of the capabilities of the BigCommerce platform.
