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Shipping, delivery logistic concept. Earth and cardboard boxes

By Joydeep Bhattacharya

Get a product, get a website, and you’re set. About a decade back, this used to be the mantra that could be expected to work for most people looking to leverage the web to excel in business. Trouble is, everyone followed it, and the magic formula was not magical anymore. Sophisticated website creator solutions have raised the bar, and coupled with other similar smart tools, can help businesses grow quicker.  Here are some such tools.

1- Shopify

Helping entrepreneurs set up functional and aesthetically pleasing websites, Shopify is a wholesome package that also makes ecommerce possible. With tremendous templates, dozens of differentiating widgets, and a fully WYSIWYG website building interface, Shopify is the best of all worlds. It offers 3 different subscription packages, suiting a wide range of requirements. From SEO to site security, from blogging to management of order to cash business cycles, it has it all.

At this moment, unless you have a patented niche product, chances are there are 5 other businesses delivering the same products with comparable quality levels and pricing, in your locality. If your product is delivered digitally, expect the competition to be ten times, if not more. Is it all a big strenuous drag, then? Well, not if you adopt some of these smart and highly specialized digital tools to improve the way you do business.

2- Shipstation – Simplifying Logistics

If you are into online retail, shipping and logistics are certainly a critical link of the whole business model. Shipstation offers you control, productivity, and price control, all digitally. It syncs online orders placed at your portals, helps you print customized shipping labels and packing instruction labels, and dozens of other smart and relevant ways to automate all tasks of your order fulfillment process. It supports wireless printing, processing of returns, a mobile companion application, sophisticated reporting, and status tracking.

3- Creately Desktop – Tap The Potential Of Graphical Expression

For entrepreneurs and businessmen who need to create design wireframes, flowcharts, and maps, Creately Desktop emerges as a one stop shop. Create process flows and flowcharts during brainstorming sessions, develop mind maps and advanced Gantt charts for graphical analyses and problem solving, and create hassle free and sophisticated website and product designs, all this and more using Creately Desktop. Among the most laudable features are the offline work mode, cloud enabled real time collaboration on design projects, and automatic backup of your work.

4- Groove – Professionalize Your Customer Support Mechanisms

What differentiates comparable businesses? It’s customer support! Well, with Groove, you can literally make your business groove, by transforming it into an enterprise that makes customers feel valuable by delivering organized and professional customer care communication. Using Groove, you can set your current mailbox up on the lines of a sophisticated customer care ticketing tool. By converting customer care queries into numbered tickets, and helping you allocate them among support personnel, Groove plugs those critical customer support gaps that can haunt small businesses.

5- Hootsuite – Succeed With Simplified Social media management

Social media management, despite not being a novel idea anymore, continues to help businesses grow and beat competitors. Hootsuite helps you simplify social media management, and minimizes the need to invest many man-hours into the same. It’s a digital suite that brings together all your social profiles, and helps you plan and schedule content updates. Plus, with smart reports, it helps you make meaning of your social media marketing efforts, paving the way for continual improvement.

6- Dropbox – The Only Online Document Management Box

This one continues to feature on most similar lists of tools that help webpreneurs get things done. Professional management of documents is a step towards growing your business, and Dropbox helps you create, access, edit, and collaborate on documents on the move, across devices. Its simplicity and relevance for all kinds of businesses makes it a must have tool for businesses of all sizes.

Are you using any other tools that immensely benefits your business? Please let us know by in the comments below.

Joydeep Bhattacharya is a digital marketing evangelist and author of SEOsandwitch.com. He is a regular contributor on publications like Wired, SEMrush, Ahrefs, Hubspot and several other sites.