10 Best Ecommerce CRM Software for Small Business in 2023
This article is part of a larger series on CRM.
Customer relationship management (CRM) software for ecommerce applies capabilities like customer activity tracking, marketing campaigns, and order management to the needs of an online retailer. The best CRM for a small ecommerce business will offer affordable and simple features to store customer information, track inventory, run email campaigns, and process orders. After evaluating dozens of products, our picks for the best ecommerce CRM include:
- Best CRM for ecommerce teams needing a free Shopify integration: Freshmarketer
- Excellent CRM option with payment processing: HubSpot CRM
- Great multi-view options for customer tracking: monday Sales CRM
- Affordable and robust products catalog: Pipedrive
- Most complete marketing CRM for ecommerce: EngageBay
- Solid operations management integrations: Capsule CRM
- Best all-in-one CRM for an ecommerce website: Zoho CRM Plus
- Great project management tool: Insightly CRM
- Solid range of free service tools: Agile CRM
- Best for email automaton: ActiveCampaign
Best Ecommerce CRMs Compared
Provider | Starting Monthly Price per User* | Free Plan? | Our CRM Rating Out of 5 |
---|---|---|---|
$19 per month | ✓ | 4.69 | |
$18 (up to two users) | ✓ | 4.68 | |
$10 | ✕ | 4.65 | |
$14.90 | ✕ | 4.60 | |
$13.79 | ✓ | 4.54 | |
$18 | ✓ | 4.38 | |
$57 | ✕ | 4.36 | |
$29 | ✕ | 4.23 | |
$14 | ✓ | 4.21 | |
$29 (one user) | ✕ | 4.19 | |
*Based on annual billing; monthly billing is also available for slightly higher rates.
Freshmarketer: Best Free Shopify Integration
Pros
- Easy system to use while navigating the menu and operating the features
- Excellent tools for creating and deploying marketing campaigns and automated journeys
- Direct integration with Shopify, including on the free plan
Cons
- Bare-bones free option in terms of features and data capacity
- Expensive after Growth plan
- Lacks built-in payment processing and inventory management tools
- You need a free integration with Shopify: Freshmarketer’s Free plan is pretty bare-bones in terms of capabilities—limiting you to 100 contacts, 200 emails, and one customer segment. It is, however, one of the few products with a free Shopify integration. This lets you track contact activity and segment lists based on Shopify events like abandoned carts or first-time visits.
- You want complete ecommerce marketing tools: Freshmarketer is a marketing automation platform that’s mostly meant for campaign management. It lets users create, send, automate, and track marketing campaigns via email, text, social media, Facebook ads, and WhatsApp. There are also tools for designing landing pages, tracking website activity, and engaging web visitors through live chat or an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot.
- You want to manage ecommerce operations from your CRM: Freshmarketer, unfortunately, is only a good product for managing marketing campaigns, storing customer data, and tracking activity. It doesn’t offer built-in features for processing payments or managing inventory.
- Alternative: HubSpot is a great alternative for built-in payment processing tools, while Zoho CRM Plus lets you handle inventory management, projects, and marketing in one system.
- You need a more robust free ecommerce CRM software: While Freshmarketer has a free-forever option, it’s designed more for a temporary use case as it limits you to 100 contacts, one list, 200 emails, and basic contact data storage tools.
- Alternative: EngageBay comes with the best overall free marketing tools and Agile CRM is a solid alternative with free comprehensive customer service tools to handle support tickets in the CRM.
Freshmarketer Pricing Plan & Overview*
*Pricing is based on annual billing. Monthly billing is available for a higher cost. It comes with a 21-day free trial. Pricing reflects pricing info available at the time of publishing. While we update pricing information regularly, we encourage our readers to check current pricing here.
Our Expert Opinion
Freshmarketer takes the top spot as the best CRM for ecommerce thanks to its easy-to-use features, broad contact management tools, and robust marketing capabilities. We like that it has free integration with Shopify. By connecting with the popular ecommerce platform, users can track activity and automate campaigns from the CRM system based on Shopify activity.
HubSpot CRM: Best CRM With Payment Processing
Pros
- Free plan has mass marketing email, Facebook Messenger integration, and list segmentation
- Includes built-in payment processing tools and integration with Stripe
- Highly intuitive CRM that requires a minimum learning curve
Cons
- Paid plans get expensive after upgrading
- Products library unavailable until the Professional plan
- Does not have inventory management features
- You need payment processing capabilities: In both the HubSpot Sales Hub and CRM Suite, which adds marketing and service tools to the sales CRM, users have the ability to collect and track digital payments. One option is through built-in processing, which allows invoice payments through an automated clearing house (ACH). There’s also direct integration with Stripe for handling credit payments.
- You want a minimal learning curve for your ecommerce CRM: HubSpot is notorious for its simple CRM usability. It leverages a modern interface and intuitive features so users at any technical level can quickly figure out and operate the system. Once comfortable, ecommerce teams can create and deploy marketing campaigns, integrate with ecommerce tools like Shopify, and automate customer journeys from one system.
- You need inventory tracking features: Inventory tracking tools let you monitor product lines and stock to ensure you are always at optimal levels. HubSpot is limited to hosting a products library that lets you view all the items your retailer sells.
- Alternative: We recommend Zoho CRM Plus as the best tool for inventory management, product tracking, order processing, and vendor management.
- You want a more scalable solution: Ecommerce businesses are unique in that they can quickly grow their operation after just one or a few successful campaigns. That said, it’s essential to have a scalable CRM for ecommerce that’s cost-effective to update when users need more data capacity and advanced features. HubSpot is relatively expensive on the paid plans once users need to upgrade past the Free option.
- Alternative: EngageBay stands out as the most scalable and affordable CRM for ecommerce that also has a free plan.
HubSpot CRM Pricing Plan & Overview
*Pricing is based on annual billing on a per-month breakdown. Monthly billing is available for a higher cost. Each plan offers a 14-day free trial. Pricing reflects pricing info available at the time of publishing. While we update pricing information regularly, we encourage our readers to check current pricing here.
**Pricing uses the monthly Sales Hub costs for individuals and small teams. The provider also offers Enterprise-level products for larger sales teams, and the CRM Suite, which includes sales, marketing, customer service, content management system (CMS), and operations software in one product for a higher price.
Our Expert Opinion
First and foremost, we love HubSpot’s product versatility. It gives options to subscribe to a sales-only CRM for lead and deal management, or a CRM Suite that adds marketing and customer service tools. It also stands out for its all-around product usability and robust free-forever plans. The most notable use for HubSpot, however, is the payment processing, where ecommerce teams can manage customer payments from the CRM system.
Read the full HubSpot CRM review for details on features and integrations to see if it’s right for your business.
monday Sales CRM: Best for Multi-view Dashboards
Pros
- Excellent no-code automation design tools for creating data management and email outreach workflows
- Simple product to use with spreadsheet-style format for data entry and customizing boards
- Solid dashboard reporting tools to get real-time performance updates and track key metrics
Cons
- Misleading pricing; paid plans require a minimum number of users
- Doesn’t offer a free plan and has expensive lead scoring
- Lacks ecommerce operations tools like payment processing and an inventory management module
- You want to track ecommerce activity on numerous views: monday Sales CRM lets you store unlimited items, like customer records, and view them on any type of board view, like table, Kanban, Gantt, and timeline. Users can also create dashboards to meet any need, as long as the data is stored in the CRM. This lets you apply reporting to ecommerce activity to track orders, customers, and revenue on one CRM dashboard.
- You need a highly intuitive CRM system: monday Sales CRM is acclaimed for product usability as it uses a spreadsheet format, like Excel, for data entry and management. It also has no-code automation features where users can use premade workflows and select triggers, actions, and data records to design automatons. This lets you put crucial data updates and drip email nurturing tasks on autopilot.
- You need a free CRM for ecommerce: monday Sales CRM, unfortunately, no longer offers a free-forever plan to test drive the features for a long period of time.
- Alternative: Freshmarketer, HubSpot, and EngageBay are all excellent CRM options with free ecommerce tools.
- You want more operational ecommerce tools in your CRM: monday Sales CRM is relatively limited in that online retailers can only use it for email marketing and storing customer information. They can’t process payments through the platform, nor can they monitor inventory stock and orders without creating data automations between third-party tools.
- Alternative: Different products can fulfill this particular need. HubSpot is great for offering payment processing capabilities through built-in tools or the Stripe integration. Zoho CRM Plus, however, has an entire inventory management module built into its CRM system.
monday Sales CRM Pricing Plan & Overview*
*Pricing is based on annual billing on a monthly per-user breakdown. Monthly billing is available for a higher cost. There is a 14-day free trial for the paid plans. Pricing reflects pricing info available at the time of publishing. While we update pricing information regularly, we encourage our readers to check current pricing here.
Our Expert Opinion
monday Sales CRM isn’t a traditional ecommerce CRM, and it therefore lacks the built-in operations management features for monitoring inventory, processing payments, and tracking orders. It is, however, highly versatile, which is where it can add a lot of value to a small business. Between its email tools, no-code automaton, and simple data management features, online retailers can use the CRM for data storage, task automation, and communications.
Need more details? Use our monday.com review for everything you need to know on the CRM use cases, features, and pricing.
Pipedrive: Best Built-in Products Catalog
Pros
- Includes a built-in product catalog to track items you sell, their cost, price, description, ID numbers, and additional notes
- Solid contact data management tools with activity tracking, duplicate detection, and visual timelines
- Highly customizable system to tailor for ecommerce informational requirements
Cons
- No free plan
- Doesn’t have payment processing, inventory management, or more broad online marketing tools
- Workflow automation gets expensive
- You need a built-in products catalog: While Pipedrive is mostly known as a sales CRM system with advanced lead and deal management tools, it does offer one specific tool vital to an online retailer: a products catalog. This allows teams to create a custom list of product offerings with descriptions, tax rates, price, cost, ID numbers, and notes, in which purchases for specific products can be tracked in contact records.
- You want robust contact management features: Pipedrive is one of the top overall contact management software products for those who need advanced data management tools in their ecommerce CRM. Teams can auto-enrich their customer profiles with online data, detect duplicate records, monitor purchase and engagement activity, attach relevant files, and view customer locations on Google Maps within a contact record.
- You need more expanded ecommerce tools: Pipedrive is ideal if you need the products catalog, contact storage, activity tracking, or email marketing features. Inventory management, payment processing, direct Shopify integration, and expanded marketing tools like online ads management are not available in this CRM.
- Alternative: Zoho CRM Plus gives the most comprehensive operations CRM with inventory management, while EngageBay has some of the most expansive yet cost-friendly marketing capabilities.
- You want a free ecommerce platform: While it’s not necessarily an expensive option, Pipedrive does not offer a free-forever plan.
- Alternative: EngageBay and HubSpot have some of the best free marketing features, while Freshsales is great as its free plan integrates with Shopify.
Pipedrive Pricing Plan & Overview*
*Pricing is based on annual billing on a per-user monthly breakdown. Monthly billing is available for a higher cost. Paid plans include a 14-day free trial. Pricing reflects pricing info available at the time of publishing. While we update pricing information regularly, we encourage our readers to check current pricing here.
Our Expert Opinion
While primarily a sales CRM and deal tracking system, Pipedrive can serve specific use cases relevant to an online retail business. The products catalog, for instance, is top-notch for tracking items sold and their details like unit prices, category, tax rates, and any other custom field you want to add. This is particularly useful for monitoring customer activity and prior purchases to help offer promotional deals or recommendations.
Check out our expert Pipedrive review to get insights on pricing, features, use cases, integrations, and online reviews to see if it’s right for you.
EngageBay: Best Complete Marketing Ecommerce System
Pros
- Free plan available with email marketing, lead scoring, landing page designer, and list segmentation tools
- All-in-one sales, marketing, and service management platform
- Offers free integration with Shopify, BigCommerce, and WooCommerce
Cons
- Marketing automation get expensive
- Poor user reviews for product usability
- No products catalog or inventory management tools
- You need omnichannel marketing tools: EngageBay is one of the most complete commerce CRM systems primarily for its marketing capabilities. The free plan comes with mass email options, list segmentation, lead scoring, stored email templates, and live chat communication channels. There’s also a social suite for monitoring feeds on Facebook and Instagram and creating posts, plus a landing page designer.
- You want to integrate your CRM with ecommerce tools: EngageBay’s free-forever plan also has CRM integrations with Shopify, WooCommerce, and BigCommerce to synchronize purchase and activity data between systems. This allows users to automate marketing campaigns based on ecommerce information. The CRM integrates with Stripe to sync payment data and manage payments in one system.
- You need more affordable marketing automation: The main downside for EngageBay is that workflow and marketing automation to deploy or retarget drip campaigns is not available until the Growth plan for $42.49 per user, monthly.
- Alternative: HubSpot starts offering automated email steps beginning on its free-forever plan.
- You require a more intuitive ecommerce CRM: EngageBay performs poorly in product usability in terms of interface navigation and operating the built-in tools. It’s also inconvenient that most third-party integrations require a connection tool such as Zapier.
- Alternative: Freshmarketer is a great alternative with comparable marketing functionality to EngageBay but with far more intuitive features.
EngageBay Pricing Plan & Overview*
*Pricing is based on annual billing on a per-user monthly breakdown. Monthly billing is available for a higher cost and biennial billing is available for a lower cost. Pricing reflects pricing info available at the time of publishing. While we update pricing information regularly, we encourage our readers to check current pricing here.
Our Expert Opinion
EngageBay is an underrated CRM solution in terms of comprehensiveness and end-to-end marketing capabilities. It lets you run omnichannel campaigns and engagement strategies, in which many of those tools are available for free. We also can’t overlook the CRM’s integration options with useful ecommerce tools like Shopify, BigCommerce, WooCommerce, and Stripe’s payment processing platform.
Capsule CRM: Best for Managing Ecommerce Operations
Pros
- Lets you oversee ecommerce operations activity like inventory and accounting management through integrations
- Built-in project and task management
- Free plan includes social contact enrichment and email marketing
Cons
- Low number of stored contacts allowed on Free plan
- Relatively expensive paid plans
- Workflow automation requires the Teams plan
- You want to oversee ecommerce operations: Capsule CRM stands out for offering a wide range of accounting software integrations like QuickBooks, Sage, Xero, and FreshBooks, as well as inventory management tools like Cin7 and Dear Systems. These make Capsule a great option for managing back-end ecommerce operations through data sync capabilities with bookkeeping, payments, and supplier information.
- You need built-in project management features: Capsule is one of the few CRM systems that come with built-in project management capabilities. As an ecommerce business may find itself engaging in long-term content production, product development, or rebranding initiatives, a project management module is useful for teams to monitor progress, track milestones and tasks, and collaborate with team members.
- You need more contact capacity for free: While Capsule CRM has a decent free-forever option that includes email marketing, activity tracking, and project management, it’s limited in data storage to 250 contacts.
- Alternative: HubSpot’s free plan allows for up to 1 million stored CRM contacts.
- You want more affordable automation tools: Capsule, unfortunately, is not a relatively affordable CRM. Most notably, the workflow automation features for putting email nurturing and sales tasks on auto-pilot do not start until the Professional plan for $36 per user, monthly.
- Alternative: monday Sales CRM has the most cost-friendly automation features that start at $14 per user, monthly.
Capsule CRM Pricing Plan & Overview*
*Pricing is based on annual billing on a per-user monthly breakdown. Monthly billing is available for a higher cost. The paid plans offer a 14-day free trial. Pricing reflects pricing info available at the time of publishing. While we update pricing information regularly, we encourage our readers to check current pricing here.
Our Expert Opinion
We like how Capsule’s integrations with accounting and inventory management tools allow ecommerce businesses to handle the back-end administrative tasks from their CRM. Thanks to the data sync capabilities for revenue, purchase, and supplier data, users can run marketing campaigns, track customer activity, and reconcile their books from the same system. We also love the free plan option that includes profile enrichment and project management.
Zoho CRM Plus: Best All-in-One CRM
Pros
- All-in-one sales, marketing, service, and project management system
- Offers a Zoho-Shopify extension that syncs Shopify customers to Zoho records in the CRM
- Comes with an inventory management module for tracking orders, creating product books, and managing vendors
Cons
- No free plan and only one, expensive paid plan
- Learning curve required to figure out and operate
- Campaigns and social media management require paid add-on
- You want an all-in-one ecommerce CRM: Zoho CRM Plus is a product built specifically as an all-in-one sales, service, and marketing platform. It also integrates with Shopify to synchronize customer data between both systems and offers a built-in project management module for planning campaigns, product launches, or new product development processes.
- You need built-in inventory management: Zoho CRM Plus, in addition to its many modules and integration options, has built-in inventory management. This feature is especially useful for ecommerce as you can manage orders, vendors, product lines, and inventory stock in the same interface you’re deploying your marketing campaigns and sales outreach.
- You need additional pricing options: Zoho CRM Plus is a specific CRM product built by Zoho to give all the native interactions, like Zoho Desk, Projects, Analytics, and Campaigns, in one system. That said, it only comes with one pricing option, which is $57 per user, monthly.
- Alternative: EngageBay, Freshmarketer, and Agile CRM are all great options with free-forever plans and a range of subscription options that give teams flexibility based on their needs.
- You want a more intuitive platform: An issue with all Zoho applications, including the CRM Plus app, is usability. Users find the interface clunky and tough to navigate at times.
- Alternative: HubSpot and monday Sales CRM stand out as the top ecommerce CRM options for usability ratings.
Zoho CRM Plus Pricing Plan & Overview*
*Pricing is based on annual billing on a per-user monthly basis. Monthly billing is available for a higher cost. Zoho CRM Plus comes with a 30-day free trial. Pricing reflects pricing info available at the time of publishing. While we update pricing information regularly, we encourage our readers to check current pricing here.
Our Expert Opinion
Zoho CRM Plus is the ultimate ecommerce CRM for managing customers, marketing, and inventory in a single system. Users can integrate it with ecommerce tools like Shopify and get access to essential tools for deploying campaigns, monitoring stock, processing orders, and tracking customer activity. While it only has one relatively expensive plan, its completeness makes it worth every dollar.
Insightly: Best for Project Management
Pros
- Includes built-in project management
- Shopify integration lets you sync customer data between systems and adjust inventory levels from Insightly’s project tools
- Robust contact management tools with relationship linking, data storage, and activity tracking, including from third-party tools
Cons
- Marketing and customer service modules requires a separate product for an added cost
- No free plan
- Expensive for pricebooks and products management
- You need to manage product development projects: Many ecommerce businesses produce and distribute their own product lines. If that’s your situation, then Insightly is one of the best ecommerce CRM platforms for you. Included is a built-in project management module to oversee long-term initiatives such as a product development process that lets you set up automated queues—auto-creating tasks and milestones for each new project.
- You want to track Shopify inventory levels: Insightly stands out as having one of the best Shopify integrations. Like other CRMs, it can synchronize customer data between systems and create highly targeted segmented campaigns. Plus, teams can use the integration to manage inventory by adjusting stock levels in their Insightly project management module, which syncs with Shopify.
- You want true and affordable inventory management support: Some teams may not like the idea of using a project management system as an alternative to monitoring inventory levels or tracking products on an expensive Enterprise plan. In both cases, Insightly is not the best product for you.
- Alternative: Zoho CRM Plus is the best alternative that also has project management but its own separate inventory management module for overseeing products, vendors, and sales orders.
- You need expanded customer management features: Ecommerce is heavily customer-driven, where you need to create properly targeted marketing campaigns and manage customer service requests. Unfortunately, Insightly requires a paid native add-on for marketing and service features like marketing automation, journey-building tools, and ticketing.
- Alternative: EngageBay and HubSpot are the two best options for customer management at all stages of the sales funnel that include sales, marketing, and service features in one platform.
Insightly Pricing Plan & Overview*
*Pricing is based on annual billing on a per-user monthly breakdown. Monthly billing is available for a higher cost. Insightly offers a 14-day free trial on paid plans. Pricing reflects pricing info available at the time of publishing. While we update pricing information regularly, we encourage our readers to check current pricing here.
Our Expert Opinion
Insightly gives product development and design teams an edge for getting their product lines into the marketplace. It has excellent project management and task collaboration tools and one of the most intriguing Shopify integrations that let you manage inventory from the projects module. We also like the systems contact management system, which can synchronize records with Shopify so you can keep activity data up to date and segment customer lists.
Insightly is a great solution for managing customers and product development projects. See if it’s right for you in our Insightly CRM review.
Agile CRM: Best Free Customer Service Features
Pros
- Free plan and affordable paid plans
- Offers sales, marketing, and service modules
- Lead scoring available on free-forever plan
Cons
- Shopify integration not allowed until the Starter plan
- Lacks inventory management and products tracking tools
- Free CRM doesn’t let you send marketing emails
- You need free customer service tools: Agile CRM has sales, marketing, and service tools for online retailers that need all customer management capabilities. Nearly all the customer service features are available for free. This lets ecommerce companies manage tickets for billing, delivery, or product issues. They can group them, label them, assign tickets to other users, and send canned responses in one click at no cost.
- You want affordable lead scoring: Lead scoring is great for ecommerce as it lets you identify top customers based on profiles or engagement activity. Agile CRM is unique in that its scoring tools are available on the Free plan. It pairs nicely with email tracking, which lets you quantify future purchases and interest based on campaign opens, clicks, and other events in the marketing journey.
- You need ecommerce operations features: While you can assist customers and track inquiries using Agile CRM, there are no expanded operations features such as inventory management, product tracking, or vendor data storage.
- Alternative: Zoho CRM Plus is the best all-in-one system for overseeing sales, service, marketing, and the operational components of ecommerce, like inventory management, in a single platform.
- You need many free third-party integrations, including Shopify: Agile CRM’s free plan only allows up to one integration or plugin. Additionally, the Shopify connection, which helps you automate marketing engagement based on Shopify activity and two-way sync customer data records, is not available for free.
- Alternative: HubSpot lets you connect multiple integrations to its CRM at once for free, including Shopify and other ecommerce platforms like WooCommerce, Square, Magento, and BigCommerce.
Agile CRM Pricing Plan & Overview*
*Pricing is based on annual billing on a per-user monthly breakdown. Monthly billing is available for a higher cost. Pricing reflects pricing info available at the time of publishing. While we update pricing information regularly, we encourage our readers to check current pricing here.
Our Expert Opinion
Agile CRM is a cost-friendly solution for managing sales, marketing, and service functions. For small business ecommerce companies, you’ll be pleased to know many of the service features, like ticketing, ticket groupings, and canned responses, are included for free. Agile CRM also has free lead scoring for identifying top customers to pursue your next marketing campaign.
Use our Agile CRM review to get the complete product scope before making a purchase decision.
ActiveCampaign: Best Email Automation Tools
Pros
- Robust email automation capabilities including abandoned cart triggers, split automation journeys, and automaton through ecommerce tools
- Omnichannel engagement options through email, text, chat, social media, and web page forms
- Integrates with all popular ecommerce platforms, like Shopify, Square, Magento, and BigCommerce
Cons
- No free plan
- Expensive to integrate with ecommerce platforms
- Landing page designer and text campaigns require the Plus plan
- You need robust marketing automation tools: ActiveCampaign has solid, easy-to-use tools for creating automated customer journeys. Users can develop mass campaigns using templates or drag-and-drop design tools and deploy their emails to various customer segments. They can also create trigger automations based on abandoned carts, product views, or email clicks, as well as based on optimal send times.
- You want to use an omnichannel outreach approach: In addition to advanced email marketing features, ActiveCampaign lets you deploy brand messaging and promotional offers via text, Facebook, and online web pages. There’s also live chat communication for teams to engage leads directly on a website.
- You need free marketing capabilities: ActiveCampaign is an advanced marketing automation platform that, unfortunately, does not have a free plan or cost-friendly paid plans.
- Alternative: EngageBay is the most comparable CRM to ActiveCampaign in terms of marketing functionality but with far more affordable pricing options, including a free plan.
- You want more affordable ecommerce integrations: While ActiveCampaign can integrate with all ecommerce tools like Shopify, BigCommerce, Square, and Magento, those apps are not accessible until the Plus plan for $49 per month.
- Alternative: Freshmarketer offers its ecommerce integrations beginning on the free-forever plan.
ActiveCampaign Pricing Plan & Overview*
*Pricing is based on annual billing for the Marketing module only. Monthly billing is available for a higher cost. There’s also a sales-specific product or bundled option ActiveCampaign comes with a 14-day free trial. Pricing reflects pricing info available at the time of publishing. While we update pricing information regularly, we encourage our readers to check current pricing here.
Our Expert Opinion
ActiveCampaign is a premium ecommerce marketing solution if you have the budget. It’s one of the best overall email marketing CRM systems mostly because of its detailed automation features that let you deploy campaigns based on events like page visits, interactions with emails such as clicks, and time-based triggers. It’s also equipped with templates and content designer tools for ecommerce businesses to key in on their brand identity and product offerings.
How We Evaluated the Best CRM for Ecommerce
To determine the best CRM software for ecommerce, we evaluated features relevant to managing a business that sells products online. For instance, payment processing through a Stripe integration and inventory management tools are useful for handling some of the back-end operations. We also looked at marketing capabilities through mass email campaigns and social media integrations, plus typical software product attributes like price and customer support.
The tabs below offer insight into our evaluation process of the best ecommerce CRM software:
25% of Overall Score
General CRM features are tools and capabilities relevant to any CRM system, regardless of use case or industry vertical. Reporting tools, customizable data fields and pipelines, and a mobile app, for example, are all essential software features for a business. We also wanted to see expanded ecommerce CRM integrations with tools like Shopify, BigCommerce, and WooCommerce.
20% of Overall Score
As many online retailers start on a tight budget, we considered pricing criteria, which looks at free plan availability and the various subscription options businesses could upgrade to as they grow. We also looked at the billing options for a subscriber to either pay monthly or save by paying annually. Finally, we looked at the costs specifically for access to the ecommerce tools like email marketing, inventory management, and payment processing features.
20% of Overall Score
Niche and advanced features looked at capabilities specifically relevant to ecommerce companies. These included the capabilities of email marketing tools, reporting dashboards, and social media integrations. We also wanted to see each CRM offer operational features like inventory management and payment processing either built in or through integration.
20% of Overall Score
Extensive customer support allows users to better understand their CRM and quickly handle system or billing issues. This was evaluated in terms of service hour availability and multiple channel access to support lines via phone, live chat, and email. We also looked at self-service resources subscribers can access, like product tutorials, user forums, or training modules.
15% of Overall Score
In addition to firsthand experience with these ecommerce CRMs, we evaluated what actual users say about each product based on online reviews from reputable sites like G2 and Capterra. These criteria consider how actual customers feel to gain insight into perceived value for the price paid, ease of use when operating and navigating the CRM, and how much users liked the CRM’s features.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
An ecommerce CRM is software that lets you develop customer relationships and manage an online storefront—ideally all in one interface. It’s beneficial for online retailers, wholesalers, and any other business selling products online with tools such as customer tracking, email marketing, social media management, inventory monitoring, and payment and order processing.
Online retailers and ecommerce businesses don’t necessarily need, but can greatly benefit from, an ecommerce CRM. Many ecommerce platforms like Shopify, Magento, and BigCommerce give you the basics to create an online store, market to customers, and handle orders. A CRM, however, gives more advanced features for tracking customer activity, managing projects, handling service requests, tracking inventory, and automating campaigns. Many also integrate with the ecommerce platforms so you can sync customer data between both systems.
Bottom Line
Ecommerce CRM software helps online storefronts track customers, deploy marketing campaigns, and manage inventory. There are many CRMs to choose from based on feature preferences and budget. Freshmarketer, for example, has a great free integration with Shopify to auto-deploy campaigns based on Shopify data. Alternatively, Zoho CRM Plus offers built-in inventory management, while EngageBay has great free marketing tools.