Whether you’ve decided to build a CRM system or a SaaS system for your eCommerce business, it’s important to look at existing solutions. By evaluating popular CRMs, or customer relationship management systems, you can capitalize on industry trends, see what your competitors are doing right, and see where they’re going wrong. This will help you meet users’ needs, stay relevant, and better understand users’ expectations.

Let’s not waste time and get right into the top five CRM software solutions for the eCommerce domain. Grab something delicious and enjoy our CRM software examples! 

Salesforce

Who hasn’t heard of Salesforce? This CRM giant was the first company to offer cloud-based customer relationship management solutions. Started in a San Francisco apartment in 1999, Salesforce launched an initial public offering (IPO) five years later, raising $110 million. Marc Benioff along with three other co-founders ─ Parker Harris, Dave Moellenhoff, and Frank Dominguez ─ managed to sell the idea of using a web browser as a CRM interface and convince users that data is protected against intrusion and loss.  

Today, Salesforce holds a 20% share of the CRM software market and is estimated at $17 billion. It has more than 36,000 employees and 150,000 customers including Crocs, ecco, Converse, Columbia, Clarins, Lacoste, L’Oreal, Panasonic, Pandora, and s.Oliver.

source:  salesforce.com

What does the Salesforce CRM provide?

  • Contact, opportunity, and lead management. Salesforce provides you with a 360-degree view of your customers, including key contact information, communication history, social content, and internal discussions. The Salesforce CRM helps you identify the best sales prospects, nurture leads to close more sales, assign tasks to individual sales representatives, track progress, and measure your marketing efforts.
  • Dashboards and reports. Customer analytics is key to better decisions. With Salesforce analytics tools, you can track the volume and quality of leads through custom reports. These tools allow you to slice and dice your analytics exactly how you need it by simply dragging and dropping filters, fields, charts, and groupings. Additionally, Salesforce equips you with dashboards, which are a great way to see your team’s performance from a bird’s-eye view.
  • Sales forecasting. You can use Salesforce to identify and track top performers, make informed forecasts, and set sales quotas using past sales data and consumer behavior.  
  • Mobility. You can manage your business on the go with Salesforce’s mobile CRM. Get account updates, check out events, make conference calls, take meeting notes, approve deals, access dashboards and reports, collaborate with your team, and quickly find uploaded files anywhere and anytime ─ even offline.
  • Workflow automation. Using Salesforce, you can set your business and approval processes to run automatically. This includes sending email notifications for deals, auto-assigning tasks when a deal moves from stage to stage, writing proposals, and handling other tasks.
  • File management. Salesforce provides you with all functionality necessary to collaborate and share files across your organization and externally with your clients. You can sort files by most recent, library, group, and owner. 

Zoho

Zoho is an all-in-one online office suite that provides practically every tool businesses need to optimize performance, including a full-featured CRM system. Zoho CRM is a good choice for small organizations looking to get started with a free customer relationship management system. 

In its 25 years on the CRM software market, Zoho has helped 150,000 businesses in 180 countries serve 45 million customers and “sell smarter, better, and faster.” The top retail and eCommerce brands using Zoho are Amazon India, Headphone Zone, Violet Warner, Alfafado, Literary Book Gifts, JP Industries, and Ecom Ventures.

Source: cloudtalk.io

What does Zoho CRM provide?

  • Sales automation. Zoho provides everything you need to automate routine sales functions. You can create optimized workflows to reduce manual processes, manage leads, track deals, get a complete overview of the opportunity pipeline, and connect with your prospects across different channels (such as email, phone, social networks, and customer portals) to build strong relationships. 
  • Process management. Define sales processes for your team and set rules based on them. 
  • Analytics & forecasting. Zoho provides reporting features, making it easy to export and distribute the trends it reveals. It also allows you to accurately forecast potential sales and measure them against current sales to improve your team’s productivity. Zoho features gamification mechanisms (badges and trophies) so you can motivate your sales team to exceed quotas. 
  • Marketing automation. Marketing and sales go hand in hand. With Zoho, you can support your sales process through personalized marketing campaigns. 
  • Integrations. You can expand Zoho’s core features through integrations with tools such as G Suite, Office 365, PandaDoc, Twilio, BurstSMS, Eventbrite, Zoom, Quickbooks, Xero, Proposify, Google Ads, and Dropbox. Go to the Zoho CRM website to check out even more integrations. 
  • CRM mobile app. With the Zoho CRM mobile app, you can access information offline, get instant notifications, attach files, follow up with leads, and leave voice notes ─ all on the move.
  • Customization options. Every company is unique and needs a CRM to fit their business. Zoho allows you to customize layouts, the data you want to see (such as buttons, fields, and modules), filters and views, and the currency and language.

HubSpot

HubSpot’s story started the day after Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Brian and Dharmesh had an idea for a tool that would help companies grow with inbound marketing. At the time, they saw consumer buying behavior was changing, as consumers were starting to ignore interruptive bids. That became the starting point for HubSpot, an ecosystem meant to unite community, education, and software to help businesses grow and succeed at inbound marketing.

Today, the HubSpot community comprises over 4,200 employees, 100,000 customers, 150 user groups, and 165,000 professionals certified with HubSpot Academy. Companies using HubSpot for eCommerce include Brauer, GigMasters, InSinkErator, Kettlebells Kings, CODE41, and Spocket. 

Source: resonatehq.com

What does HubSpot CRM provide?

  • Contact management. With HubSpot, you can create contact records and store customer data.
  • Deals and tasks. Each company has a unique sales process. Some may have four deal stages, while others have ten. HubSpot allows you to set up and customize deal pipelines. 
  • Personalized dashboards in HubSpot let you access your entire sales pipeline. You can see progress against quotas, all your deals by stage, and to-dos on a daily basis. 
  • Meeting scheduling. Setting up meetings takes more time than would be ideal. HubSpot offers meeting scheduling capabilities to make things easier. It synchronizes to Outlook or Google Calendar so you can easily share availability with clients and prospects. 
  • Mobile access. You can log on to HubSpot from mobile devices including smartphones and tablets.
  • Reporting. You can use HubSpot to dive deep into your pipeline and sales metrics to measure your team’s productivity, forecast performance, and answer strategic business questions.
  • Integrations. HubSpot features around 500 integrations so you can connect with the tools you’re already using or discover new software to help you grow. Among the HubSpot app partners are Stripe, PandaDoc, OptinMonster, Zapier, ClearVoice, Automate.io, JustCall, ManyChat, ClickMeeting, CoSchedule, Zoom, and Survey Kiwi. For more information on HubSpot integrations, check out this page. 

Pipedrive

Started in 2010, Pipedrive became one of the most beloved sales management tools just a couple years later. Today, Pipedrive is a cloud-based software company that operates in 10 offices across eight countries and has over 700 employees of 48 nationalities and 95,000 customers worldwide. How did Pipedrive get that big? Their secret to success is in identifying and filling a gap. 

Pipedrive’s story began when Timo Rein and Urmas Purde installed an existing CRM. Though it cost them $30,000, they found themselves using sticky notes to write out key information. The problem was that at the time, CRMs ignored salespeople’s needs and were tools for top management rather than sales teams. Seeing the problem, Timo and Urmas began to work on Pipedrive as a tool that would put salespeople first and focus on what was missing in existing solutions. 

Source: predictiveanalyticstoday.com

What does Pipedrive CRM provide?

  • Lead & deal management. In Pipedrive, your sales process is visualized in stages, which you can customize however you want. You can create deals when you’re ready to initiate sales for contacts and can move contacts along the pipeline as they progress. Also, you can schedule sales activities and assign them to team members, see all your to-dos, and be on top of what needs to be done today, tomorrow, and next week. Pipedrive prioritizes activities/deals that are overdue or due today at the very top of the list so you can focus on what’s important and urgent.
  • Communication tracking. You can manage sales conversations from your inbox and track timelines of contact activity history. Pipedrive also allows for calls directly from your browser so you can track and record them, and add notes quickly. In addition, you can send trackable contracts, proposals, and quotes from Pipedrive and know when those documents are opened. 
  • Workflow automation is a key component of customer relationship management. Pipedrive automates various repetitive operations including sending personalized emails and creating follow-ups.
  • Reporting. What’s the secret to really knowing your customers? It’s data. To understand how your team is performing, Pipedrive presents data in tables and charts so you can see individual results and identify improvements and opportunities. You can also benefit from custom filters to see only relevant information.
  • Mobile access lets you use Pipedrive on the go and manage customer relationships anywhere, both offline and online.
  • Integrations. To maximize your CRM’s efficiency, you can integrate and work with tools you already use including G Suite, Microsoft Office, Trello, Xero, Asana, PandaDoc, Slack, Klenty, Pipechimp, Kixie, and Plecto. You can find more details on what apps and extensions integrate with Pipedrive here

Zendesk

The last but not our least favorite CRM is Zendesk. It has helped more than 160,000 customers across 160 countries. 

Zendesk is relatively young compared to the CRM vendors we’ve discussed above. It was founded in 2007 by Mikkel Svane, Alexander Aghassipour, and Morten Primdahl in Denmark. Their idea was to build a simple solution to complex customer service challenges. Initially, Zendesk was a ticketing app that offered businesses an easy way to manage incoming support requests and inbound customer communications. The company grew year by year to become what we know today.

Source: agilecrm.com

What does Zendesk CRM provide?

  • Sales prospecting. Zendesk allows you to monitor conversations and deals in a single place. Additionally, Zendesk will remind you when it’s a good time to send emails or make calls.
  • Email management. Emails may fall through the cracks, get lost, get deleted, or be ignored. Zendesk offers a simple yet effective way to control all your email communication. You’ll receive notifications when your emails are opened so you can know the best time to reach customers. Also, you can create email templates and use them to send emails right from the CRM to save your effort and time.
  • Call management. Zendesk allows you to call prospects right from the CRM, log and record incoming and outgoing calls, store notes and call scripts, and follow up through text messages. Additionally, you can focus on call tracking metrics (such as call duration, call count, and outcomes) to optimize your inbound lead generation strategy.
  • Mobility. As with other top CRM vendors, Zendesk offers a mobile CRM for iOS and Android so you can manage customers on the go.
  • Integrations. Zendesk allows you to integrate with 50 apps to make the most of customer relationship management. These include PandaDoc, Zapier, Xero, Dropbox, Mailchimp, Mapsly, ChargeDesk, and Harvest.

Important features of eCommerce CRM software


Now that you know the best eCommerce software, let’s outline the features they have in common:

source: stelkiwi.com

We’d be wrong in saying that must-have CRM features end here. You can develop unique features from scratch to meet your specific needs and concerns. 

Steelkiwi’s experience developing CRMs

We have experience creating CRM software for different niches including eCommerce. We’d be happy to demonstrate our expertise and show off our CRM projects. Message us to book a free consultation.