As an eCommerce store owner, your biggest asset is your website. You’ve invested thousands, if not millions, of dollars, with the primary goal of turning your eCommerce platform into your number one salesperson.

However, if you’re not correctly utilizing all of its features, you’re not fully harnessing the power of your platform, and you’re missing out on opportunities to gain a competitive edge, and ultimately, losing out on sales.

The good news is, just like the theory of marginal gains states, if you make small incremental improvements to how you use your platform then when added together they will have a significant impact on your business, your revenue, and your customer retention.

In other words, if you want to stay ahead of the competition, it’s imperative you properly utilize the features on your platform. Trust us, the effect on your website’s revenue, profit, order value,
customer satisfaction, and so on, will be compelling.

Read on to discover the 14 least utilized features on Shopify, Magento, and BigCommerce. You’ll learn how these features benefit your store and, more importantly, get some helpful tips to get started.

1.Two core reasons why multilingual sites are important

Shopify
You can use a multilingual theme, translate your theme via Shopify admin, or more easily use a multilingual app.

BigCommerce
The Stencil Framework enables you to customize the look of dynamic storefronts and then, using a predefined schema, define multiple translations for each theme.

Magento
On Magento, Store Views (store instances) can be used to create multilingual versions of a website. For example, if you need a French and English site, you can simply create two separate store views — one for English and one for French.

2.Rule-Based Product Recommendations

• Based on a predefined set of rules, product recommendation engines sort and filter your store’s products by using:
• Product and traffic data (the number of views, saves, sales, reviews, etc.) to present the most popular and valuable products to the website user;
  User data (customer view pages, product, categories, etc.) to present offers and products that are most relevant to the user.

Shopify
Recommendation algorithms use sales data and product descriptions to show a mix of products that are similar or often bought together on the product page. If your product recommendation needs are more complex (e.g., to show hand-picked recommendations or in-cart recommendations), there are plenty of Shopify apps that supercharge this feature.

BigCommerce
By default, your product pages on BigCommerce automatically display five items with similar names and descriptions near the bottom of the page. However, the related products are selected based simply on name and description, or are selected by you.

Magento
Magento offers the most robust and customizable rules-based product recommendation engine. Magento uses aggregated visitor data to provide product suggestions, resulting in a relevant, highly personalized user experience.

3. Product Alerts Notification

Another underutilized eCommerce feature is Magento’s Product Alerts Notification.

Customers can subscribe to two types of email alerts: price change and in-stock alerts. For each alert, you can determine if customers can subscribe, select the email template that is used, and identify the sender of the email. These benefit you by saving you time and eliminating the need to send manual stock alerts. They also improve user experience and encourage return visits.

4.Custom Configure Site Search

Remarkably, the price isn’t always the main reason people leave your site. Visitors will also leave if they cannot easily find the product they are searching for. But it’s not just your bounce rate that’s affected. Studies have found that visitors who use your site search function are 3 to 5 times more likely to become a customer. Also, the average order value is up to 50% higher when a site search is used.

Therefore, improving your website’s search capability is one of the best ways to increase your conversion rate.

Shopify, Magento, and BigCommerce

By default, Shopify, Magento, and BigCommerce all have a site search feature. Each platform uses its algorithm; however, generally, it leaves much to be desired, rarely allowing for a good result. If you’re keen to supercharge your site search, we recommend using Elasticsearch (which is compatible with all three platforms) as your catalog search solution.

We recommend Elasticsearch as it has the following core benefits:

• Quick and advanced searches on products in the catalog
  You can manage a huge amount of data and return a search query within 10 ms.
• Support for multiple languages
  It supports 13 languages, including English, Spanish, German, Danish, Russian, Chinese, Korean, and Japanese.
• Synonym and stop word interpretation, and fuzzy searching
  It enables stores to interpret customer queries by taking textual queries and interpreting them based on more than just 1-to-1 word comparisons.

5.Tier Pricing

Tier pricing allows you to offer discounts to customers who buy more items from you; the more they buy, the cheaper the price. Customers get more choice and cheaper prices, while sellers can add products and pricing strategies that increase sales and profit.

Tiered pricing is one of the best ways to increase your average order value and boost profits. Essentially, what you’re doing is defining the product’s price per unit within a range.

Shopify
Shopify is the only CMS that doesn’t offer tiered pricing as standard. However, it’s easy to implement using the Bold Quantity Breaks app. The app allows you to set price tiers for products that are dependent on the number of units (or its variants) that a customer purchases.

BigCommerce
BigCommerce offers Price Lists, which provide variant level pricing dependent on customer groups. However, you do need to have an Enterprise Plan and a Stencil theme to use Price Lists, however.

Magento
Magento offers tiered pricing as standard. You can offer a discount based on quantity to a specific customer group that you know buys in bulk. The tiered price is displayed on your product and catalog pages, and the merchant has the flexibility to present this as needed