Tools
Tools for Digital Commerce
A working collection of tools for building, measuring and growing online businesses. No affiliate links, no sponsorship, no partnership with any vendor listed here.
E-commerce platforms
Shopify
Hosted store platform with its own checkout and a large app ecosystem.
Use it when you want to launch quickly and accept constraints on checkout customisation in exchange for less maintenance.
WooCommerce
Store plugin for WordPress, self-hosted, with full access to templates and database.
Use it when content and commerce sit on the same site, or when you need control that hosted platforms do not allow.
BigCommerce
Hosted platform with more built-in features and fewer required apps than most alternatives.
Worth comparing when catalogue complexity or B2B pricing rules are the main constraint.
Analytics and measurement
Google Analytics
Event-based web analytics with e-commerce reporting and channel attribution.
Reconcile its order count against the store backend before trusting anything else it reports.
Google Search Console
Search performance, indexing status and technical issues, reported by Google directly.
The only place to see which queries actually bring impressions, and which pages Google declined to index.
Looker Studio
Free reporting layer that connects analytics, ads and spreadsheet data in one view.
Good for a recurring report that combines platform spend with backend order data.
Microsoft Clarity
Session recordings and heatmaps, free, with rage-click and dead-click detection.
Use it to see the friction a funnel report can only imply, particularly on mobile templates.
Marketing and lifecycle
Google Ads
Search, shopping and display inventory across Google properties.
Shopping campaigns depend on feed quality more than on bidding, which is where most accounts lose money.
Meta Ads
Paid placements across Facebook and Instagram, with broad interest and lookalike targeting.
Compare its reported conversions against backend orders per channel rather than reading them as totals.
Klaviyo
Email and SMS built around store data, with segmentation on purchase behaviour.
Strongest where flows depend on order history: post-purchase, replenishment, win-back.
Mailchimp
General-purpose email marketing with a lower barrier to entry.
Reasonable for a store whose email programme is still a handful of campaigns rather than behavioural flows.
SEO
Ahrefs
Backlink index, keyword research and site auditing.
Useful for seeing which competitor pages earn links, which is usually more actionable than their keyword list.
Semrush
Keyword and competitive research across organic and paid, with position tracking.
Good for mapping which categories a competitor ranks for that your catalogue covers but your structure does not.
Automation
Zapier
Connects applications through triggers and actions, with a large catalogue of integrations.
Best for short, well-defined workflows. Long chains become difficult to debug.
Make
Visual workflow builder with branching, iteration and error handling.
Suits scenarios that need conditional logic or processing a list of records.
n8n
Workflow automation that can be self-hosted, with a fair-code licence.
Worth considering when data residency matters or per-operation pricing becomes the limiting factor.
Productivity and AI
Notion
Documents and lightweight databases in one workspace.
A reasonable home for the measurement plan and the register of what each automation does.
Airtable
Spreadsheet-database hybrid with views, relations and an API.
Useful as a product or campaign register that other tools can read from programmatically.
ChatGPT
General-purpose language model for drafting, summarising and classification.
Keep it on tasks where a person reviews the output. Anything that sends without review needs a different design.