LightCMS helps small retailers jumpstart their e-commerce operations

OKLAHOMA CITY, USA: LightCMS, a NetSuite company that provides a powerful yet easy-to-use cloud-based content management system (CMS) has claimed continued strong growth in the use of LightCMS by small retailers around the globe seeking a simple, robust and affordable solution to expand their traditional brick and mortar retail sales to ecommerce.

Expanding into e-commerce has traditionally been a challenge for small retailers, demanding a significant upfront investment and technical skills from businesses that have few available resources.

By lowering the barrier to entry and combining content features with a complete online store, LightCMS helps entrepreneurs and established retailers launch attractive, richly functional webstores that can showcase and sell both physical and digital goods across the country and throughout the world.

Since the introduction of online store capabilities to LightCMS in 2011, retailers like Israel Diamond Supply, selling to the public at wholesale prices, Sugarillashop, a seller of fashion apparel, and Australian-based Mumma Cakes, which offers do-it-yourself cake kits, have adopted the platform to run their online businesses.

LightCMS for small retailers is distinguished by:

Ease of use: With a low learning curve, LightCMS enables non-technical users at small retail organizations to easily add, delete or otherwise modify product images, text, video, navigation and checkout flows.

Simple product management: LightCMS enables users to simply add and configure both physical and digital products without a complex dashboard, offering multiple product sizes, colors and other attributes.

Design flexibility: A range of prebuilt templates lets merchants select a theme that suits their business and customizes colors, fonts, layout and more; advanced users can upload their own designs with full control over HTML, CSS and JavaScript standards, while its built-in capabilities for responsive design enables retail sites to automatically adapt to smartphones and tablets, helping to provide mobile users with the same high-quality shopping experience they're accustomed to over laptops and desktops.

Secure cart and checkout: LightCMS delivers a polished, secure cart and checkout experience that drives shopper satisfaction and integrates seamlessly with leading payment processors such as Authorize.net, Stripe and PayPal.

Order management and shipping: LightCMS enables users to quickly search, find, fulfill, cancel and refund orders from a single screen while speeding fulfillment through prebuilt integration with FedEx, UPS and USPS.

Light inventory management: Retailers can track and manage stock within LightCMS to help ensure optimal quantities, streamline replenishment and avoid costly stockouts and lost sales.

Simple data export: Financial and customer data from online sales can be easily exported into accounting software, marketing applications or spreadsheets to manage the business and build customer relationships.

With LightCMS, retailers are cultivating a brand image through blogs, videos and other content, driving site traffic through built-in search engine optimization (SEO), and offering their local customers a convenient alternative to in-store shopping.

With a well-designed and inviting website, including shopping cart functionality, a small retailer with a handful of employees can appear to be much larger. Many small retailers are attracted by LightCMS's affordable pricing, which begins at $19 a month, including free hosting.