21 Type of Software Your Online Business Needs

Running an online business can be challenging, with various aspects to manage: from internal operations and communication to sales and customer service activities. Implementing the right software is essential for efficiently controlling your company and simplifying your workflows. In this article, we’ll explore the top 21 type of software for online businesses and the best practices to make your life easier. 

Sender — Best Communication Software

Effective communication is the key to any SMB’s success. For ecommerce owners, you need a communication tool to streamline your process and expand the market. The tool shall help you convey messages to customers easily at the right moment and right content. You can design content for different scenarios across the customer journey and personalize it for each customer. 

For example, you can send a discount for first-time visitors and send an email recommending products a customer may like based on their previous purchases. This will keep customers engaged with your brand and return in the future.  

Sender is a powerful email marketing system with advanced features to build your subscriber lists and establish trust with customers.

With Sender, you can:

• Design email quickly with an automation tool to drag and drop templates; 
• Deliver emails smoothly thanks to Sender’s high-quality infrastructure; 
• Monitor and improve your email campaigns with the email analytics functions; 
• Integrate with other platforms like WooCommerce, WordPress, PrestaShop, etc.;
• Leverage SMS marketing together with your email marketing campaign; 
• Build attractive landing pages that convert visitors to subscribers of your email;
• Send Push notifications when customers visit your website or app or when they start their computers. 

Hostinger — Website Host/Builder

Web hosting and web builders are crucial software for online businesses to create a website and publish it online. Web hosting lets you rent a space on a server that will host all your website data. On the other hand, a web builder provides you the pre-coded templates that can be customized to create a beautiful, functional website. Many web hosting providers also offer the builder tool, helping small businesses create their sites without needing IT knowledge. If you use Magento as the backbone of your eCommerce business, you can consider these best Magento hosting providers.

Among thousands of web hosting providers, Hostinger has been one of the favorite choices of online business owners. It offers useful features, excellent support, and stably high performance in speed and uptime at reasonable prices.

Here are its key features: 

• Optimized for WordPress;
• One-click install to integrate 3^rd apps and features;
• Unlimited bandwidth and storage are available for the top two tiers of Hostinger’s plans; 
• A customizable and functional dashboard; 
• SSL security to keep your site data safe;
• Hostinger has developed a website builder, Zyro, which helps to build sites more conveniently and supports you with logo and AI-powered text.

Kinsta — Cloud Hosting

Kinsta provides a cloud hosting platform for web applications, databases, and WordPress sites. They provide a fast and secure infrastructure to accommodate web projects; the constant improvement of their services, scalable plans and resources, customized dashboard, and set of user and developer-friendly features guarantees an outstanding user experience.
Deploying an application on their platform is seamless and can be done in just a few minutes.
Kinsta also provides a free WordPress development tool, DevKinsta, to design, develop and create sites, themes, and plugins locally. 

Kinsta’s Key Features:

• Powerful infrastructure built on Google Cloud’s Premium Tier network;
• Cloudflare integration;
• Create WordPress sites or deploy applications with a few clicks;
• Custom-built dashboard;
• Free SSL and free CDN.

Quickbooks — Accounting Software

Accounting software enables entrepreneurs to oversee their accounts and expenses, keep financial tabs, and prepare for taxation. For online businesses, accounting software helps manage taxes and payroll more efficiently than Excel spreadsheets. As the company grows, the accounting operations become more complex, and thus you may need an ERP system.

You can choose from various accounting software in the market, and Quickbooks is one of the best options that are trusted by thousands of companies worldwide with positive reviews. It is a cloud-based system and can be accessed via a website browser or a mobile app.

It helps you:

• Automatically generate custom invoices, match payments to invoices, and send payment reminders;
• Centralize all your expenditures to prepare for tax time; 
• Connect to your bank to fully view your finances;
• Arrange expenses into tax categories;
• Track tax based on revenues and expenses; 
• Sync data with your orders and inventory levels in real time;
• Capture and classify receipts with your mobile phone; 
• Monitor your business performance with insight and reporting tools;
• Support multi-currency in sending invoices, recording transactions, and adjusting reports; 
• Migrate from traditional tools like Excel, Xero, MYOB, or Reckon Desktop to QuickBooks Online.

Timely — Time Tracking Software

Time tracking software allows you to track the time your employees spend on projects, tasks, and other deliverables. It can boost productivity and accountability for your staff and show you which activities are taking too much time. This software keeps all time data in one place to discover workflow discrepancies so you can study the problem further and find solutions.

While there are many free time tracking apps in the market, most of them merely provide some basic functions to record time. A paid software like Timely not only helps you accurately record how your time is spent but also allows you to leverage many advanced features.

Training your employees to use Timely will create a good habit for them to manage time better:

• Track your activities in real-time and create “Memories” of all software and websites during your work. Then you can create a Timesheet by attributing these Memories to the assigned tasks or projects.
• Connect to your calendar and other tools to incorporate your meetings into your work schedule; 
• Add time blocks and set up hourly rates for projects, tasks, and clients; 
• Customize and filter reports by clients, projects, tags, teams, or a period (daily, weekly, monthly); 
• Integrate with QuickBooks to create invoices from the time tracking data or export that information to share with the right people;
• Plan time for tasks by the project or the assignee. Then, you can log your actual time spent on your timesheet and compare it to the plan.

Stripe — Payment Transaction Software

A payment transaction system handles online customer payments for you. Good payment software simplifies the checkout process for customers, reducing the likelihood of abandoned shopping carts and payment failures. You can set up recurring billing, strengthen security for customer payment data and avoid fraud. The software will charge you a fixed fee or percentage rate on each transaction, so make sure to look for a provider with competitive costs in the long run. 

For online transactions, software like Stripe accepts various payment methods like debit cards, credit cards, digital wallets, and international payments. The payment processing provider can also connect with your POS data and manage invoices and subscription payments with ease. In addition, if you have a developer, you can customize the product to suit your platform.

Salesforce — Sales, Marketing Software

Sales and marketing software streamlines how online businesses reach the target audience, launch campaigns, and convert prospects into customers. This system helps you remove mundane tasks and optimize your marketing resources.

Modern marketing software like Salesforce offers extensive features that make the sales funnel simpler and faster:

• Real-time alerts help you take prompt actions on a customer’s key event and transaction patterns to increase the chance of closing deals; 
• Email management: creates email campaigns, sends emails in bulk, and automates email sending to customers for events like birthdays or anniversaries;
• Lead Management monitors and nurtures potential buyers effortlessly. It keeps all lead information to personalize sales outreach and engagement in sales pipelines.
• Marketing management: segment leads, create content marketing, launch and track launch campaigns, and support social media marketing. You can also plan marketing resources and set up automation, such as scheduling posts, queueing your content, and alerting when your brand is mentioned;
• Analytics function monitors collect and visualize data on your campaigns and ROI to facilitate data-driven decisions; 
• Proposal management creates and sends quotes directly from the marketing system. You can customize, revise, export, and share quotes with your colleagues or managers;
• Task management: schedule and track tasks and book meetings with clients;
• Gmail and Outlook integration.

Recruiterflow — Recruiting Software

Recruiting software is a type of technology that helps businesses automate and streamline their recruitment processes. It typically includes features like job posting, applicant tracking, candidate sourcing, resume parsing, interview scheduling, and reporting/analytics. Recruiting software can be used by recruiting departments, recruiters, hiring managers, and other stakeholders involved in the hiring process. The main goal of recruiting software is to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of recruitment efforts, helping businesses attract and recruit top talent more quickly and cost-effectively.

Recruiterflow is a powerful recruiting software that streamlines the hiring process for businesses of all sizes. Its intuitive design and robust features make it an ideal choice for businesses looking to improve their recruitment efforts.

Best for:

• Small to medium-sized businesses
• Recruiting and Staffing agencies

Key features:

• Automated job posting and applicant tracking
• Advanced candidate search and filtering
• Interview scheduling and collaboration tools
• Customizable hiring workflows and email templates
• Analytics and reporting for tracking recruitment metrics

Deskera — Enterprise Resource Planning Software (ERP)

Enterprise Resource Planning software Deskera is designed to facilitate seamless communication and collaboration between various business processes, enhancing operational efficiency and streamlining decision-making. By offering real-time data analysis and enabling intelligent resource allocation, ERP systems boost productivity and eliminate inefficiencies.

Deskera is an all-in-one ERP, CRM & HR platform that helps users around the world automate core operational processes and view business performance in real time, and has the following features:

• Accounting: Track transactions, create invoices, generate reports, and monitor accounts receivable and payable.
• Financial Management: Manage financial processes like budgeting and forecasting, bank reconciliation, and multi-entity consolidation with ease.
• Manufacturing Operations: Manage your materials, resources, and production processes efficiently with Deskera’s MRP Platform.
• Inventory Management: Track inventory levels and movements in real time. Generate stock-level alerts when reaching critical low thresholds.
• Warehouse Management: Automate receiving, order picking, and shipping.
• Procurement: Minimize costs, optimize order and lead times, and manage vendor scorecards, purchase orders, and invoices.
• Order Management: Manage all aspects of sales orders from multiple channels.
• Customer Relationship Management: Segment customers, Create deal pipelines, track customer histories and interactions, and automate sales tasks.

Dash — Digital Asset Management for Ecommerce Brands 

Dash is a digital asset management (DAM) tool that lets you manage your brand’s assets, including images, videos, graphics, and brand guidelines. Often used by marketing teams, Dash lets you find, share, and deploy creative files to your channels.

Imagine you need a product image for a campaign. Simply type a keyword like ‘sofa’ into the search bar and Dash will find relevant images, fast. 

Withs Dash, you can also: 

• Use tags and fields to find images;
• Create portals to share images with resellers and marketplaces; 
• Resize images for social media; 
• Set up approval workflows and permissions; 
• Leave feedback on images and videos; 
• Starts at £79/$109 per month

OSI Affiliate Software — Affiliate Marketing Software

OSI Affiliate Software is a powerful and easy-to-use platform that helps you create and manage affiliate and referral programs for your business.

With OSI Affiliate Software, you can:

• Reward your customers and influencers for promoting your brand on social media, blogs, websites, and more.
• Track and optimize your campaigns with real-time analytics and reports.
• Integrate with thousands of apps and platforms, such as Wix, Shopify, WordPress, and more.
• Grow your sales, traffic, and customer loyalty with word-of-mouth marketing.

OSI Affiliate Software is trusted by over 14,000 companies worldwide. Try it free for 15 days and see how it can help you grow your business.

Papersign — Free eSignature Software 

Papersign is an e-signature solution designed to simplify creating, sending, and signing documents, so you can spend more time on the things that matter.

With Papersign, you can go from a blank page to a signed document in minutes. The powerful editor lets you upload PDFs, create documents from scratch, or mix and match the two to create legally binding contracts at lightning speed. Easily reinforce your brand identity by adding logos, rich imagery, and a range of different fonts, colors, and formatting options.

Papersign has robust security measures to protect your documents and signatures. It complies with the requirements of several eSignature legislation in the US, EU, UK, Australia, and New Zealand to ensure the privacy of your information. 

Key Features:

• Track signature progress with Audit Trail;
• Add custom branding on documents;
• Create legally binding documents from scratch;
• Set signing workflows;
• Send automated reminder emails;
• Enhances security & encryption;
• Free version allows you to sign 3 documents per month. Unlimited paid version costs $24 monthly per user. 

Apify — Web Scraping Platform

Data is the king. You know that. But sometimes, it’s tricky to get the right data you need. Apify solves this problem by providing more than 1,500 ready-made web scrapers and automation tools called Actors.

On Apify Store, you can find Actors that will help you to:

• Automatically scrape and extract data from the web and feed it to large language models. Try Website Content Crawler;
• Extract data from social media, such as Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, or LinkedIn. This allows you to learn more about your competitors or automate your workflows;
• Extract contact details from the web using Contact Details Scraper or Google Maps and export them in a structured way;
• Match products across ecommerce channels with AI Product Matcher. Track their prices or do market research much more easily.

The best part? You can start with a free plan and try out the first runs of Actors for free. Can’t find an Actor for your use case? You can build one yourself in Python or JavaScript using web scraping templates.

MGT Commerce — Hosting Services

MGT Commerce offers specialized Magento hosting services using Amazon Web Services (AWS) for high performance and security. Their services focus on the specific needs of Magento-based online businesses, ensuring fast, secure, and scalable hosting environments.

MGT Commerce is a leading Magento hosting provider with rapid page load times. They prioritize security with AWS Web Application Firewall, DDoS protection, and 24/7 support. You can get add-ons like MGT Code Deploy, MGT WAF, and MGT Cloud Log for efficient infrastructure management.

Key Features of MGT Commerce: 

• Managed Magento Migration to AWS server with minimal downtime.
• Optimized Magento server configurations for high performance.
• Ultra-fast page load times of under 0.3 seconds.
• Advanced security with robust protections and automated backups.
• 24/7 expert support and scalable, cost-efficient AWS infrastructure.

Termly — Data Privacy Compliance Solutions

Privacy compliance solutions help websites comply with applicable data privacy laws, avoiding significant fines and penalties without the high costs of relying on a lawyer. Prioritizing data privacy also helps businesses build trust with consumers in the modern digital marketplace. 

Termly provides comprehensive generators so businesses can make customized legal policies in minutes. For example, their Privacy Policy Generator includes the necessary clauses to meet the legal requirements of over a dozen privacy laws. 

Termly’s cookie consent management allows websites to present users with appropriate consent options following regional laws. Trusted by millions of SMBs, using Termly is like having a privacy specialist in your back pocket. 

Here are some of Termly’s key features:

• Eight policy generators include privacy policy, cookie policy, terms and conditions, shipping policy, return and refund policy, EULA, acceptable use policy, and more. 
• Cookie Consent Manager is TCF v2.2 certified and a Google CMP accredited partner.
• Access to a fantastic customer support team.
• All solutions are updated regularly and backed by a legal team and data privacy experts.
• Compatible with websites and apps.
• Consent management is configurable to comply with laws in over 80 regions, and the Privacy Policy Generator is configurable to comply with 15 data privacy laws and counting.

Smartlead — Best Cold Emailing Tool

Smartlead is a comprehensive cold emailing tool designed to help businesses and individuals expand their outreach strategies and convert cold contacts into valuable leads and revenue streams. With its intuitive interface and robust features, Smartlead offers unlimited mailboxes and warm-up functionalities alongside multi-channel infrastructure support to effectively engage prospects across diverse platforms. 

Smartlead is ideal for lead gen agencies, marketing agencies, sales agencies, and recruiters looking to elevate their cold emailing strategy.

Smartlead Key Features: 

• Unlimited AI warmups using advanced AI technology for optimal deliverability 
• Unlimited mailboxes to manage several email accounts from a single platform 
• Real-time replies with Master Inbox for centralized communication and efficient follow-up
• Auto-rotating email accounts for increased deliverability 
• Email personalization and campaign management features for enhancing conversion rates
• Multi-channel outreach across various channels, including email and social media
• Detailed tracking and analytics features for informed decision-making.

Dot.vu — Interactive Content Platform

Interactive content brings plain, ordinary content to life by requiring active participation from the audience. Rather than passively consuming a piece of content, the audience is prompted to interact with it by answering questions in a quiz, clicking an image to reveal more information, completing a game, and so on.  

Dot.vu is by far the most complete and flexible interactive content platform out there. With Dot.vu, you’ll have almost endless options of different types of Interactive Content to choose from, which saves you time from thinking of new creative ways to engage your audience. 

What makes Dot.vu the best interactive content platform:

• Create personalized and memorable online experiences;
• Increase engagement by 75% and conversion rates by 55%;
• Intuitive and user-friendly;
• 300+ fully customizable templates;
• More than 19 types of Interactive Content from surveys and polls to Marketing Games and Interactive Videos for endless interactive possibilities;
• Easy drag-and-drop Editor feature;
• No coding needed;
• Adaptive and responsive design;
• Allows you to collect zero-party data;
• Integration with most sales, marketing, and analytics tools;
• Dedicated team to help create your content (Agency services).

Flatirons Fuse — CSV Importer Tool

Flatirons Fuse — CSV Importer Tool simplifies the often cumbersome task of importing data into your website or web application. It’s a versatile and powerful tool designed to seamlessly integrate into your existing systems, providing a smooth data import experience for both you and your customers.

Whether you’re dealing with customer data, sales information, or any other type of data, Flatirons Fuse streamlines the process from start to finish. It’s an embeddable CSV importer that makes importing data to your website a breeze. 

Key Features:

• Effortless Data Import
• Data Transformation and Cleaning
• Intelligent Validation System
• Customizable Importer Configuration
• Easy Integration
• Security Compliance
• Multiple File Format Support
• Custom Styling
• AI-Powered Column Matching
• Low-Code Implementation.
• Backend Validation Support
• Internationalization
• Dedicated Customer Support

Flatirons Fuse CSV Importer Tool is the solution for businesses of all sizes, offering flexible pricing plans to accommodate varying needs. From operations and customer experience to sales and engineering, Flatirons Fuse simplifies data import tasks, allowing teams to focus on what matters most. Built by a team of data import experts, the software reflects a commitment to quality, usability, and efficiency, enabling seamless data onboarding experiences.

Paycom — HR & Payroll Software

The main purpose of HR and payroll software is to automate payroll, human resource management, talent acquisition, and time and labor management processes. However, Paycom goes beyond that. It digitizes your business’s core HR operations by offering features like expense management, applicant tracking, compensation budgeting, scheduling, and benefits administration.

Paycom offers comprehensive Human Capital Management (HCM) software designed for efficient employee management, seamlessly integrating HR and payroll data. The platform streamlines compensation processes for businesses of various sizes and industries.

It offers different automation tools, including Beti, Vault, Everyday, Paycom Pay, and GL Concierge, to assist managers and employees in handling payment transactions. It has a wide range of tools for talent management, talent acquisition, and HR management as well, including E-Verify, Employee Self-Service, and Clue.

Paycom’s intuitive and engaging features make it a go-to choice for businesses who want to enhance their payroll and HR operations.

Paycom Key Features:

• Automated employee-driven payroll
• Applicant tracking for the dynamic recruiting process
• Onboarding tool to help candidates onboard seamlessly
• Risk-free tax credit services
• Performance, compensation, and position management
• Industry-first direct data exchange tool
• Time, attendance, and schedule management

CloudTalk — Cloud-Based Call Center Software

CloudTalk provides a cloud-based call center and business phone system designed to amplify your customer support efforts across all communication channels and is tailored to cater to the unique needs of both sales and support teams.

Selecting a number from over 160 supported countries is the gateway to instantly optimizing your workflows. With advanced features like IVR, click-to-call, power dialers, and more, CloudTalk ensures a seamless enhancement of your communication processes.

Additionally, CloudTalk supports over 35 robust integrations, spanning helpdesk, e-commerce, and CRM systems such as HubSpot and Zendesk.

Key features:

• Advanced call routing and IVR systems
• Real-time customer information and call history access
• Customizable call scripts and interactive call scripting
• Live call monitoring and recording
• Detailed analytics and performance reporting

Software for Online Business: Key Takeaways

Also read:

• The 20 Best Marketing Automation Tools & Platforms in 2024
• Online Advertising: Examples & Advertisement Statistics

Author Bio

Irene is a content writer at Magestore — an ecommerce solution provider. She often writes about retail and technology trends to help merchants stay up to date with the industry movements.