How Project Management Tools Can Give Your Shopping Cart a Boost

Sell, sell, sell. As a small business especially in a digital world, things move fast. It can be difficult to take your eyes off the ball (or the sales results) if you want to survive or better still thrive and grow. But flying by the seat of your pants may only take you so far. As your enterprise gets bigger and encompasses more activities with greater numbers of clients, employees and subcontractors, there comes a time when you can no longer do it all in your head. Even if you choose to focus exclusively on wholesaling or retailing, you will need to add value.

That can mean:

• Providing an attractive online store that changes to reflect trends as they occur


• Producing new offer catalogs


• Informing customers or sales partners with useful content relating to your offering


• Optimizing online and offline advertising to make your ecommerce site as visible as possible


• Managing and updating payment options, invoicing, and inventory


• And optimizing the shopping cart, of course…

Sooner or Later, You’ll Need Project Management

Whether or not the answer lies in software, with the plethora of activities that spring up around a simple online sales concept, some sort of project management is necessary. Without setting objectives, defining milestones and organizing resources, you’d probably have a tough time doing any of this on your own. As soon as several people get involved, central control becomes mandatory to get everybody working towards the same goals and to avoid enterprise anarchy.

Is the Answer in Project Management and Planning Software?

In principle, one of two things will be true. A project management and planning app will bring you more value than what you pay to use it. In that case, you’ll probably keep it. If the reverse is true, you’ll ditch it. Remember that using software costs more than just license or subscription fees. You and your colleagues need to learn how to use it. The hours it takes to start getting value out of the app should be multiplied by the number of people involved for a true reading. This explains why some apps with low pricing but high complexity may turn out to cost an enterprise significantly more than apps at a reasonable price that are easy to learn and effective in use.

Different Approaches

If the idea of project management and planning help from software sounds interesting, the next step is to identify an app that suits you. As well as the factors of cost and learnability discussed above, apps can differ widely in terms of their design and how they fit in with your enterprise way of working (your company culture, if you prefer). Wrike, Mavenlink and Clarizen are examples of three apps with varying perspectives on how to get those shopping cart and related projects done and dusted.

1. Integration with or leveraging of other tools you already use. If a PM app is a natural extension of technology you already know and like, you can expect the benefits of better sales results with less of a learning curve.


2. Range of functionality offered. Your shopping cart projects typically have one objective: to increase enterprise profitability. To do that however also means being able to account for time spent, employee resources consumed, results achieved and customer billings.


3. Who needs to use the app? Some enterprises while highly oriented towards to sales and marketing rather than claiming any specific technical leadership are coming to a surprising conclusion. They think that everybody should know how to manage a project for overall improved company results.

Wrike – Simple as Pie and Tasty Too

Got email? Then you’ll know how to use Wrike. That’s the basic concept underlying Wrike project management and planning functionality. The app was originally designed as an extension to email, even if later it developed its own personality. From one-person enterprises that want to better organize their online sales to hundreds or thousands of employees, Wrike offers a highly intuitive interface for sorting out what should happen, when and how.

Clarizen – A New Project Management Paradigm

Enter social project management. Clarizen spotted a need to bring project management to the masses and make it universally accessible. In the vendor’s words, “everybody is a project manager”. With social networking also penetrating further and further into enterprises of all sizes, Clarizen combines these aspects. The software also includes project portfolio management functionality. This lets you optimize global profitability over all the projects you have on the go. For example, if you’re preparing your online gift catalog for the next festive season, creating content to draw in a new category of customers, and integrating a new payment gateway, project portfolio management can help you allocate resources between them with the best results and no conflict.

Mavenlink – End-to-End for Handling Complexity

The Mavenlink vision is of a project management and planning app that covers projects from start to finish, including quotes, inception, execution and integration with different applications for accounting and invoicing, for instance. At this stage, we’re moving beyond the exclusive focus on the shopping cart. Consequently, Mavenlink may appeal more to larger companies or as a solution to grow into. On the other hand, if you are already excited by the idea of advanced project management, resource planning and analytics for better productivity and enhanced profitability, then keep Mavenlink on your list of possibles.

How Should You Choose?

Here’s a quick action plan to get you started:

• Decide if you can manage your shopping cart-centric business as it stands, or if growing complexity means a need for better project management


• Answer the three points above to assess your needs concerning existing applications, functionality you need and who will use the app.


• Make use of the free trials of project management and planning apps available from GetApp for Wrike, Clarizen, Mavenlink or even all of them.


• Get feedback from the people in your company who will use such an app.


• Choose from one of the monthly or yearly subscription plans on offer accordingly.

How Project Management Tools Can Give Your Shopping Cart a Boost