10 Tools To Keep Your Remote E-commerce Team Productive

It can be hard to keep momentum with newly remote teams.
The quarantine threw many e-commerce businesses into remote work for the first time. People adapted, and e-commerce teams across the globe learned new ways of working and staying connected when working from home. 
However, this movement was largely filled with excitement around something new and accompanied with a determination to triumph this new challenge.
Over time, the honeymoon period of remote work soon begins to wear off, and productivity can be hard to achieve or maintain; which would be seen in the performance of your e-commerce website. 
In this article, we’ve gathered together the top tools you can use to help keep your remote team productive, and online store running smoothly.

These productivity tools will bring a breath of fresh air to teams stuck in a post-honeymoon rut after shifting to working from home.

10 Productivity Tools for Remote E-commerce Teams

1. Slite

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Knowledge is a powerful tool in itself, that’s why we’re starting the list with Slite.
This tool is coined as a “free knowledge base that your team will actually use.” It’s a platform with UX at heart and will give your remote team a constant reference point rather than waiting on slack responses from their colleagues. 
Use the platform as a company wiki, onboarding tool, for meeting minutes or project documentation.
If you’re looking to get your e-commerce business processes and valuable information out of heads and onto paper, then digitize them and ensure your remote team has everything they need to get the work done.

2. Maze

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It can often be challenging to prototype a new e-commerce solution without having your users in the same room.
However, just because your team is now working remotely, it doesn’t mean it should hinder or halt their productivity when it comes to new e-commerce services. 
Maze is a design user testing platform created with remote work in mind.
With a host of testing panels, UX vs. UI reporting metrics, and more, your team will be able to get a better idea of how your people engage with your product, and they’ll be able to do it all online. 

3. Slack: E-commerce communication 

Slack is a life-saver for internal communications, especially with remote teams.
If your e-commerce business has been struggling between juggling emails, WhatsApp messages from colleagues, and phone systems, it may be time to unify and solidify how you now communicate. 
Slack is the perfect chat platform to keep things professional, yet engaging and fun. The Slack mobile app is available on android and iOS, which means even if your team is on-the-go, they’ll still be able to check-in with those they need to. 
Use Slack’s powerful integrations, paid plan for extra storage, and intuitive notification system to ensure your team gets the most of the platform and remote communication is never missed. 

4. Clockify 

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Clockify is excellent for smaller teams that want to understand better how they split their working from home hours.
It can be tough to look back and analyze your day when you’re not in the office and working side-by-side with your colleagues. 
This tool is a free resource that will enable your team to get a clear overview of how they’re spending their time and identify areas to be more productive.
What’s more, Clockify is determined to bring this free service to teams, no matter what their size, forever. 

5. Dropbox 

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When going remote, it’s so essential that your team has a hold over their files.
People need to know where they can get things and how. Dropbox is possibly the best file storage system out there that can work entirely from the cloud. 
If you can put together a “how-to guide” for storing your files and how people can access them, you’re already setting yourself and your processes up for success; especially with the members of your team that work with visual content. 
Dropbox has a few other nifty features, too. The tool uses AI to learn the files that are most important to each team member and give personalized suggestions; as well as handling a wealth of different file formats so different teams can work together better. 

6. Airtable: E-commerce project management

Project management needs to run differently for remote companies.
Newly remote companies need an even tighter hold over their projects, what once could be easily managed or resolved from a quick chat over the coffee machine is no longer the case. 
If you want your team to stay productive in the shift to remote work, every stakeholder needs a clear overview of any project.
Airtable is a fantastic tool for project management. You can customize cards to fit your needs, tag colleagues, upload and share files, attach deadlines, and more.
Introducing a tool like this will ensure your e-business team stays productive, and no project falls on the side. 

7. Headspace

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Productivity doesn’t just come from using smart tools; sometimes, it’s a headspace that your team needs to adopt.
However, managing emotions and atmospheres can be hard with a remote team. When you’re in the office, you have more control over the environment you create, but how can you ensure your team creates a productive environment in their own homes? 
Meditation has shown it can help people to stress less, focus more, and sleep better. All of these things are key to having a productive day, both professionally and personally.
Headspace teaches mindfulness skills to your team, for a few minutes, every day. It can completely change their attitude, ethos, and productivity toward work. 
Headspace has created team plans to help any business of any size succeed using meditation. 

8. Klok

Not all tools need to be state of the art, high-tech systems to get your team to be productive.
Some of the simplest of tools can help your team in a big way. Klok is a widget that your team can add to their phones, giving an easy overview of different timezones.
It’s vital that as your team goes remote, they remain conscious and empathetic towards people and their time zones.
23% of remote workers say they work more hours at home than they do in the office, the struggle to switch off is very real. If this becomes the case with your e-commerce team, they’ll struggle to be productive in the hours they’re supposed to be if constantly switched on during the hours they’re not. 
Onboard your newly remote team with ways they can remain conscious of other people and their timezones.
By doing so, and using this simple tool before they send someone a message that can perhaps wait until the following day, it will make all of your team more productive for two main reasons. 

1. This working style will enable all team members to fully relax after hours. 
2. People will know they need to make the most of the contact hours they have. 

 

9. Habit – Daily Tracker

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It’s argued that it takes 21 days of successful change to fix a new routine.
That’s 21 days of uncertainty for you and your team. Habit Daily Tracker is a phone app that gives you the nudge and reminders your team needs to hit their personal goals. 
Like we mentioned with HeadSpace, changes like going remote are just as much mental as they are physical. It’s so important that you mentally support your team in this change, which can seem daunting to anyone that hasn’t experienced it before. 
Hold workshops with your team. What do they want to achieve in their personal lives? Maybe they want to exercise more, or perhaps they want to read a few chapters of a book every day?
Whatever their personal goals are, implement this tool to help them get there and support mental health.
You’ll see a notable difference in your team’s attitude and productivity if you’re looking after them in their personal life.

10. CamScanner

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Now that we’ve taken e-commerce out of office, we need to find new ways to recreate office tools that we had access too.
Scanners were an essential tool in the office and made transferring physical data to the digital space easy. 
Just because you’re remote, it doesn’t mean every team member now needs to go out and buy a scanner. CamScanner enables any team member to turn their phone or tablet into a scanner. 
The tool allows you to manage documents, generate watermarks, auto-enhances image quality, and more.
It’s a nifty way around buying a bulky scanner and is undoubtedly something that all businesses should consider whether returning to the office or not. 

Wrapping up remote tools for e-commerce teams

I hope you’ve found this article useful and discovered a few new tools that you can potentially use with your remote e-commerce team. 
Productivity comes from many contributing factors. We need great tools to help us digitalize and streamline processes, but we also need communication and personal wellbeing tools if we want to be successful. 
In going remote, we’re asking everyone to take their work home with them, which was once frowned upon, but now is a necessity. We need to consider the repercussions of this both in an employee’s working environment and their mental wellbeing. 
Adopt the best tools for your e-commerce team on the whole, onboard them thoroughly to maximize use, and lead a team with empathy in a newly remote world. 

Author

[one_third_first][/one_third_first][two_third_last]Ray Slater Berry is a content strategist at Outreach Humans. He has been working in social media and content marketing for eight years. He specializes in the tech, innovation, and travel sectors. He is also a published fiction author with his first title, Golden Boy.[/two_third_last]