In this digital era, businesses are moving to a different dimension where selling or buying is just a click away.
Whether you want to sell a pen or real-estate, you do not necessarily need a tangible, brick, and mortar store. Ecommerce platforms have got you covered, given you pay attention to adding value to your targeted customers. The whole process is cost-effective, time-saving, and user-friendly!
As a result of the combined forces of eCommerce and the internet, starting a business is comparatively easier these days. Your virtual “home base” can be built easily using the eCommerce platforms available. Hence, the eCommerce industry is rapidly booming and opening doors to businesses.
According to statistics, the eCommerce industry made $2.3 trillion in sales in 2017, which is projected to double by 2021.
Take the example of Amazon, eBay, Alibaba, and many more; you can introspect the way their business is growing in the online space. However, these big names and rosy statistics mask the huge pressure that the eCommerce businesses face. The growing consumer demands and fierce competition has created tight margins, making it difficult for businesses to survive in this virtual space.
To stay ahead of the game and win the competition, eCommerce businesses need more networking, keeping an eye on their competitors, leveraging the latest technologies, and upgrading their customer service.
But, despite facing fierce competition, the eCommerce industry still has a massive potential across many niches such as:
- Eco-friendly baby toiletries
- Natural skincare products
- Handmade toys and other products for pet owners
- Print-on-demand apparels
- Fitness gears
- Gluten-free and Organic foods on demand
- Online course, and more
Why choosing the right eCommerce platform is crucial for your business?
It is somewhat similar to that of selecting a physical brick and mortar store. A lot goes in while building an eCommerce website, be it the cost, reputation, and risks. And if anything goes wrong, your overall business suffers. Ultimately, you are forced to change the platform, which again demands additional cost and time, let alone the hassles incurred.
Hence, save yourself from unnecessary troubles and invest in the right platform from the beginning. But how exactly are you going to achieve it? Consider the below-mentioned points.
Price
If you have a small or midsize business, price becomes a crucial aspect to consider. Choose a platform that can offer the essential tools, features, and usability that can come at a reasonable price.
Back-end tools
Make sure the platform you choose must offer essential backend tools to support your website. It could offer features like access to WP plugins, application management systems, support for SKUs and CSS, and more. It must provide smooth accessibility from inventory management to content management, everything in the back-end.
Scalability
With the growth of your company, your online store would need support for more products, more payment options, etc. Hence, the platform you choose should be capable of providing easy scalability, without hampering your business operations.
Performance and speed
When a user opens your store, it must provide decent performance and page loading speed. It keeps him/her hooked on the site to enhance your business. Hence, your host must offer excellent performance and speed even if you use a variety of add-ons, plugins, and whatnot.
User experience
Choose a technology that your end users can find easy to use to enhance user experience. The website must not give them hard-time when they are searching for a product or service. Similarly, make sure that the platform is not that complex to manage by your team. Instead, it must offer easy management without compromising on efficiency.
Security
Cybercrimes are on the rise as we speak. And you know how important the security of your online store is. It not only poses a serious threat to your reputation and business, but it also threatens your client’s data.
Hence, choose a platform that can offer you with top-level security to mitigate security breach of any sort in the long run.
Customer service
Many businesses tend to overlook this aspect. As a business, you know how important customer service is for the benefit of your business. You must always be ready to attend the questions of your customers and help them.
Similarly, make sure to select the one that can offer you prompt customer service in case you may need any help.
Next, let’s find out some of the best solutions for your businesses.
Magento
The open-source eCommerce platform, Magento offers a myriad of useful and exciting features. From small to enterprise-level firms, numerous companies are benefiting their online stores from Magento’s flexibility and power.
It builds your shop efficiently so that you can run your business well. It offers endless possibilities for customization to shape your business the way you have dreamed of. You get lots of templates, widgets, add-ons, and many more that keep on updating.
To increase your online visibility, Magento performs exceptionally well in the ground of SEO. And, the high performing platform is also prompt in fixing bugs, if any. Additionally, online stores using this platform run smoothly across different devices, including mobile phones.
What’s more, the Magento Commerce platform also supports sales channels such as Amazon. Magento is ideal in delivering ultimate sales experience in addition to downloading the software for free. If you go for an open-source solution, then you can either install and setup yourself or go for a trusted hosting platform.
Weebly
Small and mid-size businesses looking to build a budget-friendly website, Weebly is a great option.
To get started with it, you do not need to be tech-savvy, just the basics would suffice. It also offers blogging to promote and market your products by adding relevant articles. Additionally, you get tons of exciting and professional themes.
The building, managing, and editing your website is effortless even from a mobile device. It offers full customization and a wide range of professionally designed templates. You can create your galleries, custom background, and slideshows suitable for your business. It also gives you third-party integrations for your store along with SEO tools to help you get noticed.
Square powers Weebly’s transactions; hence, you can trust the platform for all your payments. The easy-to-use platform offers free service for basic use, but you can upgrade it to Pro version with $12/month and get $100 Google ad credits along with a free domain.
Opencart
Get full control over the design of your online store by choosing Opencart.
It’s an open-source platform that helps you create, run, and scale your business the way you imagined. The easy-to-run and simple-to-start platform helps you get started with your digital store painlessly. Enjoy the transparency, free updates, and downloads that the platform offers with zero monthly fees.
The powerful management lets you take care of your products, orders, customers, coupon codes, tax rules, and more along with an in-built SEO. Expand the functionality of your store by choosing from over 13,000 themes and modules. The dedicated customer support of Opencart is always ready at your disposal in case of difficulty.
Opencart has integrated the most famous payment gateways in the world, including PayPal, Amazon Payments, FedEx, Skrill, and more for secure transactions. Check out reliable Opencart hosting for your online shop.
WooCommerce
Love WordPress?
Use WooCommerce for adding a shopping cart on your existing WordPress site. You can use this WP plugin instead of building a different platform.
It offers configurable options for shipping your products and 140 region-specific secure payment options through PayPal, Stripe, Google Pay, Apple Pay, etc. The fully customizable platform allows you to extend your store’s functionality using official WooCommerce extensions, including marketing integrations, store enhancement, multichannel, point of sale, and more.
Crafted using the REST API, the platform can be integrated virtually with any service and is scalable with the growth of your brand. You can list your products easily on Google Shopping, promote the store on social media like Facebook, and email customers through MailChimp. Besides, report and track the marketing efforts via Google Analytics.
WoCommerce site requires more server resources than normal blogs, so choose the hosting platform carefully.
BigCommerce
Create a differentiated and robust digital store without compromising scalability, stability, and security through BigCommerce. It empowers your business to climb above complexity by offering its extensive and specialized services focused on optimizing your brand for growth.
Build a customized storefront design through custom themes with in-built HTML, Javascript, and CSS. You can even customize the checkout experience through server-to-server checkout SDK and API. Make your store mobile responsive, preview before you publish, and build the store on WordPress. Enrich your site with more traffic through SEO-friendly URLs and Metadata.
BigCommerce gives your site a blazing-fast speed by leveraging Google Cloud infrastructure, Akamai Image Manager, and Google AMP. Customize your products using a drag-and-drop feature and create 70 native promotions and discounts. It includes a bunch of digital wallets such as Apple Pay, PayPal, Amazon Pay, etc.
Other features:
- ISO/IEC 27001:2013 certification
- PCI DSS 3.1 Level 1 certification
- 99% uptime
- Supports over 250 currencies in 129 countries
Prestashop
Keeping in mind the diverse requirements of different businesses, Prestashop helps you create a fully customized store of your dreams! It offers features, functionalities, and performance needed to create and grow your brand. Add your products quickly, configure its features, and customize them with ease.
You can create price rules, configure coupons, select discount modes, and customize shipping. Prestashop also offers SEO-friendly stores where you can check your SEO scores, and it lets you connect your digital store to social media networks for better engagement and traffic. You can also measure your marketing efforts through periodic reports and visitor insights.
Prestashop is currently available in over 75 languages to help you expand your user base. Run multiple digital stores using a single back-office to reduce your cost and increase convenience. Join the group of over 300,000 merchants and sell your products beyond boundaries.
Shopify
You expected, didn’t you?
Looking for a solution where you can find all the point of sale features to start, operate, and grow your brand under one umbrella?
Shopify has got you covered. Get started with your business journey and sell your products anywhere, including social media, online marketplaces, and more.
Shopify offers built-in tools to help you with your marketing efforts in creating, executing, and analyzing your campaigns on Google and Facebook. Manage all your orders, payments, and shipping using the same dashboard for your convenience. Customize your website easily by accessing the CSS and HTML codes.
You can add impressive functionalities and features to your site with over 3200 apps capable of integrating with Shopify directly. It offers more than 70 professional themes created by renowned designs such as Pixel Union, Happy Cog, etc. Shopify offers a blogging platform where you can inform and educate your audience by publishing high-quality articles.
Shopify provides you with a 256-bit free SSL certificate to protect all the information on your site. It also offers secure payment gateways and an option for making credit card payments from Visa, AmEx, Mastercard, etc. Join the community of 1M businesses based across 175 countries that have already made over $155 billion in sales using Shopify.
Drupal
Build an ambitious digital store with Drupal by integrating the perfect tools for marketing, fulfillment, and payment for compelling a wider customer base. You can manage your content along with product data models, including product pages and search interfaces.
Over 1 million developers across the world contribute their efforts to Drupal, hence, making it a stable and secure platform. It secures your store through database encryption, access control, security reports, auto-updates, and prevention from malicious activities and DoS attacks.
Drupal offers marketing automation through social media, emails, CRM, optimizations, and more. It also works as a content repository accessible via an API and lets you personalize information such as geolocation, device type, browser history, behavior taxonomy, etc. to deliver relevant content to your visitors. The platform is multilingual, offering over 100 languages.
Since its open-source, you have to manage the installation and configuration. Instead, you can go for managed hosting so you can focus on your core business.
Sylius
Present your store with a unique look and touch by leveraging the open-source platform Sylius. It is completely based on a PHP framework named Symfony. It includes high code quality, solid principles, and testing practices to make it easy for developers and user-friendly for your customers.
The platform offers built-in APIs so you can build mobile applications effortlessly, including Android and iOS, along with progressive web applications. Hence, you can sell your products on any device your targeted customers use. Integrate your site with different tools needed to thrive in your business, such as CRM, ERP, inventory, emails, and so on.
Sylius can be easily deployed on various hosting platforms, including Cloudways, Nexcess, etc.
Sellfy
Sellfy offers a straightforward yet powerful platform to create your online store for selling physical goods, subscriptions, or digital products. If you are someone who hates complexity and still wants effective results, Sellfy is for you!
You can sell your products on YouTube, Instagram, or Soundcloud through your website by including a “Buy Now” button or sharing a simple link.
You can boost your sales using email marketing, upselling features, and discount codes with no extra integrations. Customize your store the way you want by adding your logo, creating layouts, and changing colors to compliment your brand. The multilingual platform offers optimization for mobile users so that they can access your store via mobile and desktop.
Sellfy accepts payments from over 200 countries and uses safe payment gateways such as PayPal and Stripe. Get a powerful insight through analytics to track best performing products, view traffic channels, and top business locations.
Saleor
Deploy your online store easily using Saleor and leverage top-class performance and flexibility to manage and run your business. It allows seamless integration of your store with different systems such as CRM, CMS, fulfillment APIs, etc. through its innovative GraphQL API.
It gives you complete front-end freedom to use PWA storefront or JavaScript SDK along with the options to choose a new platform or language of your choice. Manage your product bundles, groups, and configurations the way you want. It offers support for multiple currencies, languages, and translations.
Track your business growth by harnessing data and analyze it to shape your business in the long run. Future-proof your brand by creating a robust and secure store using modern tools. It also offers seamless Magento migration and uses clean codes to add new and exciting features to benefit your store.
3dcart
Get a competitive edge by leveraging the robust and secure eCommerce platform of 3dcart. It offers an all-in-one solution for creating a robust store with suitable tools for inventory management, designing, tracking sales, and more. Connect your store with Amazon, eBay, Facebook, etc. to maximize your customers and draw benefits.
Grow your business with in-built email marketing and measure customer insights through reliable analytical tools. Interestingly, it offers tools for cart abandonment recovery that can engage your visitors automatically and encourage them to make a return. The platform also optimizes your site for SEO to drive more traffic and get noticed.
3dcart possesses a Visa PCI certification along with powerful security attributes to secure all the transactions. It supports more than 200 payment providers, including PayPal, Stripe, etc. You can also integrate your store seamlessly with FedEx, UPS, Royal Mail, USPS, etc. to offer secure shipping.
Wix Stores
Create a professional-looking and efficient online store using Wix to sell your products on different sales channels, including Instagram and Facebook. Choose from 500 templates and customize your store design with effective tools to reach a wide customer base both on mobile and desktop. It offers 100 design features, effects, and fantastic product galleries to escalate your online presence for growth.
Set and manage your storefront based on your business by choosing a wishlist, mini-cart, quick add-to-cart, and more. You can customize every page on your site to meet the needs of your business. Leverage the drop-shipping platform – Modalyst to source thousands of high-grade products to expand your offerings.
You can even set up your shipping rules and select global carriers such as FedEx, USPS, etc. to offer real-time shipping estimations to your customers at checkout. Wix takes care of payment security by allowing you to choose from leading payment providers such as PayPal, Wix Payments, credit/debit cards, etc. and accepts 40 currencies. You can also migrate the product catalog to Wix using CSV files.
Conclusion
If you are ready to surf beyond the brick and mortar business, it’s high time for you to build a scalable digital store using a reliable and feature-rich eCommerce platform. Choose the right service provider based on your business requirements and budget to get brownie points that can save you from the future hassle and provide a profitable business in the long run.
