Top 5 Best Platforms For Your Ecommerce Business
E-commerce platforms are fast becoming indispensable assets of online marketers. Are you planning to take your marketing business online? Are you looking for the best eCommerce channel through which you can sell your products or services? If your answer to the above questions is yes, then you are in the right place.
I will show you some of the best e-commerce software for profitable online marketing. You will also learn about the powerful features each of them has and how you can use them to your advantage. You need to know the kind of online store you want. Understand how each of them works, and also decide which is best for you.
What is an E-commerce Platform?
An eCommerce platform is software that allows businesses to market, promote, and sell their products or services on the Internet without any physical contact with their buyers.
It also helps buyers search, buy, and pay for any product or service through the Internet without having to go to the seller’s physical shop.
Therefore, an e-commerce platform makes online business transactions between sellers and buyers easy, transparent, and safe.
How to Choose the Best Platform
When choosing an eCommerce platform for your online store, there are certain factors to be considered. While all the software may have amazing features, not all of them will have all the essential tools to meet all the needs of a standard eCommerce store.
Find below some of the basic features you should look out for when making your choice.
Flexibility and Scalability: A good eCommerce platform should be flexible. It should be user-friendly and open to modification. The design process should not be rigid and should be able to handle the increased number of users.
SEO Performance: It should have good support for search engine optimization, without which your site will have a low ranking in search results. e-commerce platforms with SEO-friendly content will rank high on the search engine results page.
Speed: If your online store is slow, it will give an unpleasant user experience. This will make your visitors log out of your site quickly. When your website is fast, they will stay longer thereby increasing your site’s visits.
Integration: There are lots of other software that works in collaboration with your online store to add more functionality, improve customer experience, and also guarantee growth. A good platform should make basic integrations possible.
Customer Service: Technical issues are bound to occur while using this software. Sometimes you can fix them by yourself, but there are some that you can’t. You need a platform that will be there for you when these issues occur.
Pricing: Good eCommerce software should be affordable. You don’t have to break the bank before getting a good platform with basic advanced features.
Here is a list of the 5 best software for e-commerce.
1. Woocommerce E-commerce Platform
Woocomerce is one of the most popular e-commerce platforms. It is open-source and customizable software built on WordPress. It is stand-alone software that is very easy to set up.
All you have to do is download the plugin into your WordPress backend, run the setup wizard, and build your online store. Woocommerce comes with many important features that allow you to get safe and secure payment, configure shipping options and also track delivery.
Woocommerce also has a lot of extensions to help extend your store’s functionality.
It allows extensions of software like Stripe, Jetpack, Woocommerce payments, Paypal, Tax Jar, Google ads, Woocommerce shipping, Shipstation, and Mailchimp. One good feature I like about Woocommerce is its multiple payment gateways.
You can manage and update your store anywhere with the Woocommerce app. You can easily add new products, get new buyers, and connect with existing customers using your smartphone. It is compatible with thousands of WordPress themes, and you can manage your customers using third-party plugins.
Woocommerce is built with a REST API and with it, you can build a complex store from scratch, and integrate it with any kind of service. They also provide customer support, but only for the paid extensions they offer. Woocommerce is free, but you have to pay for some of the extensions you need.
2. Bigcommerce
Bigcommerce is another popular eCommerce platform with a lot of advanced features. You can use it to build an online store for a specific business. It is very flexible and scalable with strong SEO performance.
Bigcommerce themes were designed with their customers in mind as they come with beautiful templates that allow multi-channel selling, and unique design customization.
Bigcommerce is a cloud-based platform that you have to signup for to start your design. It is easy to set up and comes with a dashboard with a user-friendly interface.
It is easy to build your online store with Bigcommerce without having any coding skills using a unique page builder. But if you have coding skills, you can customize the HTML and CSS to meet your design needs.
The software comes with tools to manage inventory and create customer groups, with payments and shipping providers. The platform can be integrated with Amazon, eBay, and Facebook, and also boost SEO with customizable URLs and robot.txt access.
There is also Google AMP, and Akamai image manager to optimize your images. They also have good support services from their experts.
There is also the availability of about 12 free built-in themes, and its drag-and-drop builder makes it easy to customize according to your choice of design.
Their pricing is as follows: $29.95 / month, $79.95 / month, $249.95 / month, enterprise-level solutions, up to $900+ / month.
3. Shopify
Shopify is another great platform for the eCommerce business. It is very suitable for a dropshipping business. It is easy to set up and the design process does not require any preknowledge of Webdesign.
Although the platform does not have good SEO performance, it makes up for that with a fast loading speed.
Shopify comes with 10 free themes and more than 50 paid themes that make it possible to customize your store, giving it the design of your choice.
Adding products to your Shopify store is quite simple.
All you have to do is go to the product section in the menu option on the sidebar, fill in the required information, with its easy-to-use drag-and-drop interface, and your store is set.
The platform has a lot of integration, especially with software like Zapier which automatically adds new customers to your email list. And also some accounting software like Simplycost allows businesses to add cost prices, track profit, and calculate profit automatically.
Quickbooks online lets you link multiple users to their business finances at any time. Shopify POS, an iPad application lets you sell your Shopify products in a physical retail setting. There is also ZapERP that helps you control inventory, and manage orders and multiple warehouses.
Shopify offers 24/7 customer support via, email, live chat, phone, and Twitter. Its pricing is very affordable. With a 14-day free trial, you can build your Shopify store for $9/month. When your store has grown and you wish to upgrade, you can go for the higher plans of $29 / month, $79 / month, or $299 / month to add more functionality to your store.
4. Wix E-commerce
Wix is one of the e-commerce platforms that provide subscription-based services. It comes with hosting space and a subdomain/free custom domain to build your online store.
But, if you don’t want to use their free domains, you can connect your own domain and still run your business comfortably.
Wix is loaded with over 500 free professional templates that allow you to create any kind of online store for any kind of business. This makes it easy to customize any part of your website, from the storefront, members area, checkout, and product pages with its drag-and-drop design editor.
The platform comes with a lot of powerful features, like product management, customer management, Multiple payment gateways, unlimited bandwidth, and order management as well as built-in drop shipping.
The themes are fully optimized for e-commerce platforms, and there are also niche themes for different products. You can even add drop-shipping too.
Wix is mobile-friendly with an easy-to-use user interface. To make your work easy, they also offer free tools like Wix logo maker and a business name generator.
Building your online store with Wix also gives you a lot of advantages. From unlimited product collection, and inventory management, to tax automation Wix is a suitable platform to start an online store on a budget.
Apart from the Wix payment solution, you can also connect to other payment providers like Paypal and Stripe. You can sell your products using multiple sales channels, offer store subscriptions., and manage your Facebook, Instagram, eBay, and Amazon shops direct on your dashboard.
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5. Squarespace
Squarespace is a website builder you can use to create an amazing eCommerce store. It is very easy to set up and comes with a drag-and-drop design editor with stunning free templates to choose from.
It is an excellent platform for simple online stores that also offers print-on-demand services. Apart from building online stores, Squarespace is unique software to set up your booking services. It also allows third-party extensions.
Squarespace provides useful tools like on-brand email campaigns to grow your audience across multiple channels. The free templates are quite easy to customize, and they are available for different kinds of niches.
From blogging to online stores, CVs, creative services, and even events, there are varieties of stunning templates you can use to give your website a professional look.
Building your e-commerce platform or any website with Squarespace is very easy. There are a lot of useful tools to help you with your designs. There are tools to design your logo, get stock photos, and also carry out email marketing as well as SEO.
Unlike Woocommerce and Shopify, Squarespace has limited e-commerce platforms integration and payment gateways. However, it makes up for these with third-party extensions to help you manage and optimize your site.
The Squarespace Unfold app helps you create attractive and professional-looking social content. It comes with over 150 layouts as well as designer filters, fonts, and stickers. Creating your website with Squarespace comes with free unlimited hosting and they also provide 24/7 personalized support via email, live chat, or a live webinar.
Their pricing is quite affordable depending on the plan of your choice. The Personal plan is $12/month, the Business plan is $18/ month, the basic commerce plan is $26/month, and the advanced commerce plan is $40/month.
Conclusion
There are so many other great e-Commerce platforms out there. This post is only limited to the five listed above. Choosing from any of these depends on the type of online store you want to build, your design preference, and the kind of functionality you want to add to your site. They are all great tools with unique features. You just have to decide which is best for you. Other e-commerce platforms include but are not limited to, Prestashop, Volution, Weebly, Shift4shop, and Magento.
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