This comparative guide will review the top 11 e-commerce platforms and how to evaluate which is best for your business needs.
What is an E-commerce Platform?
An e-commerce platform is the software that an online store uses to handle all their needs as sellers and buyers. These needs include product pages, reviews, transactions, order fulfillment, and returns.
Top E-commerce Platforms
1. Shopify
The best platform for creating an easy and comprehensive online store. Shopify comes with additional tools and features for selling across multiple channels, shipping, marketing, and business management. You can choose from over 100 paid and free templates to launch your store quickly and with minimal learning curve. Additionally, Shopify handles all aspects of your business, including payment processing, managing personal sales, and delivering products to customers. It also offers unlimited bandwidth and online storage, so you don’t have to pay more as your traffic increases and your business grows. Shopify users also enjoy competitive shipping rates from USPS, UPS, DHL Express, and other shipping companies.
2. Wix
The best for individual sellers. Wix is an easy-to-use website builder that provides customizable templates, hosting, and domain registration. You can build a basic website for free, but you’ll need to upgrade to a paid plan to use the e-commerce features. Wix has some useful tools for e-commerce, such as order tracking, accepting online payments, selling products on multiple channels, and creating abandoned cart campaigns.
3. BigCommerce
The best for large businesses. BigCommerce is an e-commerce platform used by enterprise-level software companies. BigCommerce provides web hosting and many customization options. However, you cannot register your domain name through BigCommerce, so you will need to purchase and register it elsewhere and then transfer it. Valuable features include international selling, search engine optimization tools, social channel selling, and third-party marketplace integration. However, with these powerful features comes complexity.
4. Adobe Commerce (formerly Magento)
The best for businesses with PHP programming experience. Adobe Commerce is a self-hosted e-commerce platform designed for developers who want a system they can fully customize. While this provides benefits for brands that want a fully custom platform, it also presents many hurdles in the form of complexity and cost. You need advanced programming and development skills to build and manage the entire infrastructure. Magento also lacks tools to create a seamless multichannel strategy. There’s no easy way to operate social commerce or sell products on marketplaces with Magento.
5. WooCommerce
The best for WordPress users. WooCommerce is particularly familiar to those who know WordPress, as it is a plugin for the popular blogging platform. WordPress has traditionally been for content-driven sites, not e-commerce, so WooCommerce is WordPress’s answer for those who want to sell online. While there are many apps and plugins you can add to your store, the more you use, the higher the risk that something will break. This is not always a risk worth taking, especially given the limited support options.
6. Squarespace
The best for high-quality templates. Squarespace is a website builder that uses drag-and-drop, requiring little technical knowledge. Both platforms are primarily website builders, not online selling platforms, so they require significant tweaking to add e-commerce functionality. Squarespace requires time and patience to set up if you want to sell online, and there are only two payment integrations available, which are Stripe and PayPal. If your budget allows, you can even delegate it. Once the e-commerce functionality is set up, Squarespace has good tools for inventory tracking. Higher-tier plans also come with the ability to sell gift cards or subscription-based products.
7.
Big Cartel
Best for artists and creators. Big Cartel is a fully-hosted e-commerce platform and website builder designed for makers, artists, and craftsmen – the types of businesses you would expect to see on Etsy. Big Cartel offers customizable templates, domain name registration, and marketing tools. While you can change the look and feel of your site, Big Cartel limits the number of images per product to five. Payment options and integrations are also limited, making it harder to scale your business across multiple channels.
8. Weebly
Most cost-effective for small businesses. Weebly is a simple e-commerce website builder owned by Square. It works well if you want a small online store that doesn’t require much maintenance. You don’t need any technical expertise to operate the Weebly platform, but it offers a very basic online store. You can build a store on Weebly for free. The trade-off? You can’t use your own domain name or remove in-app ads until you purchase a paid e-commerce plan.
9. 3dcart
Best for business owners who understand e-commerce. 3dcart offers a shopping cart for store owners who want to sell online. The platform doesn’t have comprehensive features, but you can quickly build a mobile-ready store. The platform provides hundreds of features and ready-made templates to create and manage your store. You can also use its API and apps to integrate a 3dcart store with third-party applications.
10. Volusion
Best for quick setup and easy interface. Volusion is one of the oldest e-commerce platforms. Launched in 1999, it has helped businesses go online without extra cost. You can set up the basics, such as a homepage and product pages, as well as integrate with over 30 payment gateways and sell unlimited products. There is no free plan. You can also only sell physical products on Volusion. So if you want to sell e-books or music, you’ll need another e-commerce solution.
11. OpenCart
Best free e-commerce solution. OpenCart is an open-source and free e-commerce platform known for its customization capabilities and easy setup. The platform allows you to create and manage multiple stores and provides a powerful dashboard with important metrics like sales and repeat customers. OpenCart has over 13,000 extensions and templates you can build upon to create your website, along with many integrations to connect your tools.
Types of E-commerce Platforms
To make your online store accessible to the public, you need a hosting solution. Hosting keeps your information on a server, allowing users online to visit your site and view all content.
There are four types of e-commerce: B2C (business to consumer), B2B (business to business), C2B (consumer to business), and C2C (consumer to consumer).
Ultimately, the nature of your e-commerce business will help determine the best e-commerce platform for that business.
How to Choose the Right Software for You
If you know how to start an online store and want to choose the best e-commerce platform for you, there are several factors to consider. The best e-commerce platform for you may differ from the best platform for another merchant – you should consider your unique business needs and goals.
When evaluating your options, think about the following scenarios:
- I need to sell my products online and offline to all my customers – no matter where they are – and accept payment for those sales.
- I need
- To deliver my products to my customers in the best way for my business.
- I need to attract my current and future customers for the growth of my business.
- I need to run my business day-to-day, from managing my finances to ensuring that my strategies are working and learning new tactics and getting technical support when needed.
When evaluating costs, look beyond just setup and monthly fees. You’ll also want to account for payment processing fees, costs for adding integrations, and any potential customer support fees. Remember, if hosting is not included, you’ll need to factor that in as an extra cost as well.
When choosing the right e-commerce platform for you, you should consider your unique business model. You may be selling physical products or digital products, and other business models have also emerged. If you are doing dropshipping, for example, you will need an e-commerce platform that can easily connect in the background to streamline operations.
The checkout process is a critical part of your e-commerce site. You need a secure and reliable payment method to accept payments, ensuring that the process is quick and easy for shoppers. For instance, Shop Pay increases checkout speed by four times. Shopify also offers seamless integrations with over 100 payment gateways, so you can offer the most relevant payment options to your audience, no matter where they are in the world.
When choosing the right e-commerce platform for you, you should consider your future business plans. You might also want to add physical retail to your business at some point. With a limited e-commerce platform, integrations with point-of-sale systems can be inflexible. You’re at risk of having inaccurate inventory data due to separate online and in-person systems. With a platform like Shopify, everything is tracked and synchronized in one place. So you’ll get accurate inventory and sales data at any time – and you can also add services like local delivery and leverage Shopify’s e-commerce fulfillment network.
When you need additional funding in the future, there are other commercial financing options that pose less risk to personal relationships. Look for e-commerce platforms that provide support to merchants, such as Shopify Capital for small business loans.
When comparing e-commerce platforms, it can be easy to forget the reason for choosing an e-commerce platform in the first place. At the end of the day, there isn’t a one-size-fits-all option. Instead, look for the right platform that enables you to provide the best e-commerce experience for your customers and makes online shopping easy.
In addition to the best online store builder, consider the other business tools offered by those platforms. It is often beneficial to use a seamlessly integrated environment, consisting of your online store, payment processor, point of sale, and even small business lender. Shopify, for instance, has a full suite of tools that help you manage every aspect of your business, and its app store features over 4000 apps to help you customize the experience for your customers and your team.
Selling your products online using your e-commerce site has never been easier, faster, or more scalable. Shopify is a single platform that allows you to sell wherever your customers are – online, in-person, and everywhere in between.
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