The Internet almost owns our life. Every social and commercial activity is related to it.
Business owners now believe in initiating their business by building an online store. Adopting the eCommerce website is the best and the most popular option for them. Without eCommerce, the world over the Internet is improbable, and it can even frighten you.
It is a demand of customers, businesses, nation and most importantly, time. This is how eCommerce plays a significant role in everyone’s life. eCommerce website development is the most popular option for businesses that gives an extensive scope for online sales and transactions.
As compared to the standard website that is extensively used for gaining and searching the information, the eCommerce website lets customers purchase the services and the products.
According to the recent statistics:
- 1.92 billion global buyers in 2019 are estimated. It can even reach by 2.14 billion till 2021.
- There is an enhancement of 13.7% for retail sales in 2019. Its regular improvement says that it will reach by 17.5% till 2021.
- Almost 85% of customers research online before buying anything online.
- 80% of the customers do not believe in purchasing from those companies who have lousy customer experience.
As per Statista, the retail eCommerce sales accounted to be 3.53 trillion US dollars. It is estimated that the retail revenue is expected to be grown by 6.54 trillion US dollars till 2022.
Source: https://www.statista.com
After comprehending the significance of eCommerce in recent times, its time to check out the platforms that you should choose to build your eCommerce store. The internet has given infinite possibilities. A lot of factors are there that one should consider while choosing the right platform for their online store. Consider the following set of questions:
- Do you have a wish to sell on an eCommerce platform or a marketplace? Or do you want to use both of them?
- What tools and features you want to add in the website?
- Do you prefer technological support according to your current sales volume or as per your recent business scales?
- How much can you spend on technology?
Why Choosing the Best eCommerce Platform is Essential
The eCommerce platforms are powerful, adaptable and fully-functional to sell your business products online. Precisely, every platform has its own features, and they act accordingly. An eCommerce platform can entertain you with the below factors:
- Growth: How promptly your business is growing?
- eCommerce website building cost: It integrates the expenses of developing the eCommerce website, including maintenance and development costs.
- Customer engagement: It displays how you control the customer’s communication with your business?
- Objectives: Adopting a suitable eCommerce platform lets you deliver the services you want to provide to your customers.
The significance of using the eCommerce platform lies in the fact that it is not probable that you can create your web presence online. It is the backbone of your business even if it is B2C or B2B company. It can effortlessly create the ways following which you can streamline your business operations and can communicate with your employees and customers effectively.
The eCommerce platform is a software application that facilitates businesses to perform complicated functions from both front end and back end. It amalgamates mobile eCommerce, CRM, web design, inventory management, etc.
Here, in this article, we will give you the best eCommerce development platforms that you should use to launch, host and operate the online store effectively. Let’s find out!!
Best eCommerce Website Development Platforms
Big Commerce
Big Commerce is the leading eCommerce platform. It integrates built-in features and functionalities and is recommended for both enterprise-level eCommerce companies and start-ups as well. It has the most accurate dashboard and navigation.
Though, big commerce uses the tab instead of putting a description of the services on the big screen. With the help of these tabs that get the different factors of the services. Bigcommerce development company can assist you whenever it is required (while setting up). Additionally, the features it encompasses are:
- POS (Point of Sale)
- 24X7 customer support
- Visual store builder
- Different payment gateways, like Stripe, PayPal, Braintree, Apple, many more.
- HTTPs
- Sell from Pinterest, Facebook, Square POS, eBay
- Level 1 PCI Complaint hosting
- Support return visits using email marketing
- Search engine optimization features
- Several marketing features
- Relocate the store and import products
- Its plan starts from $29.95/month/user, though you can start with a 15 day trial period. For the premium plan, you need to pay $249.95/month.
Shopify
It is also one of the best eCommerce platforms to choose for. It covers you with everything for building an online store from purchase to buying, from shipping to payment. Shopify can be installed quickly, and its professional developers can assists you in migrating your traditional online platform to Shopify.
Its aim lies in making it easy to build their online store quickly without any technical expertise. The features it amalgamates are:
- Free SSL certificate
- Extensive products, orders, bandwidth and file storage
- Automatic taxes
- customer profiles and accounts
- Multilingual support
- Automated carrier shipping rates
- 100+ easy accessible payment gateways
- Web-based eCommerce website builder with drag and drop option
- SEO
- Social media integration
- Level-1 PCI complaint
- Inventory management
- Mobile support and mobile commerce ready
- It has three plans; $29 (basic); $79 (basic with additional features); $299 (Advanced)
Magento
Known as a robust and highly flexible platform, Magento is trusted by most of the leading organizations. It provides exceptional features, like, order management, inventory management, customer service, cloud deployment and business intelligence. Though, it offers content staging, page builder, immediate purchase and content staging. It is amalgamated with a lot of features that make it different from other platforms are:
- Recurring payments
- Basic Customer management
- Approximately100 professional themes
- Product management
- Includes subdomain and hosting space
- Ability to build your domain
- Mobile-friendly
- Outstanding analytic module incorporating purchase funnels, reports, abandoned cart stats
- It finalizes the prices according to the quotation provided by the customers
Volusion
A small but effective eCommerce platform is Volusion. It provides several pricing tables that make it easier for the customer to choose according to their budget. Its dashboard is quite impressive; you can get a helpful step by step wizard that navigates you quickly during the installation process.
It is a well-built eCommerce platform with extensive functionalities and a unique Content Builder that nearly matches the Elementor WordPress plugin. Find out its features below:
- Visual website builder
- Reviews and Ratings
- Supports all SEO and Social media selling tools
- Access different payment gateways, like, Amazon, Paypal and Stripe
- 24X 7 customer service using phone, chatbots, and priority support
- File storage and Unlimited orders
- Newsletters
- Manage shipping rates
- Integration of Amazon and eBay
- CRM and Phone offers
- Batch order processing
- API access
- Its price ranges from $14/month (basic/mini-plan) and $135 (premium plan).
3d cart
This platform is best for small scale organizations because it has very easy to use features and functionalities with optimized SEO features. The organizations can use their simple URL and can effortlessly access the products and services online. It shows an outstanding video when someone opens it for the first time in the centre panel. Below are some of its exceptional features:
- POS
- Social and mobile ready
- 24X7 availability via phone, chatbots or priority support
- Endless file storage, orders and bandwidth
- Cross-sell and Upsell
- Customer reviews
- Digital products
- FTP access files
- Integration of SSL certificate
- Secure level 1 PCI hosting
- Easy shipping setup
- Supports Quickbooks, Amazon, FedEx, and Stripe
- Its pricing starts from $19, $29 (basic), $79 (Plus), and $299(Pro)
Big Cartel
It is an eCommerce platform customized to artists and markers for selling the products. The artists can use the platform’s free themes or code to fit in the website design. Being SEO and mobile-friendly, it provides features that can sell the products online.
It makes the changes as per the selling; that is; the number of products bought by the customer. Find out the features it includes:
- Infinite bandwidth and orders
- POS
- Mobile-friendly and Responsive store designs
- Search engine optimization
- Real-time stats
- From 1 image to 5 images according to the product
- From 5 to 300 products and services from the database
- Promotional tools
- Email assistance (Mon-Fri, 9 am to 6 pm EST)
Wrapping Up
We have given you a comprehensive guide on the right eCommerce platforms that you can choose for your business website. But, you need to make an effort to find your business requirements, potential future growth, and sales volume.
You must have discovered the best articles related and must have done a comparative analysis. However, the person that can tell you which platform to choose is you only. So, start it today and make an actual sale!!
Is there is any other platform that we have missed? Are you practicing these platforms?
Share your experience!!
We hope you liked this article if there is anything that we have missed then let us know in the comment section below.
Thanks for reading!!
Morris Edwards is a Web Developer by profession and writer by hobby. He works for Awebstar, a well-known Mobile App Development Company based in Singapore offering Web Design & Development and SEO Services at affordable cost. If you want to rank your business website on the top of the search engine results, Awebstar can prove to be your right choice.