An ecommerce platform is a software application that lets online businesses to launch, host and manage their online store. All ecommerce platforms provides businesses with standard functionality such as the ability to showcase products in an online catalogue, take payments online, manage customers and provide with after-sales.
Ecommerce platforms help to save your time and allows you to focus more on the marketing and selling side of the businesses. With e-commerce platform, you can create, customise, and launch online stores and start selling.
This eliminates the need to spend a huge amount of time on coding, designing websites as well as online stores and maintaining the web hosting and server. It is very secure and you may experience little to no downtime.
It enables you to provide great customer service to your customers with seamless payment and shipping integration. There are a lot of e-commerce platforms available.
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Choosing the right ecommerce platform for your business is really a daunting task. This article will help you choose the right ecommerce platforms for your business.
1) Shopify
This ecommerce platform allows you to start, grow and manage a business. It helps you every step of the way from first sale to full scale.
To start your business, all you have to do is to create a business name and logo, get a custom web address, personalize your website with high resolution images and increase awareness and run ad campaigns on social media.
Then, start selling using shopify’s powerful features. Shopify allows you to sell online, in-person at retail locations, pop-ups and on social media, online market places etc. With shopify, you can transform any existing website or blog into an online store.
It helps you to find and sell your products to the right shoppers, wherever they are. It allows you to fulfil one or multiple orders in one click.
It manages customer’s contact info and order histories. It saves time with a unified inventory that stays accurate across all the places you sell.
It securely accepts credit cards on your online store from the first day itself. It allows you to see real-time and recent activity, gain insight into your visitors and analyse your business performance.
It lets you get detailed information about your business, including sales, customers and marketing. Shopify dashboard, which is available on desktop or mobile, allows you to run your business from anywhere.
2) EKM
This cloud based ecommerce platform offers everything that you need to sell online, from your own domain name to the ability to take payments.
EKM have over 150 themes, which helps your shop to look unique. Its features come standard with all plans, thereby eliminating the need to pay for expensive add-on apps.
3) Big Cartel
This is one of the cloud-based ecommerce platforms, designed for artists and makers. It is very affordable and has a free forever plan. It is easy to set up and use.
It allows you to connect directly to your Facebook account, allowing you to sell from your Facebook page. It offers high-level data encryption that keeps your customer’s information safe.
By using Big Cartel ecommerce platform, you can improve the look of your store with a range of pre-made themes or give your store a completely custom look by tweaking the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript directly. It also allows you to manage your shop from any phone or tablet.
4) Magento
This ecommerce platform is built on open source technology which offers online merchants with a flexible shopping cart system as well as control over the look, content and functionality of their online store.
It provides powerful marketing, search engine optimization and catalogue-management tools. It is a very robust system and easy to install.
It has the ability to scale that allows shops with only a few products and simple needs to easily expand to tens of thousands of products and complex custom behaviour without changing platforms. It offers a variety of plug-ins and themes to help you improve the customer experience easily.
5) WooCommerce
This flexible, open-source ecommerce plugin is designed for small to large-sized online merchants using Word Press. It is easy to install, free to use and full of customization options, this makes it easy to design your own e-Commerce store.
It allows you to sell both physical and digital goods in all shapes and sizes. It offers product variations, complex configurations and instant downloads to shoppers. It even sells affiliate goods from online marketplaces.
There are hundreds of free and paid WooCommerce Storefront themes available, you can click on any theme and download the theme of your choice.
You can personalize your store’s design even more with WooCommerce Blocks and use them to add selections of or single products to any page, for a seamless blending of commerce into content.
It gives you complete control from taxes to stock levels to customer accounts. It also allows you to add and remove extensions, change your store’s design and switch themes or hosts or payment service providers.
It is built with a REST API and integrates with virtually any service. It allows you to access store data from anywhere, at any time, 100% securely.
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With Woo Commerce, developers can easily create, modify, and scale a store that meets client’s specifications and make enhancements either with extensions or with customs solution. It has a robust framework that supports stores from basic to enterprise.
6) PrestaShop
This immensely feature-rich, free, open-source ecommerce solution can be used to run stores in the cloud or via self-hosting. It has a variety of tools that will help you to build a successful online shop.
It works well on PHP and helps the business merchants to build comprehensive eCommerce websites coupled with amazing functionality. It is one of the strongest eCommerce website builder platforms and has an intuitive interface to manage your online store.
PrestaShop comes with features such as advanced backup schemes, high reliability and easy accessibility, allowing users to scale their business and increase the credibility of the site.
It uses a web template system that allows you to customize the store theme and make use of add-on modules.
To create PrestaShop theme, you need a robust PrestaShop theme maker that will help you built your own theme according to your specifications.
7) Lightspeed
This cloud-based ecommerce solution comes with features such as automated tax calculation, support for multiple currencies and languages, and integrated shipping options. It allows you to add up to 10 different images for every product in your store.
It has a search feature that makes it very easy for customers to find exactly what they’re looking for. It lets you do things like edit your metadata, titles, tags, descriptions and Meta descriptions.
It optimizes all the themes using SEO best-practices. It offers a built-in blogging tool, thereby allowing you to create SEO optimized content easily.
It offers an array of marketing tools to help your store grow. It also offers an optimized back end, which will help your site to load fast. It allows you to create product categories, process returns, add and update product descriptions, add photos etc.
With Lightspeed, you can use optimized website templates to create a beautiful e-commerce store easily. It does not require any coding skills.
Omnichannel allows you to integrate your online and in stores into one platform. It has centralized inventory, the ability to track customers both online and in-store and the ability to generate a report covering both online and in-store metrics.
8) Ecwid
This cloud based ecommerce platform helps you create an easy to use online store and start selling anywhere online or in-person.
It is a perfect solution for small as well as medium sized businesses. It can be integrated with your existing website, business page on a social network, your blog, marketplaces or mobile app.
With Ecwid, you can sync and manage all the storefronts from one control panel. It does not require any installation. It can be added to any website through their widget or a plugin for WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, and Wix websites.
9) X-Cart
This is one of the open source PHP shopping cart ecommerce software platforms that enables online merchants to process orders, track inventory and manage every aspect of an online store.
It is easy to use, maintain and modify. It is the only PCI DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard) compliant software that you can run on your own server.
It comes with features including awesome design templates, real time smart search and bulk product editing. It provides effective SEO tools as well as offers auctions, coupons and discounts.
10) Squarespace
This website builder helps you to create a stunning and professional-looking portfolio website. All you have to do is create an account, choose a template and then edit it.
It is ideal for photographers, artists and designers and also for anyone who loves design and wants their website to look as good as the content they are showing off online.
Its templates are crisp, clean and full of white-space, which gives your portfolio a very high-end feel and can really elevate you above your peers. In addition, templates are mobile-responsive to ensure that your work looks great whenever and wherever it is viewed.
11) PinnacleCart
This hosted ecommerce software platform provides a robust all-inclusive online store builder that allows you to custom design an online store, manage product catalogues, create marketing campaigns, collect web analytics etc.
It integrates with a host of add-ons such as AVALARA, MAILCHIMP, ENDICIA and ADDSHOPPPERS. It comes with SSL certificates. It can make the payment page or your entire checkout process secure.
It is PA-DSS (Payment Application Data Security Standard) and PCI certified. PinnacleCart storefront allows you to set up recurring billing accounts for customers or provide multiple languages and currency selections.
It lets you create beautiful storefronts with features such as photo galleries, image magnify, zoom and lightbox. It has a content management system (CMS) for creating information pages and managing SEO attributes. It offers various marketing tools that enable you to promote your ecommerce store.
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Conclusion
When choosing the best platform, you need to consider your business’s needs, sales volume and potential future growth.
These ecommerce platforms offer different features. All of them give business owners the opportunity to build a branded online storefront to sell their products.