Starting a business selling goods and services from a remote location is easy with the new growing technologies. Professional engineers work every day to create and update e-commerce platforms according to the changing requirements.
It is unnecessary to own an ample physical space when you can offer your products to people with clicks on intelligent software. Today, we will discuss the top e-commerce platforms popular among the blooming online businesses. We will give you the reasons to pick the right one with valid information.
Before reading, one essential thing to keep in mind is that every trade has different needs. One solution will not work perfectly for every company. Hence first, check right and learn what will fit the best for your requirements. Let’s get started!
MAGENTO
We begin with the worldwide accepted e-commerce platform — Magento. It is open-source software and cares about the situation of modifying itself for your needs. One can use their development skills on this platform or hire a professional developer to work for you with the additional programming.
Magento creates a beautiful interface for the customers who will buy the products and maintains a well-structured back-end. It provides excellent flexibility to the owners and people working daily on it. You can add a range of products as per the size of your business.
Let’s check some advantages associated with Magento:
- Work Flexibility: The top quality of this platform is that it allows you to alter the coding part as per your requirements.
- Excellent Features: Some features come with Magento. For example, it helps in arranging different prices for the products.
- Mobile-friendly: According to research, the customers of online shopping platforms are more on smartphones than the desktop. Magento is suitable for mobile-friendly websites.
- Easily Scalable: Magento provides the facility of uploading 10 to thousands of products as per the requirement of the business.
After the good points, we can move on to know some downsides. Here it is:
- Expensive: Magento provides the free community version, but it is costly with the yearly plans and maintenance for the enterprise.
- Time-consuming: It takes a reasonable amount of time to load, so the customization is complicated.
- Hosting: Dedicated hosting is required when you use Magento for your products; otherwise, the website may crash.
SHOPIFY
Shopify is an all-in-one e-commerce solution for setting up an online store. It is not open-source like Magento and will not allow you to modify the platform much as you need. Various plans include that you can pick anyone with your choice on the software.
It offers a comprehensive option of getting the templates for selling your products online. One more thing missing in Magento was you could sell on Instagram, Facebook, eBay, and Amazon with Shopify. More understanding of the platform will come with the plus and minus points.
Here are the pros of Shopify:
- Easy to use: The functionality of this e-commerce platform is exceptionally smooth, and it will be a piece of cake for you to add the products.
- Various checkout and payment options: When we are talking about selling online, it will include many transactions and should require the choice of payment methods. Shopify provides several options that will help.
- Responsive store themes: Shopify’s themes are responsive, making them easily visible on any device.
Let’s check the noticeable cons now:
- Themes with a cost: The choices of Free website themes are there, but you need to pay the price for most of them.
- Complex Integrated apps: The handling of the Shopify ecommerce platform becomes problematic when the apps need to get integrated. You also have to purchase them before utilising them.
- Transaction Fees: The payment methods choices are plentiful with Shopify, but if it is not the Shopify payment, you have to pay for the transactions.
WOOCOMMERCE
WooCommerce is a plugin and not a complete platform like Magento and Shopify. It is an e-commerce plugin for the WordPress platform and helps manage the online store. It provides a moderate facility and features for tasks like tax and inventory management, shipping control, and secure payments.
It is an open-source plugin and allows users to do the modifications according to their needs. Besides, it is suitable for small and large-scale businesses.
The following pointers will present the benefits of WooCommerce:
- Inventory Management: The plugin gives complete information about the inventory and manages it for you.
- Customization Options: WooCommerce provides the freedom of customization according to the products you want to sell.
- Security: Transactions are a necessary part of an e-commerce platform, and this plugin is safe with secure payment options like Paypal or Stripe.
Now, we can also check some downsides:
- WordPress Specific: The main disadvantage is that it is only helpful for the websites that WordPress hosts, and already existing businesses need to recreate their websites to use WooCommerce.
- Expensive: It is good initially, but after you will move forward with this plugin, you need to spend money according to the requirements you have for your website.
BIGCOMMERCE
BigCommerce is an e-commerce platform that offers good SaaS(Software as a Service) options to retailers. It includes many facilities for the users, including hosting, SEO, marketing, and security for different size companies.
It provides the software to the people to set up their online store and helps maintain the payments and conversions of the currencies. For WordPress, the BigCommerce plugin is available, and the related websites can manage their e-commerce websites easily.
Pros of BigCommerce:
- Customization: Feel free with the customization process by BigCommerce and set everything up as per your requirements.
- SEO benefits: SEO is one of the main factors driving more visitors to the website, and an option to perform it gets offered by BigCommerce.
- Safe to use: Secure payments are necessary while selling something online, and this e-commerce platform offers a shared SSL certificate to its users.
Cons of BigCommerce:
- Free Themes: The number of themes is free of cost and is limited, and you need to pay for the ones not in the Free plan.
- Annual Sales Limit: There is a threshold for the number of yearly sales, and after that, you have to pay any amount.
THINGS TO REMEMBER
You can analyze the requirements of your business first and then choose the plan for any e-commerce platform of your choice. Another thing you can do is try the free offers and test what suits you the best. In the end, we have a suggestion for you.
Each solution for creating an online platform we explained above is great to use with its features. The only things that matter is your online store’s size and the level of customization you need to make. After getting the answer to these two questions, you can think about choosing the correct option for your business.