Light speed growth is the norm for ecommerce companies in 2021, with a few growing at hyper-speed. While the retail giants, like Amazon are the most well known ecommerce players, they are not representative of the best ecommerce platforms and the best ecommerce companies. They do no not encompass all of the medium sized ecommerce companies that are growing at a moderate rate, but rather represent a small fraction of them.
Shopping for the best ecommerce platform for medium business? Finding the right mid-market platform for your business can be tough. These solutions allow for rapid and scalable growth but usually require a team to keep up with complex and technical systems. We’ve listed our top mid-market ecommerce platforms and reviewed each one based on pricing, marketing and SEO features, inventory management, and fulfillment. Likely, you’re already familiar with some of these brands, but we hope that our reviews help you decide which one is right for you.
A platform for medium business usually does not cost a fortune. For small businesses, claiming an established company already known to have good reputation and excellent customer service comes with a price tag. However, if a customer is looking forward to outsourcing all the tasks that are not for their core business, choosing a simpler platform for medium business is what should be done.
Ready to build an online store? From Shopify to Magento and more: our research-backed list of the best ecommerce platforms for medium-sized businesses gives your company options on what you’re looking for. What makes a great platform for a mid-sized business site?
Why choosing the right eCommerce platform is crucial for your business?
It is somewhat similar to that of selecting a physical brick and mortar store. A lot goes in while building an eCommerce website, be it the cost, reputation, and risks. And if anything goes wrong, your overall business suffers. Ultimately, you are forced to change the platform, which again demands additional cost and time, let alone the hassles incurred.
Hence, save yourself from unnecessary troubles and invest in the right platform from the beginning. But how exactly are you going to achieve it? Consider the below-mentioned points.
Price
If you have a small or midsize business, price becomes a crucial aspect to consider. Choose a platform that can offer the essential tools, features, and usability that can come at a reasonable price.
Back-end tools
Make sure the platform you choose must offer essential backend tools to support your website. It could offer features like access to WP plugins, application management systems, support for SKUs and CSS, and more. It must provide smooth accessibility from inventory management to content management, everything in the back-end.
Scalability
With the growth of your company, your online store would need support for more products, more payment options, etc. Hence, the platform you choose should be capable of providing easy scalability, without hampering your business operations.
Performance and speed
When a user opens your store, it must provide decent performance and page loading speed. It keeps him/her hooked on the site to enhance your business. Hence, your host must offer excellent performance and speed even if you use a variety of add-ons, plugins, and whatnot.
User experience
Choose a technology that your end users can find easy to use to enhance user experience. The website must not give them hard-time when they are searching for a product or service. Similarly, make sure that the platform is not that complex to manage by your team. Instead, it must offer easy management without compromising on efficiency.
Security
Cybercrimes are on the rise as we speak. And you know how important the security of your online store is. It not only poses a serious threat to your reputation and business, but it also threatens your client’s data.
Hence, choose a platform that can offer you with top-level security to mitigate security breach of any sort in the long run.
Customer service
Many businesses tend to overlook this aspect. As a business, you know how important customer service is for the benefit of your business. You must always be ready to attend the questions of your customers and help them.
Similarly, make sure to select the one that can offer you prompt customer service in case you may need any help.
Opencart
Get full control over the design of your online store by choosing Opencart.
It’s an open-source platform that helps you create, run, and scale your business the way you imagined. The easy-to-run and simple-to-start platform helps you get started with your digital store painlessly. Enjoy the transparency, free updates, and downloads that the platform offers with zero monthly fees.
The powerful management lets you take care of your products, orders, customers, coupon codes, tax rules, and more along with an in-built SEO. Expand the functionality of your store by choosing from over 13,000 themes and modules. The dedicated customer support of Opencart is always ready at your disposal in case of difficulty.
Opencart has integrated the most famous payment gateways in the world, including PayPal, Amazon Payments, FedEx, Skrill, and more for secure transactions. Check out reliable Opencart hosting for your online shop.
Shopify
With over 100,000 users worldwide, Shopify is one of the most popular e-commerce platforms today. The software boasts several elements such as its app store, SEO Expert, various free and paid extensions, plugins, and a wide range of functionality improvements that are easy to set up and use.
Shopify also takes pride in its security features, including fraud analysis and protection and PCI compliance. This e-commerce platform runs its customer service options via e-mail, phone, and live chat. In addition, Shopify provides extensive online documentation and resources that owners may use to grow their business.
Aside from these functions, Shopify offers competitive payment processing rates, which both small and medium businesses can afford.
Magento
The open-source eCommerce platform, Magento offers a myriad of useful and exciting features. From small to enterprise-level firms, numerous companies are benefiting their online stores from Magento’s flexibility and power.
It builds your shop efficiently so that you can run your business well. It offers endless possibilities for customization to shape your business the way you have dreamed of. You get lots of templates, widgets, add-ons, and many more that keep on updating.
To increase your online visibility, Magento performs exceptionally well in the ground of SEO. And, the high performing platform is also prompt in fixing bugs, if any. Additionally, online stores using this platform run smoothly across different devices, including mobile phones.
What’s more, the Magento Commerce platform also supports sales channels such as Amazon. Magento is ideal in delivering ultimate sales experience in addition to downloading the software for free. If you go for an open-source solution, then you can either install and setup yourself or go for a trusted hosting platform.
Weebly
Small and mid-size businesses looking to build a budget-friendly website, Weebly is a great option.
To get started with it, you do not need to be tech-savvy, just the basics would suffice. It also offers blogging to promote and market your products by adding relevant articles. Additionally, you get tons of exciting and professional themes.
The building, managing, and editing your website is effortless even from a mobile device. It offers full customization and a wide range of professionally designed templates. You can create your galleries, custom background, and slideshows suitable for your business. It also gives you third-party integrations for your store along with SEO tools to help you get noticed.
Square powers Weebly’s transactions; hence, you can trust the platform for all your payments. The easy-to-use platform offers free service for basic use, but you can upgrade it to Pro version with $12/month and get $100 Google ad credits along with a free domain.
BigCommerce
Small or medium businesses with big ambitions can rely on BigCommerce. It has many powerful e-commerce features like complex product assortment, SEO tools, and other built-in tools that owners can utilize. Plus, there’s no need to look for any extra apps if there is a need to incorporate specific selling features into the website.
BigCommerce may also be attractive to small and medium business owners because customers can shop around for low transaction fees from any payment processor.
Squarespace Commerce
Squarespace Commerce is the perfect fit for business owners who run their stores independently. This platform gives business owners total creative control over how their website would look without the need for coding skills or additional plugins through its core, all-in-one content management system (CMS) and user-friendly interface. It also provides excellent customer support service, inventory management, and a vast community.
Squarespace Commerce has an integrated marketing function that sends cart abandonment e-mails to customers who didn’t go all the way through checkout. This also works by pulling information from product pages to help businesses sell more through their newsletter campaigns.
Wix
Wix is any small-scale seller’s (with little to no tech knowledge) dream come true.
You get:
- an easy to use drag and drop system to put together your store (just drag text boxes and images and position them anywhere you want on the page)
- tons of creative freedom over your website’s looks: make your website look exactly like the one in your head
- the chance to build your store with… zero costs (pay when you start to actually sell products/services on your newly built website)
What more could you want from a solution of eCommerce for small retailers!
Key Benefits
- you can build your first online store in no time: you just drag and drop elements on the page
- you’re free to design it exactly how you want it to look
- you get to add product videos, too
Main Drawbacks
- you can’t sell your products across multiple social channels
- you get a less robust inventory, compared to other platforms (i.e. you can’t bulk upload products)
Overall, the eCommerce tools that you get aren’t as powerful as those of other platforms (i.e. Shopify).
You’d Choose to Build Your Website with Wix If…
- you’re looking for an affordable eCommerce solution
- you want it to be super easy to use
- you want to be able to personalize every little aspect of your store
Prestashop
Keeping in mind the diverse requirements of different businesses, Prestashop helps you create a fully customized store of your dreams! It offers features, functionalities, and performance needed to create and grow your brand. Add your products quickly, configure its features, and customize them with ease.
You can create price rules, configure coupons, select discount modes, and customize shipping. Prestashop also offers SEO-friendly stores where you can check your SEO scores, and it lets you connect your digital store to social media networks for better engagement and traffic. You can also measure your marketing efforts through periodic reports and visitor insights.
Prestashop is currently available in over 75 languages to help you expand your user base. Run multiple digital stores using a single back-office to reduce your cost and increase convenience. Join the group of over 300,000 merchants and sell your products beyond boundaries.
Drupal
Build an ambitious digital store with Drupal by integrating the perfect tools for marketing, fulfillment, and payment for compelling a wider customer base. You can manage your content along with product data models, including product pages and search interfaces.
Over 1 million developers across the world contribute their efforts to Drupal, hence, making it a stable and secure platform. It secures your store through database encryption, access control, security reports, auto-updates, and prevention from malicious activities and DoS attacks.
Drupal offers marketing automation through social media, emails, CRM, optimizations, and more. It also works as a content repository accessible via an API and lets you personalize information such as geolocation, device type, browser history, behavior taxonomy, etc. to deliver relevant content to your visitors. The platform is multilingual, offering over 100 languages.
Since its open-source, you have to manage the installation and configuration. Instead, you can go for managed hosting so you can focus on your core business.
Size (Of Your Store) Matters
The amount of software support and functionality you need is directly proportional to how big, complex, and varied your online store is–or will be. A solo creator who’s tired of paying table stakes for Etsy is in a very different position than a company with staff needing to oversee an online store that’s open 24/7.
A mismatch here can lead to a lot of headaches. Trying to do more than your platform is designed for is a recipe for frustration and an eventual switch, while trying to use an immense platform for a basic online trade show booth will feel like trying to drink from a fire hose.
Accuracy and simplicity also factor in here. A relatively basic store that’s accurate and up-to-date is going to be better than a dazzling one with mistakes. If pricing is no longer correct, or you’re listing products for sale that are actually out of stock, customers are going to hate shopping on your site.
Be realistic about the time you can give your store, too. The more plugins you add and products you list, the more work you’re going to have to do to stay on top of it.
If you offer a simple menu of products or services and don’t plan to scale up very far, Wix, SquareSpace, and WooCommerce on Bluehost won’t take a lot of time to set up or maintain.
One user we spoke with who used SquareSpace to sell house plants said it was perfect for a side hustle. “I’m able to do what I need to do pretty easily with the time I’m able to give to it.” She still works a full-time job, and wished she had more time to master everything, but “I just don’t have the luxury of that time and energy.”
Similarly, you don’t have to do much to get a stellar, on-brand site with Wix. It’s like filling a display window–a couple outfits on mannequins, a few accessories, a little seasonal decor, and boom, the small shop has what it needs to bring visitors in the door.
For people who know their way around WordPress, WooCommerce on Bluehost can be a super-affordable way to get a simple online store off the ground. Adding more plugins increases the cost and time spent doing maintenance. Keeping things simple has its benefits for folks who are short on time.
I wouldn’t recommend WooCommerce for people dreaming of massive growth, though, as Shopify and BigCommerce are just better set up to handle complex inventories.
One WooCommerce user on Bluehost told us that the cart system lacked the ability they needed to keep updated prices for the thousands of parts they stocked. It was simply too difficult to keep track of shipping costs from different vendors, and they wound up moving to another platform.
If you have a complex inventory or ship a lot of products each week (or you know you plan to get to that level within a year or two), platforms like Shopify and BigCommerce are better suited. The same simple product line that looked tight on Wix might look a little sparse on BigCommerce–like a warehouse with a lot of empty shelf space.
You’ll have more options to classify, filter, and sell products with ecommerce builders like these. It might be overkill for the side hustle or simple shop, but both Shopify and BigCommerce are designed for maintaining inventory at scale.
You just have a lot more control over product variations with Shopify (up to 100) and BigCommerce (up to 600).
One BigCommerce user who worked for a digital marketing company that helped retailers sell online told us how easy it was to manage a super diverse inventory. “You can set up custom rules for product variations, as far as, when you’re showing different pieces of content,” he said. “You can even show specific photos just for specific variations of a product.”
And a Shopify user told us how much time they saved updating high-volume inventory because of Shopify’s easy upload process. “You can come up with these great workflows for managing dozens to hundreds, to thousands of items and ensure that your QA is being adhered to.”
Previously, these updates involved manually going in and making the changes to each product. By their estimation, Shopify cut the time it took to update their product line in half.
Wix and WooCommerce let you add six product options, which is going to be fine for some users, but completely unacceptable for others. According to Wix, they’ve updated the platform so that you can add up to 100 variants, but none of the users we spoke with had used this feature yet.
With SquareSpace, you can add a lot of variants, up to 250, but the process of uploading a .csv or using the product editor is not as streamlined as it is for BigCommerce and Shopify. This gets incredibly important when you’re trying to scale.
If you have a really simple inventory, SquareSpace, Wix, and WooCommerce have the tools you need to manage it. But once things start to get complicated, Shopify and BigCommerce are much better set up. You’ll be able to categorize and display products on your terms, and keeping everything up to date will be far easier.
Conclusion
The ecommerce industry is growing fast with medium sized businesses. This is because it offers a lot of benefits to companies that are not in the business of selling or providing physical goods such as electronics and other consumer products. However, these businesses still need software solutions like all ecommerce stores.
Your small business is booming, and you want to figure out how to expand internationally. The thought of adapting your existing ecommerce platform and business model to other countries seems daunting. You go with the best ecommerce software solution that’s built for medium sized businesses.