Best eCommerce platform for small business: It’s an Ecommerce platform for small business. Best apps for online selling. You will love online Selling with this beautiful ecommerce mobile app for the best selling product.
As a matter of fact, bricks-and-mortar small businesses always wanted to draw an edge over their traditional competitors and also make larger profits through online store. Using the power of High-end shopping cart solution as well as Ecommerce apps, small business can now sell multiple products at the same time.
If you are a small business owner, then building your website and working the backend of it can be an overwhelming challenge. We have searched high and low to find the very best ecommerce apps out there that have made life easier for small businesses. Everything here is based upon our own experience with these products, as well as user reviews.
Ecommerce is one of the fastest growing segments in the digital marketing industry. Ecommerce applications allow you to sell your products online. Beginners and small business owners are trying to figure out which platform is the best for their business. Ecommerce platforms have always been a hot subject for small businesses. An ecommerce platform defines how a business interacts with its customers through their website. Among other services, they incorporate a means to accept payments. But when deciding which platform to go with, you need to consider its user-friendliness, reliability and security of the service as well as additional features it offers.
How your business can benefit from using an e-commerce platform
Using an actual e-commerce platform opens up a world of e-commerce solutions you may not even have known you needed. Your business can profit in many ways.
Decrease external costs
Suddenly the extra $30/month it may cost for a streamlined service is actually a positive for your bank account when it comes to saving you money in other areas. With increased inventory control and decreased cost associated with managing inventory, you’ll see your profit margins rise.
Customer insights
Knowing the ins and outs of your customers is all too important to any good e-commerce business owner. When your marketing analytics are streamlined and accessible in one place, you can make sure you really know buying habits and interests and be able to tailor your offerings and targeting to those patterns.
Selling 24/7
Digital commerce means never having to close your doors, so you aren’t dependent on waking, working hours to make sales. Your online shop front is open 24/7, and your e-commerce software is managing the transaction process even while you sleep, so you miss out on exactly zero sales due to time of day.
X-Cart
X-Cart has helped to create over 35,000 online stores, and this has been growing rapidly over the past few years. As with all of these ecommerce platforms on the list, it’s free, open source and self-hosted.
X-Cart is often considered one of the fastest open source platforms on the market, and it also has an incredible number of features for you to sink your teeth into. There’s also a free trial for the premium plan, which goes for $495 (one-time payment).
Benefits of X-Cart:
- It depends on the package you go with, but you can often get full multilingual and multi-currency support. This is especially good if you are running an enterprise store
- You can integrate your shopping cart with the most reputable payment gateways in the world such as PayPal and Sage
- It’s free and open sourced so similarly to WooCommerce there is some great developer support available. It’s PHP code means you can easily add additional integrations manually
- The most advanced developers will have all the control they need with X-Cart. It’s pretty fun to play around with and is very scalable. As your store grows X-Cart can grow alongside you.
- You can also rest easy knowing that X-Cart is completely secure and PCI Compliant.
Downsides of X-Cart:
- You have no access to direct customer support unless you pay an extra fee. Other than that you will just have to rely on X-Carts self-help tools
- You even have to pay for hosting if you opt for one of the paid plans. Again this can cost anything from $5 a month to several thousand.
- Although the premium plan is only $495 for a lifetime, this still looks somewhat high compared to other options. Also if you need a multivendor plan and then continue to grow the price rises considerably
- There’s a good chance you’ll have to utilize some sort of manual coding when setting up your store. If you don’t need PHP code then you will have to outsource development work which will be costly
Solidus
Solidus works a bit differently from the majority of eCommerce solutions on the market. It’s a fully customizable open-source eCommerce platform based on the Ruby on Rails framework. It also utilizes headless eCommerce architecture that’s regularly maintained by its developer community. For the uninitiated, this just means that your eCommerce website’s front-end is separate from its backend.
Unlike other eCommerce solutions that hand you premade designs, web design is left entirely in the hands of your software team. At a basic level, you’ll use an API from Solidus’s framework to create custom features and designs while also being able to benefit from Soldius’s in-built eCommerce functionality. All without affecting the design or user interface with any updates or edits you make.
Solidus’s basic eCommerce features focus on product management, payment options, and logistics. This functionality is packed into coding modules that you can import into your site.
For example, you can control your online and physical store inventories using the product module.
Soldius also enables you to organize how products appear on your website and within your database because Solidus provides coding options for both your store’s aesthetics and administration. In fact, you can even use Solidus to build your own backend user interface. This is especially useful for designing something specifically for your team and implementing whatever workflows/processes/UX you think would serve your teammates best.
Solidus is extensive in the sense that not only can you create an online store, but it’s also a complete management system with payment processing and resources that control:
- Shipping
- Postage
- Transactions
On top of all the modules available, you can also integrate with third-party logistics providers, payment services, and marketing platforms.
There are plenty of free extensions available that are designed and updated by other Solidus community members. However, you can also find official third-party add-ons if you want extra assurances about the integration’s validity.
Benefits of Solidus
- You can create a fully customizable store. This goes a lot further than simply tinkering with color schemes and text boxes. Instead, Soldius offers you to create an entirely custom design with whatever features and aesthetics you and your team decide upon. Rest assured, you’ll be able to create a thoroughly unique and personalized customer experience.
- Solidus is free. Thanks to Soldius’s open-source nature, you have completely free access to Soldius’s framework.
- Solidus is an incredibly flexible tool: Whether you’re looking to create a standalone eCommerce store or an entire marketplace. You can manage all your site’s features and functions, including payment, logistics, product management, etc., from one unified backend. Needless to say, this makes managing your store a lot easier. What’s more, with Solidus’s integration options, you can streamline your workflow with the help of your preferred third-party service providers to carry out everyday business tasks.
- Automation: You can automate all the features that might traditionally slow your business down, such as inventory, stock, and product management.
Downsides of Solidus:
- Although Solidus is free, as you may have guessed, the framework requires extensive knowledge of Ruby and Ruby on Rails’ coding and framework. If you don’t have this know-how, you’ll need to hire a software engineer to help get you and running.
- Similarly, as Solidus is designed for those coding websites from scratch, it takes much longer to set up a basic eCommerce store than a traditional drag-and-drop eCommerce platform. In that same vein, you’ll also need to meticulously plan out your website before you waste your time coding or money hiring a web developer.
- Though there are many online resources and a community on-hand to answer questions, there isn’t a customer support system to manage issues that crop up when things go wrong. Instead, you’ll have to rely on your software engineer to get you back up and running.
Zen Cart
The whole reason Zen Cart was created was so that people without development degrees could build their own online stores.
I wouldn’t go so far as to say that you don’t need any coding knowledge, but it’s pretty close.
But, I can assure you this, Zen Cart is more user-friendly than many of the other open source ecommerce platforms, so it might be worth looking into if you want to scale up quickly but you don’t have advanced developer skills.
Benefits of Zen Cart:
- Zen Cart is known as a rather secure software, so you know that your site and customer information is protected. Zen Cart knows that security is important and have provided some great security documentation.
- Zen Cart is also great for scaling up a store because of its wide range of features and full customization options. There are modules which developers have already created on Zen Cart which you can download and add to your store
- You can send out HTML emails directly from your website to leads and customers that you have already gathered.
- The Zen Cart community has been going strong for over a decade now which means there is a fantastic experience on hand to help you
- Zen Cart has some great multilingual options available if you are an enterprise store and you are looking to sell internationally
Downsides of Zen Cart:
- The platform doesn’t provide any dedicated support. The only way you will receive support is by hiring a dedicated third party.
- It can sometimes be difficult to upgrade your software, also customers have complained in the past that they have lost some of the custom options of their store as a result.
- Although there is a SEO out of the box tool, you need to purchase the more advanced features that other companies would offer for free such as sitemaps and meta tags
- There aren’t many add-ons or extensions and there have been reported issues of how they talk to each other. It’s likely you will run multiple plugins and some times they don’t play ball.
- The templates are far from impressive, but you can still find some made by third parties.
Shopify
Shopify is a full-fledged eCommerce platform, hosting included. It’s rather popular among free eCommerce platforms and takes care of everything – marketing, payments, shipping, and secure checkout, and is easy to set up.
Note: Like Wix, Shopify will let you create a free eCommerce website – but you’ll need to upgrade to a paid plan to start selling to customers.
Free plan
While there’s no fully free plan, you can subscribe to Shopify’s free trial for 14 days, without submitting credit card details.
Free plan limitations
During your free trial period, you can set up your store and explore features. But before you sell products or services, you’ll need to pay up for one of the plans.
Key features
- Online store with customizable themes, Shopify POS apps, multiple sales channels are part of Basic Plan
- Also in Basic Plan, unlimited products, manage products and inventory, track sales, and growth trends
- Shopify includes a dashboard with a complete eCommerce builder
- Hosting, domain names, design, themes, and marketing – all included
- 100+ mobile-ready themes and hundreds of apps to enhance store functions
- Integrates with most social media forums
- Possible to create regular web content as well — static pages, blog posts, contact forms, and so on
- Downtime is minimum with round the clock support
Shopify is a delight for anyone who wants a hands-off approach to online store setup and maintenance. With a range of plans to suit every need and type of online business, it has something for everyone.
Price & transaction fees
Four plans with varying features and monthly fees are available:
- Lite – $9 per month
- Basic – $29 per month
- Shopify – $79 per month
- Advanced – $299 per month
All plans, except the Lite, allow you to create fully-functional Shopify stores. The Lite plan only allows you to sell on Facebook and in physical locations, as well as integrate a Buy Button on an existing site.
Transaction fees:
There are no separate transaction fees when you use Shopify Payments (available in some countries). If you choose an external payment gateway, there’ll be an additional fee of 2%, 1%, or 0.5% for the Basic Shopify, Shopify, and Advanced Shopify plans, respectively.
NopCommerce
NopCommerce is a beginner-friendly, open-source ecommerce platform that is based on ASP.NET. The product can be hosted with the user’s web hosting service or a product partner of NopCommerce. In terms of inventory management, the product has abandoned cart recovery, product catalog, and listings.
NopCommerce integrates with apps like Amazon and eBay. The checkout experience comes with tax and shipping calculators, along with a single-click checkout. In terms of support, the free plan comes with a knowledge base and a forum community. The product also has video tutorials and webinars.
NopCommerce is free to download either with or without the source code.
Compare Ecommerce Platforms and Choose the Right One For You
While a lot of these ecommerce platforms offer similar features and services, it’s worth digging deeper into the ones that interest you the most to see if they have everything you need.
Once you’ve got a shortlist, you’ll be much better positioned to get started and succeed with your new online store. Then you’ll be able to grow sales by connecting it with an email marketing service
Conclusion
Selling products online is one of the best ways to grow your business. Online shops provide a very convenient option for purchasing physical goods or digital downloads in the comfort of customers’ homes. However, the process of setting up an e-shop and designing appropriate promotion techniques seems to be very complicated in the beginning. It is a big challenge for those who are beginners at selling on websites. But it is not as hard as you might think, just read this article and choose from several ecommerce platforms that best meets your business and budget needs. Find out how to sell more, reach new customers and grow your business.