Many startups are hugely successful because large corporations and small businesses use ecommerce software for their needs. Among the most common solutions is Magento, an open-source platform. Are you curious about the best ecommerce software for large businesses? Or about what is the best ecommerce platform 2021? This article will clear up all your doubts regarding the subject.
Finding the best ecommerce platform for big business is a big decision. If your company is growing, your website needs an upgrade to keep up. Our ultimate guide to the best ecommerce platforms will walk you through what to expect and who the leading software providers are so that you can make an informed decision.
Big corporations usually have high needs when it comes to software and solutions. They want solutions that would not only be cost effective but also ready to scale with their growing requirements. When we are talking about best ecommerce software for large companies, the powerful platform should provide an easy, efficient and smooth way of managing items, customers, orders, tasks and payments from a single interface.
Picking the right ecommerce platform for your business is essential to its success. That’s why we researched and compared dozens of systems to find the best ecommerce software. BigCommerce, an all-in-one ecommerce solution, was our top pick for 2021 because of its feature-rich store builder, ease of use, and selection of marketing tools.
How to Choose an Enterprise Ecommerce Platform
You’ve made it this far in building your enterprise, so you need to make sure you pick the ecommerce platform that best suits your needs and ambitions. Below are some of the most vital features, facts, and fine prints you should look out for when choosing an enterprise ecommerce platform…
Onboarding time
As an enterprise ecommerce owner, you want to get your online business up and running as quickly as possible. Fully hosted platforms like Shopify Plus, BigCommerce Enterprise and Squarespace Enterprise are ‘ready-to-go’ packages, providing everything you need for growing your enterprise, all in one place.
With these platforms, you don’t need to think about:
- Coding
- Hosting
- Bandwidth
- Software updates
- Security
- Web development tactics
Do you sell to businesses or consumers?
Some platforms have tools that are better suited to selling I.T. software on a large scale to businesses worldwide, while other ecommerce platforms will have features specifically designed for selling individual retail products like sportswear or perfume. Shopify Plus and BigCommerce Enterprise tick both customer boxes, offering all the tools you’d need to sell B2B and B2C (business to business and business to consumer).
Overall cost
In order to get the most accurate pricing information, you’ll need to request quotes from each platform, which is really simple to do. However, once you’ve compared bespoke quotes from your selected enterprise ecommerce platforms, you’ll need to look further than the subscription costs.
Consider whether your chosen platform will incur additional costs for things such as:
- Web hosting
- IT support
- Domain names
- Plugins
Consult other teams within your business
The enterprise ecommerce solution you choose will impact all areas of your business, so make sure you consult other departments in order to pick the solution that benefits everybody. For instance, your marketing team will have opinions on the platform’s personalization features, while your IT department may ask how the software would integrate with your own computer systems.
nopCommerce
nopCommerce is an open-source eCommerce shopping cart with a lot of features that online businesses can utilize. It caters to both beginners and established businesses with all of its comprehensive features.
Also, unlike others, it supports several languages like Arabic, Bengali, Danish, German, English, Japanese, Russian, Korean, Spanish, Portuguese, and Chinese among others.
One advantage of using nopCommerce is one of its features enables multi-vendor and multi-warehouse management, which isn’t something readily available to other eCommerce platforms, even for paid ones.
Pros:
- Good active community support.
- Fully-featured ecommerce platform from promotions, marketing, mult-store, multi-vendore, multi-warehouse management.
- Great architecture for developers to build upon on.
Cons:
- Difficult to install for non-technical people.
- Updating the core system is a bit difficult to handle if you don’t know what you are doing.
Zen Cart
Zen Cart is another open-source shopping cart that you can literally download and patch up on your existing website to turn it into an online store.
Like other shopping cart plugins, Zen Cart allows its users to fully customize the checkout process, integrate with several payment processors, as well as integrate with other third-party applications for a more functional online store.
As of writing this, Zen Cart boasts thousands of free plugins and templates in its arsenal.
Pros:
- Has a massive collection of free plugins.
- Works properly on its default setting without needing to install other plugins.
- Regularly maintained and forum is active.
Cons:
- Integration with new leading apps is scarce.
- Updates are a bit slow.
Spree Commerce
Spree Commerce is yet another open-source shopping cart that you can use to build an online store. It features a really good admin dashboard that is perfectly suited for beginners as well as advanced users.
Spree Commerce documentation is robust and if you are still confused about anything, there is a huge community of users out there who can help you.
The only downside I can see here is if you need technical support and you are in a hurry, you have a better chance of getting help if you hire someone to work on your issue, rather than fully rely on the community for help.
But that said, you can integrate a bunch of third-party applications with Spree Commerce, and it also works with dozens of payment gateways.
Pros:
- Active community of Spree users, both regular and developers.
- Easy to setup.
- Tons of free third-party plugins for extended functionality.
Cons:
- Customizing will require advanced coding skills.
- Compared to other mainstream ecommerce platform, Spree has fewer integrations with applications that matter when it comes to an online store, like with Xero, ShipStation, and the like.
Magento
Having worked in eCommerce for roughly a decade, we can vouch that Magento is the undisputed king of the e-commerce shopping cart. Many businesses gravitate towards Magento because of its fully functional and rich features. In reality, there are more than 771,000 websites using Magento according to Builtwith.
Despite the fact that a lot of store owners favor Magento, this theme also brings a bumpy ride for them. Now, let’s discover its strengths and weaknesses.
What are the strengths of Magento?
- SEO
SEO is where Magento shows off its muscles with an extensive suite of SEO customization features. Index management allows you to have control over the links that get passed on to the search engine. There are also a lot of standard discoverability features, like the sitemap in XML variations. XML helps search engines understand the site’s structure easier and allows the search engines to find all of the site pages while some of those might be missed when indexing. The Magento configuration includes settings to generate and manage instructions for web crawlers and bots that index your site. The instructions are saved in a file called robots.txt that resides in the root of your Magento installation. The instructions are directives that are recognized and followed by most search engines.
Your store is loaded with places where you can enter keyword-rich metadata to improve the way search engines index your site. You can easily set idea meta-titles, keywords, descriptions for products, CMS pages keywords, categories. Moreover, you can take advantage of the mass settings to save time when editing these attributes.
allows modification of URL prefixes and suffixes, plus canonical tags for products and categories.
Rather than that, you can capitalize on speed enhancement, page layout, and rich snippets. When you need additional SEO tools, there are various plugins available that include full-stack analysis and tweaking functionality.
- Improved performance and scalability
Having undergone many refinements, Magento has had an improved indexer to speed up query performance. The indexer works to make regular data updates, including catalog data, users, prices and stores, to improve the overall speed of your online store.
The core integration of Magento with Varnish Cache – the leading HTTP accelerator technology, will enable you to provide full page caching for your online store, thus accelerating the page load speed. In the study by Quanta, Magento’s online cart load time is acceptable with a result of 568 milliseconds. We consider it to be reasonable enough to keep clients until the end of the sales funnel
What if your store’s got to deal with tons of orders at a time? Not a big deal. Magento is optimized to process a large sum of orders simultaneously, effectively handle a large inventory, and offer all the major payment gateways. Magento can process 39% more orders per hour, which is quite an impressive feat.
- Built-in features
Magento has everything you need to start running your business right away. Developers packed it with various eCommerce features. We will only crack down on the most essential features that this platform offers, and they are:
- Integrated Checkout, Payment, and Shipping: includes more payment sources for greater flexibility.
- Mobile Optimized Shopping: provides an optimal viewing experience across a wide range of devices (from desktop to mobile phones).
- Global Selling: provides the ability to transact in multiple countries, currencies, and use worldwide shipping providers.
- Catalog Management: manages the creation of rich content across many types of products: simple, configurable, bundled, and customer-personalized.
- Extended Functionality via App Marketplace: easily add capabilities and connectors for a nominal fee using the Magento Extensions Marketplace.
- Instant Purchase: provides returning customers with a faster checkout experience.
- Site Search: comes with ElasticSearch, which delivers high-quality search results that help boost conversion rates.
It’s hard for us to list down all the features Magento can provide merchants, so to dig deep into it, please have a look at the Magento Feature General List.
What are the weaknesses of Magento?
- Require excellent development skills
The default dashboard of Magento online store is full of terminologies making it difficult for merchants without the developer’s expertise. Especially when it comes to deep and sophisticated customization, with over 20,000 files and 200 database tables, not all developers know how to manage, a user with a poor technical background will undoubtedly have a hard time.
- Associated cost
Although Magento offers a free open-source edition, you’ll still need to pay for some associated costs, such as hosting ($12 a month), a domain name ($12 a year), an SSL certificate ($37 a year), and extensions.
Who should use Magento?
Magento stands out as a great option for those who have strong technical knowledge and don’t mind tinkering around with code to discover all features of Magento. Besides, your store will one day grow on a bigger scale, requiring a robust platform able to cater to your needs. In that case, built on a robust microservice architecture and equipped with tons of advanced features, Magento allows wide scope for site improvements, so retailers can unhesitatingly scale up their business to any size.
WooCommerce
WooCommerce holds the biggest eCommerce market share in the world. WooCommerce holds around 11% of the total eCommerce market. Basically, WooCommerce is a WordPress plugin that can turn any website into a fully functioned eCommerce store. It’s an open source plugin and gives features like inventory management, coupons, product pages, etc.
Although, there is much external development you might need to enhance your store. There are certain downfall WooCommerce as well that leads to eCommerce replatforming.
Here are some advantages and disadvantages of WooCommerce you should know:
Advantages
- WooCommerce offers limitless customization. You can literally design the store of your dream.
- It’s an open-source platform, hence talented developers are always there to guide, help and upgrade.
- WooCommerce stores are compelling in terms of SEO performance.
Disadvantages
- You will not get quick support like BigCommerce or Shopify.
- You need experts with WordPress knowledge to build an online store.
- WooCommerce stores often face security issues.
Why Your Enterprise Needs a Purpose-Built Ecommerce Software
If your company has recently grown, it may be time to upgrade your ecommerce solution. What once worked for your business when it was smaller may no longer fit the bill as your company grows.
Or perhaps you just haven’t yet found an ecommerce solution that’s the right fit for your needs.
Whichever the case, it’s important to understand the different types of ecommerce software solutions, what each one offers, and how it can help your business.
Using ecommerce software that is built especially for the enterprise space means that the way in which the software has been designed is underpinned with an understanding of how enterprise businesses operate and what it takes to power a global company’s needs.
Therefore, ecommerce software explicitly designed for the enterprise can provide some substantial benefits, including:
- Improved sales engagement
- Multi-site capabilities
- Better brand awareness
- Streamlining and efficiency
Conclusion
A good platform was never enough. The best ecommerce platforms of today are often integrated with other business software to help make your business more efficient. Every major company is looking for ways to optimize their businesses for the bottom line and choosing a web based, mostly automated ecommerce solution is a recipe for success.
eCommerce (Electronic Commerce) has been around for quite some time. What started out as B2B (Business to Business) transactions, has now evolved into a multi-million dollar industry and stands to be the future of how people shop for goods and services. There are some really great eCommerce platforms out there but having this many options can make the process of choosing the right platform for your business overwhelming.