A lot of small business owners are considering using e-commerce software for their businesses. Many wonder if this will be the best investments and which products should they pick. Before selecting the platform that you would use for your small business, there are things that should be considered. These include choosing a platform that is flexible and scalable, a platform which provides accounting and order management tools, a platform where you can get solutions for integration with third party solutions such as payment processors, a platform that provides support, helping you to manage inventory, multiple stores and different shipping options and fulfillment services…
Your business needs a great platform to establish an online presence. The best ecommerce platform provides a complete solution for all your online selling needs without much effort. The challenge comes when you have to choose the best one from so many platforms that are available in the market now. The article will give you some best e commerce platforms but before that let’s take a look at some of the factors that should be considered before settling on any platform.
Research and the development of an ecommerce software company has seen a tremendous growth in recent years. The reasons behind this is the ever increasing dependency of companies in all industries on the internet. Not only with regards to sales but also for better service delivery towards the customers.
The best ecommerce software just got better. Our top-rated online shopping cart is easy to set up and use, and is trusted by more than five million merchants worldwide. We provide everything you need to sell online, on social media, or in person. Top categories: Best Ecommerce Software for Small Business
Ecommerce Software
Mailchimp Open Commerce
Mailchimp is a well-known brand in the online world, so once Mailchimp adopted Reaction Commerce and renamed it Mailchimp Open Commerce, the open-source development of this eCommerce platform has just become better.
Mailchimp Open Commerce has an extensive documentation that beginners and experts can follow to install, customize, and launch an online store. It might not be the easiest thing for non-technical people, but if you get the hang of it, you’ll discover that compared to other eCommerce platforms, this one offers more advanced features – especially if you are heavily into APIs and developing your own custom plugins.
Pros:
- Acquired by MailChimp, a trusted company in the marketing industry.
- Speed of update is topnotch since there are hundreds of active contributors.
- API integration.
Cons:
- As of writing this, there are 91 open issues on their Github page that are stil unresolved.
OsCommerce
OsCommerce Online Merchant is an open-source online shop e-commerce solution that is available for free under the GNU General Public License.
It features a rich set of out-of-the-box online shopping cart functionality that allows store owners to setup, run, and maintain online stores with minimum effort and with no costs, fees, or limitations involved.
CREloaded
CRE Loaded is much more than your average shopping cart. It’s the industry’s first downloadable e-commerce system that makes your store fully compliant with all Payment Card Industry (PCI) security rules.
Organize, manage, and ship your products from your online store. Accept credit card transactions safely.
Zeuscart
The Zeuscart shopping cart is based on PHP application, and it is used as a scripting language, which facilitates the developer in making dynamically driven websites. It is very facile to learn and understand.
To be precise, the application of PHP is most popular because of its functionality, which can be changed as per one’s requirements.
Agoracart
Offers an extensive range of features that allow you to set up an online storefront or shop ranging from a simple template-based store for novices to the integration of complex web design concepts created by your web designer.
VirtueMart
The complete e-commerce shopping cart solution for Joomla! – used by thousands of store owners. It can be run in Store- and Catalog-Mode.
With its powerful Administration Tool, you can handle an unlimited number of Categories, Products, Orders, Discounts, Shopper Groups, and Customers. VirtueMart works for both Joomla and Mambo.
RokQuickCart
RokQuickCart is a simple shopping cart for Joomla. It takes a simple, yet elegant, shopping cart script and integrates directly into Joomla.
It allows you to showcase products, inclusive of images, descriptions, and additional options, and purchase these items, with support for shipping and tax calculation.
SimpleCaddy
Integrate a simple shopping cart into your content. There is no need to set up a complete system like VirtueMart if you are only selling a few items or don’t want to set up an entire shop.
CS-Cart
CS-Cart is an “out of the box” e-commerce software solution with easy-to-use functionality that allows starting selling online immediately.
Its feature set fits into businesses of any size, from a small single-product shop to a fully-featured online storefront. Designed for ease of use and flexibility, CS-Cart is equipped with the latest e-commerce innovations (like one-page checkout, AJAX-based web interface, block manager, and others) built into a highly configurable and modifiable sales and promotion engine.
Fortune3 Ecommerce Software
Fortune3’s Shopping Cart software is a completely customizable and professional shopping cart that includes thousands of features and tools to make managing your online store easy and fast.
Their powerful Windows software, the Fortune3 Wizard, stands out from the rest, it includes a built-in HTML WYSIWYG editor and a superb Product Management interface that cannot be compared to any web-based e-commerce software.
You can download a 30-day trial of the full version of Fortune3, and build your e-commerce site for free for 30 days.
X-cart
X-Cart shopping cart software is based on PHP Smarty templates; this makes it very flexible and easy to modify.
The data is stored in a MySQL database. X-Cart is a turnkey package. Installation is handled by a web-based step-by-step wizard to make the system running immediately after receiving it. It is also search engine friendly.
A merchant can specify meta tags and define custom URLs for product and category pages that result in higher search engine rankings.
OpenCart
OpenCart was launched back in 2008 as an open-source PHP-based platform, using MySQL database and HTML components. One thing that reportedly stands out about OpenCart is its overall user-friendliness compared to another of its kind and the ability to manage multiple stores in a single backend. Currently, OpenCart has empowered 924,024 websites all around the world, accounting for 4% of the market share.
What are the strengths of OpenCart?
- An intuitive environment to get started
One of the things for which merchants praise OpenCart is its user-friendly interface. With a clean and simple dashboard, the learning curve in navigating the dashboard is virtually nonexistent, because all the information you need is accessible with just a glance.
The dashboard provides merchants with an overview of how your store is performing by the following data: Total Orders, Total Sales, Total Customers, People Online, Sales Analytics and many more.
- Great shipping method
OpenCart integrates the most common shipping methods that are available on all major e-commerce sites today. So you can use your national postal systems, such as the USPS, Australia Post, or Royal Mail. Also, it supports FedEx, UPS, and others. That way, you can make sure that your customers receive their purchases in a timely fashion using a manner that works with your current operations.
- Advanced multi-store capabilities
The multi-store compatibility is one of the biggest advantages of OpenCart. Normally, having and managing multiple stores can be very complex and time-consuming. However, OpenCart allows you to build multiple eCommerce stores and manage them from a single interface. You can evaluate your current orders, track your customers, sales, etc.
What are the weaknesses of OpenCart?
- SEO
OpenCart limits its users to make certain important SEO modifications. For example, metadata adjustment as well as performing 301 redirects and canonical tags can turn out to be complex as they require PHP coding skills. What’s more, OpenCart doesn’t support individual URLs.
Although creating multiple stores is a strong feature of OpenCart, it can also be a drawback. When you begin to build multiple stores with OpenCart, you will find out that when you go through the design process, the same page on your website may have several different URLs. Hence, this creates an issue for SEO and forces you to handle canonization at a coding level to avoid spreading too much of your link equity.
- Performance
Being a relatively light system, OpenCart isn’t able to provide great performance, and this isn’t ideal for scaling even on a strong hosting platform. One of the most notable performance-related issues OpenCart users usually encounter is the slow loading speed and check-out process.
A study of Quanta revealed disappointing results: websites using OpenCart are among the slowest of all platforms put into comparison, with an average load time of 831 milliseconds, which is more than 1.6 times higher than the Google guideline for SEO. Category pages are even slower with 936 milliseconds.
Who should use OpenCart?
If you own a small website with limited inventory and want to start your online business experience with a platform that has a short learning curve, OpenCart is a great option for you. Moreover, in case you wanna sell in multiple stores, OpenCart makes it easy for you with simple and seamless multiple store management. However, pay attention to the SEO-related issues, which is a serious matter of this platform.
Wix
Wix has gained a lot of popularity because of its simple interface and affordable prices. To use Wix, you don’t need any coding knowledge. You can simply drag and drop components and create beautiful online stores. Just like other platforms, Wix has more than 510 templates you can try your hands on. Templates are available for electronics, food & drinks, fashion, sports, clothing, and many other niches.
Wix also helps in creating a stunning online store for mobile devices. As we all know, mobile stores are gaining more and more attention, Wix is the eCommerce platform you can use for this purpose.
Here are some advantages and disadvantages of using Wix as an eCommerce platform:
Advantages
- There are multiple template choices available.
- The plans are very affordable compared to other eCommerce platforms.
- Wix Help Center has tons of articles and tutorials that can guide you to create an online store.
- The free plan never expires. Although, you can’t sell online with a free plan, but Wix gives you endless time to create and customize your online store.
Disadvantages
- Wix is an excellent option for starting an online store. However, it may not be a good option for a large-scale online store. You can initiate your business with Wix, but as you grow, you might have to shift to bigger eCommerce platforms like Shopify or BigCommerce due to less customization in Wix.
- Once you choose a Wix template, you’re kind of stuck with it. Wix has its custom codes, so it’s hard for you to migrate as well.
Is It Worth Upgrading to a Paid Plan?
Unlocking extra features is key for a successful online store. And, with the website builders around today, it’s cheaper than ever to do so. Remember – Constant Contact’s plans start from just $10 per month, while Big Cartel’s start from a mere $9.99 per month. So if you’re wondering whether it’s worth upgrading to a paid plan, the answer is almost definitely: yes!
In short, upgrading to a paid plan will upgrade your business. How is that so? Well, like any subscription, if you pay more, you get more.
Conclusion
The e-commerce industry is growing rapidly and entrepreneurs are constantly looking for the best e-commerce software or platform to start or grow their business. E-commerce solutions can be “overwhelming” when you don’t have any clue where to start – there are so many features, so many vendors, so much information that “you don’t know what you don’t know”!
Im in the process of setting up a new ecommerce site for my wife’s business and we have narrowed our choice down to some software that we’re interested in using for this. Like most small businesses we do it as a home-based business, so really all we want is something simple to manage our inventory (we are doing drop shipping) with, and overall working with suppliers. Granted once we start selling a few things and gain traction I guess we will be paying for something more advanced.