In recent years, ecommerce has become big business with no signs of slowing down. According to Statista, it is projected that the global ecommerce market will reach $3.54 trillion by 2021. With such a rapidly growing industry, it has made sense that ecommerce solutions are moving in the same direction.
Are you looking for the best platform for your e-commerce business? Do you want to find out the best e-commerce software?Ever since the launch of Bitcoin in 2009, there has been a huge growth in digital currency. By 2022, an estimated worth of 15 Billion will be generated by ecommerce businesses only. As per the reports, in just one year, Amazon’s digital sales went up by $12 billion while eBay’s by $2.8 billion. This rise in the sale has led to a sudden surge in demand of ecommerce website design and development platforms. That’s why today we are here with an article on top e-commerce software that can help you design and develop online website for your business at a reasonable price.
If you are looking for the best ecommerce website software of 2022, then look no further! In this article, we have up to date a list of online shopping cart and online shop software providers to help your business sell online and reach the desired customer base.
Who wants to talk about e-commerce website design? I know I do, because there are so many options out there it can be hard to decide which way you want to go. You have a range of platforms that you could use, like Shopify and Magento. It’s not easy to make the right decision, but we’re here to help with this list of the top eCommerce website software platforms.Here we go through several ecommerce software, According to your need and requirement. you can pick any one from below collection of best ecommerce website software.
What’s the difference between ecommerce software and an ecommerce solution?
In this guide, we’ve used ‘ecommerce software’ and ‘ecommerce solution’ in the same way. They both describe dedicated ecommerce tools that help you create an online store.
Ecommerce platforms, on the other hand, can include website builders that let you add ecommerce functionality. We haven’t included these builders, such as Wix and Squarespace, in this article. If you want to know more about these and ecommerce platforms on the whole, read our review of the best ecommerce platforms.
Squarespace
Squarespace
Best for Artists, Photographers, and Creatives
Get everything you need to tell your brand story and put your visuals at the forefront of the user experience. Includes dozens of stunning pre-made visual-focused templates, social media marketing tools, and shoppable Instagram posts. Plans start at $18 per month.>> Get 14 Days Free!
If you rely heavily on imagery and branding to help sell your work online, Squarespace is an excellent choice that puts your visuals front and center. Since users can’t interact with what you’re selling, photos, videos, and your website have to do the heavy lifting for you.
It’s built specifically for creative, highly visual websites with dozens of aesthetically pleasing templates ready to go out of the box. Out of all the products we looked at, Squarespace’s templates take the cake.
Most of them require very little editing on your part since they look aesthetically pleasing out of the box. But you can easily customize the template you choose using an intuitive what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) editor.
It’s 100% drag-and-drop, which makes it easy to set up a visually appealing online portfolio, even if you’ve never built any type of website before.
Changing colors across your entire site takes just a few seconds. So, all you have to do is choose a template, apply your branding, upload your images and videos, set up your product listings, and you’re good to go.
On top of regular products, you can sell premium spots on your calendar for custom work or consultations using the online booking tool.
Another amazing feature is the ability to sell memberships and subscriptions on the advanced ecommerce plan. This is excellent if you plan to sell stock photography subscriptions, digital assets, or other products with recurring revenue.
When you’re ready to start marketing your store, Squarespace delivers various tools to help you get the word out via social media where you can connect with potential customers.
With Squarespace’s social media integrations, you can easily tell your brand story and sell your products directly within the platform. As such, your customers never have to leave the page to buy something from you, making the buying process a breeze.
And if you’re on Instagram, you can use Squarespace to set up shoppable posts so followers can see your offerings with one tap.
Every plan comes with built-in tax tools, the ability to create discounts, gift cards, mobile inventory, and store management, and in-person payments if you sell at pop-up events or art shows as well.
There are three ecommerce-ready plans to choose from, including:
- Business – $18 per month with 3% transaction fees
- Basic Ecommerce – $26 per month with no transaction fees
- Advanced Ecommerce – $40 per month with no transaction fees
There’s also a personal plan for $12 per month, but it doesn’t include commerce functionality or the ability to accept payments.
The Business Plan includes basic functionality and everything you need, but you do have to pay 3% of every transaction. Alternatively, you can opt for the Basic Ecommerce plan to keep more of what you earn and access more advanced features.
BigCommerce: Best e-commerce website builder for Omnichannel selling
In addition to selling on their own e-commerce website, many merchants find success by diversifying their channels — that is, selling through social media, email, marketplaces and more. If you’re looking for the best e-commerce website builder to implement this strategy, known as omnichannel selling, you’ll want to consider using BigCommerce.
A top Shopify competitor, BigCommerce is similar to many of the other platforms we’ve discussed. With BigCommerce, you can quickly and easily customize and launch your own online store, process and manage orders, as well as market and promote your business.
Features and benefits of BigCommerce
As we mentioned, although BigCommerce is similar to many other platforms, one of the areas where it excels is its integrated sales channels. BigCommerce includes access to eBay, Amazon, Google Shopping, Facebook, Instagram and POS integrations with all of its plans.
Moreover, BigCommerce offers the following tools for businesses looking to build an e-commerce website:
- Unlimited products, file storage, bandwidth and staff accounts with all plans.
- Single-page checkout, Apple Pay, Google Pay and Amazon Pay acceptance.
- Over 100 professional and customizable templates.
- Coupons, discounts and gift cards.
- Real-time shipping quotes and professional reporting tools.
- Product ratings and reviews.
- Free sitewide HTTPS and dedicated SSL.
- Integrated multi-currency functionality.
- 24/7 live agent support.
- Access to over 50 payment processors with no additional transaction fees.
- Discounted credit card processing fees through Braintree.
Drawbacks of BigCommerce
Although BigCommerce is a strong all-inclusive e-commerce website builder, especially for selling through multiple channels, there are some things to keep in mind with this platform.
First, perhaps the biggest downside of BigCommerce is that its plans are limited by annual sales volume. Therefore, if you exceed the limit for annual sales, you’ll be required to upgrade to a more expensive plan.
Additionally, even though BigCommerce offers a decent library of themes, there are very few free options and some of the paid options can get expensive — up to $300. If you compare the BigCommerce theme options to competitors like Shopify, Wix and Squarespace, you’ll find that some of these platforms can offer more affordable, user-friendly theme designs.
BigCommerce pricing
As a top Shopify alternative, the BigCommerce pricing structure is very similar to Shopify’s. BigCommerce offers three core plans, as well as an enterprise solution, with its entry-level plan priced at $29.95 per month. The remaining two plans cost $79.95 and $299.95 per month, respectively, and these plans include additional features such as abandoned cart saver, stored credit cards, custom SSL, Google customer reviews and higher annual sales limits.
It’s important to mention that although BigCommerce allows you to choose from a variety of payment processors and doesn’t charge its own transaction fees, you can access specialized rates (as low as 2.2% plus $0.30 per transaction) by working with Braintree for payments.
Volusion
A Solution for Experts
Volusion is one of the oldest ecommerce platforms. Founded in 1999, this Texan ecommerce website builder powers 30,000 online stores and employs over 250 people.
If we look at their pricing (starts at $29 a month), Volusion is in the top tier and should offer similar services to Shopify and BigCommerce. Personally, I don’t think it has aged well and there are many aspects I believe they should improve (read below).
What we like about Volusion
In our tests, we found Volusion to be one of the fastest platforms we benchmarked. Volusion’s many features are appreciated, for example, I like ‘the deal of the day’ promotional option that bumps up a product to the top of your homepage.
What Volusion should improve
Expect to spend some time figuring out how things work with Volusion, as they are not an intuitive solution. I am not a huge fan of their templates, and even though they’re responsive, I don’t find them too appealing.
When comparing their system to similarly priced solutions like Shopify or BigCommerce, its platform feels a bit limited. There is not an app store where you can find external apps to enhance your shop’s capabilities (e.g. extensions to improve SEO or email marketing integrations).
Free trial: volusion.com
Jimdo
Great for European Stores
Jimdo is originally from Germany and it’s a very popular tool among Europeans (they are fully localised in English). They have achieved relative success due to the fact that 20 million websites have been created using their system.
Being 100% honest, it’s almost unfair to list Jimdo along with top ecommerce platforms like Shopify or Weebly, as their features simply can’t match those of their competitors. However, there are a couple of perks Jimdo offers that no one else does, let me tell you about them.
What we like about Jimdo
It’s affordable; for as little as $10 a month, you’ll get an ad-free online store with 15 products. A nice little added bonus is that Jimdo sites seem, on average, faster than its competitors’. If you are looking for an easy-to-use tool, Jimdo is certainly that. European users will be relieved to know that they fully comply with the complicated ecommerce EU regulations.
What Jimdo should improve
On the other hand, Jimdo feels slightly lacking; it just doesn’t provide many basic ecommerce features. For example, you won’t find a way to import or export data, which makes it difficult to manage larger online stores.
It’s not possible to sell digital goods either (e.g. images, PDF documents or songs). Jimdo’s designs are OKish, but they are unimpressive and could use an update.
Free trial: jimdo.com
Disadvantages of using Website Templates
Despite all the very real advantages of website templates, you should pause and consider some of the disadvantages. For example, how easy is it to customize the template to your requirements? Do you have the skills or the software to do it yourself?
Not exclusive and unique
Website templates are downloaded and used by many hundreds of users. So they are not exclusive and unique to your own company. You may wind up with a website that is a clone of many others. If you want to ensure that no-one else buys the same website template, you will have to pay many times the price. Besides, the same template may have been used by customers who downloaded it before you got there. You may need to custom-design your website if you want a design exclusive to your company or for your personal use.
Limitations on customization
A website template can not be tweaked beyond a point, so it may end up being non-specific to your requirements. If you have a great deal of website content but have chosen a web template with limited space for text, the additional text may change the look of the design by stretching it. At this point you may decide that the template doesn’t really work for you but you are stuck with it as you have actually already spent for it and downloaded it.
Certain software needed for personalization
While some website design templates are simple to customize, modify and upgrade, making use of readily available web authoring software like Microsoft Frontpage, others are more complicated and necessary understanding of photo-editing and website-building tools and coding.
Whether it is Macromedia Dreamweaver or Flash or understanding of HTML code, you may not have the requisite software or skills to customize, edit and update your website. In this case, you may need to use the services of a web developer to customize and/or update your web template for you.
Image optimization requires skills
You have to be familiar with optimizing images for the web so that your pages load quickly. If you do not have the needed skills and photo-editing software for image optimization, this will slow down the website development process and you could need to engage the services of a web developer.
SEO is your little
Website Templates will only give you the shell of your site. They are not optimized to attract search engines. You will need to do this with your website content. Keep in mind that search engines are more attracted to words than to pictures. A website template with a lot of graphics and Flash animation effects may look appealing, but may take longer to load and will not draw the search engines to your site. So despite the good looks of your Flash website, it may end up lower on search engine rankings.
While composing content, you have to utilize the keywords that promote your products or services and attract targeted customers to your site. You will also need to use meta-tags (Title tag, Keywords, Description) to attract the search engines to your web pages. Since content is the heart of your website, it is worth spending the time and energy to write it– or leave it to a professional material writer.
Conclusion
eCommerce business has grown tremendously in the past few years. Because of this, you will see a lot of new ecommerce software coming out on the market that promises to make your business run more efficient. It may be difficult to find out which eCommerce software is the best for your DIY store.
When it comes to small and big businesses, commerce has been an integral part of the growth of these entities. This commercial activity is so important in the present global economy that even the major retail giants like Amazon, eBay and Alibaba have their own ecommerce website software platforms. These ecommerce website software platforms made it possible for physical and digital goods to be sold online. The best e commerce software make online stores easy to create, maintain and manage. Our ecommerce software tools help you sell more online by creating customizable online shops that can be shared across multiple social networking pages