An ecommerce is a platform that facilitates business and purchase transaction online. The demand for such platform has increased dramatically lately. Starting an e-commerce business can be a truly wonderful thing for any small to medium sized business, as it gives you the opportunity to compete more directly with large corporations. The e-commerce platforms have brought a great convenience to the purchase of goods, whether from home or from your office.
If you are an entrepreneur planning on setting up a new online store for your business then it is essential that you set aside sufficient time to research the different options available. No matter how good your product or service may be, if you set up an ecommerce website on a dodgy platform then you will end up having a poor customer user experience which will have a negative impact on the success of your business.
This is the Best Platform for Ecommerce Store. The best ecommerce platform for small business is not always the same as the one for your customer’s needs. We’ve built merchant reviews and ratings, showing that you how ecommerce software works from a user and administrator point of view, and operated by real people using their own credit cards in real-life scenarios.
Best eCommerce platforms
Sometimes choosing the best platform for your business can be difficult. You don’t want to choose the wrong platform and then regret it later. Following are some of the leading platforms that offer a wide variety of features, at different price points, to suit every small business.
Volusion
Best for tracking your store’s progress with analytics features
Start selling from $29 a month
3.3out of 5Ease Of Use
3.2 out of 5 starsDesign Flexibility
3.4 out of 5 starsSales Features
3.7 out of 5 starsWebsite Features
2.5 out of 5 starsCustomer Score
1.9 out of 5 starsHelp and Support
1.7 out of 5 starsValue For Money
2.5 out of 5 starsTry For FreeRead Our Volusion Review
| Volusion Pros | Volusion Cons |
|---|---|
| Great analytics features | No blogging tools, which can limit your marketing strategy |
| Multi-channel selling is easily managed from your dashboard | Limited bandwidth can result in unexpected fees down the line |
Volusion Gallery
Click the image below to expand
Volusion’s ecommerce solution has great analytics features to help you track – and improve – your store’s performance.
Volusion has a smaller number of themes than Shopify and BigCommerce, and some of its designs aren’t quite as sleek. Not to worry, though – you’ll still have plenty of choice!Volusion has very similar pricing to Shopify, but offers less value for money due to its more limited features. Still, its 0% transaction fees are a great perk.
Like BigCommerce and Shopify, Volusion is a comprehensive ecommerce solution.
Key features include:
- 24/7 customer support – impressively thorough support pages and video tutorials, plus phone support on higher price plans.
- Broad range of mobile-responsive themes – whatever you want to sell online, Volusion has you covered. Its themes cover fashion, beauty, food & beverages, electronics – pretty much anything you can imagine! These themes are also mobile-optimized, meaning your customer’s experience will be smooth no matter what device they’re using. However, for sheer number of designs, Volusion can’t match Shopify (offering 45 compared to Shopify’s 100+).
- App market – you can choose from over 20 apps to bolt onto your store from Volusion’s App Marketplace.
- Ecommerce tools – add products, offer subscription billing, get automatic tax rates, and integrate with Amazon and eBay – all without touching any code.
We like the simplicity of Volusion’s design. The overall offering is not as comprehensive as Shopify or BigCommerce, but Volusion’s store editor is pretty accessible.
Volusion does not charge transaction fees on any of its plans. This means you can keep all your profits and reinvest them in your store.
Like Shopify and BigCommerce, Volusion also has a great range of analytics tools. This makes it easy to assess where your store is doing well and where it could be improved.
Volusion is especially helpful if you’re selling over multiple channels, such as Facebook and Instagram. It allows you to pull all your sales into one place, making it really easy to keep track of everything.
But beware: Volusion doesn’t have any in-house blogging tools, which is less than ideal for growing your store. Blogging can be central to your marketing efforts, so Volusion’s lack of blogging tools is a big drawback.
On the whole, though, Volusion is a more than decent ecommerce software that can get you online even if you’re not at all technical. It’s not quite up to the standard of Shopify or BigCommerce, but it’s still an ecommerce solution that lets you build a stylish store and sell online without coding.
WooCommerce (powered by Bluehost)
Best overall self-hosted ecommerce software
4.2out of 5Overall Rating
4.2 out of 5 starsEase Of Use
3.5 out of 5 starsSales Features
4.1 out of 5 starsWebsite Features
3.9 out of 5 starsHelp and Support
5 out of 5 starsValue For Money
4.4 out of 5 starsVisit Site
| WooCommerce (powered by Bluehost) Pros | WooCommerce (powered by Bluehost) Cons |
|---|---|
| Easy to install | Fewer multichannel integrations than other platforms |
| Excellent value for money | No built-in abandoned cart recovery feature (requires an extension) |
| Our recommended hosting provider, Bluehost, offers a 30-day money back guarantee | Extra plugins can add up over time |
WooCommerce Gallery
Click the image below to expand
WooCommerce is a popular WordPress plugin that lets you create powerful online stores. You can start from scratch, or turn an existing WordPress site into a store with ease.
WooCommerce is super customizable thanks to its huge marketplace – you can pick and choose the features you want to add to your store.WooCommerce is a self-hosted ecommerce solution, so you need hosting – we recommend Bluehost, which even has WooCommerce-specific hosting plans.
Online store Two Chimps Coffee used WordPress and WooCommerce to create a unique brand.
OK, we’re guessing you’ve heard of WordPress? After all, it’s one of the most popular platforms around.
To turn your WordPress site into an ecommerce store, you need to use extra ecommerce solutions. The best of these is WooCommerce.
How does it work? It couldn’t be simpler. All you have to do is sign up to your chosen hosting provider’s WordPress-specific hosting plans, if it has them, (we strongly recommend Bluehost), and it will automatically install WooCommerce onto your computer for you.
WooCommerce also offers an ‘setup wizard’ that guides you through the process of building your store, helping you set up payments, choose currencies, and decide on shipping and tax options. It’s no wonder that WooCommerce clocked a 3.5/5 score in our ease of use research.
Why do we recommend Bluehost to power your WooCommerce store? Well, we’ve carried out some serious research into all the important areas for building online stores using self-hosted software, such as value for money, ease of use, sales features, and more.
From our findings, we can confidently say that Bluehost is head and shoulders above the rest of the hosting competitors for powering WooCommerce stores. With WooCommerce powered by Bluehost, you’ll get:
- 15+ themes costing on average just $38 (compared to $100 on Magento)
- Bluehost plans starting from just $13.99 per month (helping WooCommerce, combined with Bluehost, score a brilliant 4.4/5 in our value for money research category)
- WooCommerce extensions costing on average just $79 per year
- Translate your site into 24 languages
- Multichannel selling – sell on Amazon, eBay, and Instagram through a paid extension, and sell on Facebook for free.
- Great SEO support (SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization – the practice of boosting your site’s rankings in search engines like Google. The higher you rank, the more traffic and sales you get)
- The ability to add and customize products
- Payment options like PayPal and Visa – WooCommerce scored an impressive 4.1/5 in our ‘sales features’ category.
The great benefit of ecommerce software like WordPress + WooCommerce is personalization. You aren’t tied down to any one way of doing things, instead having the freedom to play around in the backend. For instance, you can customize everything from your check-out cart through to your confirmation emails.
But, while WooCommerce may sound simple in principle, just like Magento, it requires technical skill to run.
In our experience, add-ons that are included in Shopify and BigCommerce plans can get quite pricey with WooCommerce. If you’re looking for an alternative, check out BigCommerce’s WordPress plugin. This allows you to make the most of BigCommerce’s features along with the freedom of WordPress.
BigCommerce has more multi-channel integrations than WooCommerce, so if you want to sell through numerous social media channels or marketplaces, it’s an option worth thinking about.
BigCommerce
- Price: from $29.95 / month
- What it is: signup-based online system
- Sell: physical products, digital
- Features: 8/10
- Ease of use: 7/10
- Designs: 9/10
BigCommerce is another very popular solution among ecommerce software. It offers much of what you’d expect from a quality ecommerce platform and does so in an easy-to-use package.
The way you begin your adventure with Bigcommerce is very similar to getting started with Shopify. All you need to do is sign up at Bigcommerce.com, go through the setup wizard (where you get to indicate what you want to sell and how you want your store to look), and you’ll have your store running in no time.
BigCommerce lets you sell any type of product, and even configure quite a lot of different parameters that describe those products.
There’s a lot to choose from in regards to themes and store designs as well – particularly if you’d like to save some money and use a free design – those are really nice-looking! Many consider Bigcommerce’s templates to be the best in the industry. They look modern and professionally designed.
The overall pricing is similar to Shopify’s, but you don’t get any $9 a month plan. The majority of the features are already built-in. For example, the marketing tools are far more advanced with BigCommerce.
Here are some of the features you get with BigCommerce:
- Unlimited products, orders, file storage, and bandwidth
- 24/7 support via live chat
- Level 1 PCI compliance and multi-layered security and DDOS protection
- SSL certificate included
- Point of sale equipment
- Visual builder for your online store website
- Migration tools for bringing in your store data from another system
- Handle payments from PayPal / Braintree, Stripe, Apple Pay, Amazon Payments and others
- Inventory management
- Optimized for the search engines
- Tools to sell on Facebook, Pinterest, eBay, and Amazon
- Developer API
- Integrations with product comparison sites
- Email marketing module
Ecwid (Web, iOS, Android)
If you’re launching an online store but want to minimize your initial outlay, Ecwid is the best place to begin: it’s got a great, free plan that lets you start selling your first 10 physical products, and affordable upgrade tiers starting at $15/month as you grow or need extra features. There are also no additional transaction fees on top of what your payment gateway charges, so it isn’t skimming any profit with hidden fees.
When you sign up, Ecwid gives you the option to integrate your store with your existing website—it supports most platforms like WordPress, Weebly, Drupal, and the like—or to set up your own store with a company.site domain name (although you can change that to a custom domain at any time by upgrading to the Venture plan).
At the Dashboard, you’re presented with a big, bold to-do list that walks you through setting up your site, adding your first products, localizing your store, and choosing how you want to deliver goods—and get paid for them. Working through the full list takes less than 15 minutes.
Where Ecwid stands out from some of the other free options is its customizability. In the sidebar, click Website and then Edit Site to open the site builder. To change the theme, click Themes and choose from one of the dozens of different options. Whatever you’re planning to sell, there’s a decent base theme to work from. Then, dive deeper into the intuitive builder to customize every section, text block, and photo.
While Ecwid is a great free option, it doesn’t skimp on the features with the paid plans. It integrates with social channels like Facebook and Instagram so you can sell directly to your followers, you can list your products on Amazon or eBay, or take payments in person. It automatically calculates tax, offers discounts, and tracks your inventory. If you set up a free store on Ecwid, you don’t have to worry about moving to a new platform if things take off.
Ecwid integrates with Zapier too, so you can connect it to all your other apps and do things like receive texts when someone places an order or track sales with Google Sheets.
Ecwid Price: Free for standard features; from $15/month Venture Plan for professional features; transaction fees depend on payment gateway.
Which eCommerce platform is worth using?
We can admit that all of these platforms are quite good to create your first online shop, to get experience, to understand how it works. After you gain an experience it will become obvious for you what exact tools you need and what is missed, what aspects you would like to edit and improve. A software development company can definitely help you to create the eCommerce platform regarding your strict requirements and needs.
Conclusion
These days business is going online. Thanks to the great boom in the internet, it has made it easier for the businessmen to expand his business across states and borders. In addition to this, there are a number of platforms that have come up and made it easier for them to get the word out. In the context of ecommerce market there are numerous ecommerce platforms that are presented today.
Ecommerce stores are the latest trend among business. It provides many benefits to its users hence, it gives boost to sale and profit. So if you want to start your online store then a good ecommerce platform is essential for your business.