E-commerce platform is the system of an online store for selling goods and services. This E-commerce development platform is used for designing and setting up online store in simple manner. People can buy products directly from this platform without visiting other parts of the website. Based on the customer’s requirement, the designer develop this particular platform with the complete features that covers most of the processes to maintain a regular e-store.
One of the most popular questions that is asked by people who have been involved in ecommerce or dropshipping industry is, “what is the easiest ecommerce platform”. Since most types of business involve product selling, starting an online store should be the perfect solution for making money. However, it seems like a lot of people having these ideas in their heads have no clue what they should do to make a website profitable.
Your time is valuable. Before you start online business or decide on a suitable ecommerce platform, it’s important to know the basics and make a rational choice. There are hundreds of ecommerce platforms in the market that can be overwhelming for beginners. This article reviews main options for your ecommerce website, compares them with each other and gives useful tips how to choose the best solution for your business that will save your time and reduce costs of running an ecommerce website.
Ecommerce is a profitable business model. With ecommerce becoming a household name, there are few countries that have not heard about it. This article is all about ecommerce platforms. However, what is ecommerce? It’s basically the sale of goods or services over the Internet. The businesses which sell their products and services over the internet are known as online business. Here we will discuss about best ecommerce platform in this article.
Easiest Ecommerce Platforms: Comparison Criteria
What did I look for when I selected the easiest ecommerce platforms? Here’s a summary of my evaluation criteria:
- User Interface (UI): Is the ecommerce platform interface clutter-free, clean, and user-friendly? Are the product listings easy to arrange, view, and inspect?
- Usability: Is the ecommerce platform easy to learn and master? Does the company offer good tech support, user support, tutorials, and training? Is it easy to launch a fully functional ecommerce store and sell products without complicated customizations?
- Integrations: Is it easy to connect with other tools? Any pre-built integrations or APIs? Is it easy to connect with social platforms and other marketplaces? Can other tools be integrated without complicated workarounds?
- Value for $: How appropriate is the price for the features, capabilities, and use case? Is pricing clear, transparent, and flexible?
There are so many different ecommerce platforms to choose from, and while WooCommerce and Shopify seem to be the most popular, there are a handful of others that can be quite convenient. This article will help you determine which one is right for your business.
1) Volusion – Best feature-rich ecommerce platform for SMBs
Volusion is the ecommerce equivalent of a James Bond Aston Martin car — it is loaded with useful and life-saving features for online store owners.
Now let me be Q (one more James Bond reference) and explain what it does. Volusion’s all-in-one ecommerce solution helps SMBs create their first professional ecommerce site. It comes with built-in features covering every aspect of launching, operating, and growing an ecommerce business.
Volusion’s inventory grid feature allows it to manage the price and status of child products. What are child products? If you sell a pair of jeans, they might be available in different colors and sizes. Here jeans are the parent product, and the variations are child products. Volusion also has the feature to bulk upload products.
The analytics features include options to check gross revenue, revenue by day, total orders received, traffic performance, cart conversions, and more. Volusion also includes site creation features like mobile responsiveness, product pages, and search functionality/search engine, as well as functional features like secure checkout and a dropshipping integration.
Their SEO tools and analytics come in handy for optimization. Volusion integrates with all the major payment gateways (PayPal, Stripe, etc.) and accepts all major credit cards.
The product allows full customization to create a consistent experience throughout the store and checkout experience. Volusion pricing starts at $29 per month with an option for a free trial. Support is available 24/7 by phone, email, and chat. There is also a comprehensive knowledge base available.Visit Website
2) PrestaShop – Best ecommerce platform for first-time entrepreneurs to test their ecommerce MVPs
PrestaShop is an open-source ecommerce platform that’s free to use and allows you to edit software code to suit your custom needs. The tool covers all the basics like customizing your store, managing products, processing payments, and more.
PrestaShop is free to use and perfect for MVP testing. The product’s advanced stock management system allows it to use multiple sources of inventory and manage them in a single place.
The analytics and statistics add-ons cover all the main data points of your ecommerce store. PrestaShop has over 2000+ design theme add-ons. Use it to design an ecommerce site that matches your brand tone and design language.
Though PrestaShop is free to use, add-ons are priced usually between $30 to $50. A major drawback is that the support feature is not free, but that is expected from a freemium service. The basic support plan is priced at around $345.Visit Website
3) WooCommerce – Best ecommerce platform for customizations
WooCommerce is a fluid, flexible, and adaptable ecommerce platform that allows you to sell physical goods, digital products, and services.
Their free option includes a storefront, a WordPress theme, 5 payment gateways, product listing management, a shipping rates calculator, gift cards options, and more. Though this alone will cover everything you need to start an ecommerce business, the real fun is in the integrations and customizations.
You can choose from many plugins, themes, and extensions to create an application based on your requirements. You can also adjust the look and feel of the site to match your brand’s design language and tonality.
WooCommerce also integrates with a variety of utility tools like Shippo, QuickBooks, and more. The analytics dashboard gives you insights on gross sales, average order value, net sales, refunds, and other critical insights.
Currently, WooCommerce is used by more than 30% of ecommerce sellers. WooCommerce itself is a free ecommerce platform but has additional costs for themes ($59 approx) and plugins ($25 each).Visit Website
4) BigCommerce – Best ecommerce platform for ease of use
Unlike other ecommerce platforms, BigCommerce does not limit plans based on staff amounts or product amounts. In fact, the bandwidth of BigCommerce plans are based on how much you can sell from their platforms. So, each plan allows you to upload unlimited products. This ability to add an unlimited number of products gives a lot of legroom for an ecommerce business to truly flourish.
Apart from that, there are multiple, easy-to-apply features like customer segmentation, abandoned cart recovery, payment processing (with 65 payment gateways), and more. For site design, BigCommerce has an intuitive visual editor that lets you change your site’s look and feel without any coding involved.
Being a leading player in the ecommerce market, BigCommerce integrates with 100s of powerful enterprise integrations like ActiveCampaign, Webgility, Avalara Tax, Stripe, and more. Also, with BigCommerce, you can sell directly on marketplaces like Amazon and eBay.
Inventory management features include order tracking, stock level reports, pricing adjustments, and insights on purchasing trends. The analytics feature helps you track insights like your biggest customers, average order value, net sales, refunds, and other data that will help you scale your product fast. BigCommerce has a WordPress Plugin that can be a great fit for WordPress users looking to sell products on their platform.
The support team is available via email and phone. In addition, there is a knowledge base and a community of ecommerce entrepreneurs supporting each other.
The BigCommerce standard plan starts at $29.95 per month with the option for a 1-month free trial.Visit Website
5) Shopify – Best ecommerce platform for stability and always-on availability
If ecommerce platforms were the mob, Shopify would be the boss of all bosses. The tool is easily the most popular ecommerce platform out there.
Shopify comes with a professional storefront, a payment processor, and a Shopify POS application. The product management features let you organize items/products into collections or use smart collections to create interesting groupings, such as items less than $50, item bundles, and other parameter-focused groupings. These features can be very handy marketing tools for your product.
Shopify lets you execute important inventory management activities like exporting or importing inventory through CSV files, tracking and adjusting inventory, and hiding out of stock products. Shopify’s analytics give you insights like transaction data, site speed, store visits, and more.
In terms of extensions and compatibility, Shopify integrates with 3219+ apps covering everything from sales to merchandising to finances. It works out of the box with Amazon, Oberlo, Stocky, Facebook Messenger, Apple Business Chat, and more.
Shopify is used by more than 90k retailers in over 100 countries. The tool offers support via chat and email. It has an extensive knowledge base and an active community on Shopify forums dedicated to the product.
The basic Shopify plan starts at $29 per month with an option for a free trial.Visit Website
6) ERP Gold – Best inventory management SaaS platform for wholesale manufacturing organizations
ERP Gold helps small businesses and wholesale manufacturing organizations with a dead-simple way to list, manage, and ship inventory when selling through online marketplaces like Amazon, Walmart, Shopify, eBay, or any other platform.
ERP Gold allows product listing to all these multiple marketplaces simultaneously, all from one single platform. This makes managing inventory a breeze. Also, it lets you track inventory through a unique serial number.
ERP Gold works great with apps like Salesforce, Shopify, PayPal, Facebook, and more. Support is available 24/7 by email, phone, and chat.
ERP Gold starts at $49 per month with a 14-day free trial.Visit Website
7) GoDaddy – Best easy-to-use ecommerce platform for small businesses
Most business owners know GoDaddy as the leader in domain name hosting. What a lot of people don’t know is that GoDaddy comes with a powerful ecommerce website builder.
GoDaddy’s ecommerce platform provides you with all the tools and insights you need to operate a fully-functional online store. It comes with all the essential features like product listings, a shopping cart, multiple payment options, SSL certificates, shipping, and more.
The product is easy to use and comes with helpful guides and powerful customer support to set up your ecommerce platform easily. The site builder is simple to use and helps you build a modern-looking ecommerce site without any coding knowledge.
True story: Back when I was a technical klutz, I used GoDaddy to build my first-ever website. So I can vouch for this firsthand.
You can use the online store’s inventory feature to manage stock levels and let your customers know if a popular item is available. You can also connect your online store to marketplaces like Amazon, eBay, Etsy, and sync inventory across all channels.
GoDaddy integrates comfortably with apps like Stripe, LiveChat, Acuity Scheduling, and other mainstream business software. Support is available 24/7 via phone, email, and chat.
The GoDaddy website builder starts at $10 per month with an option for a free trial.Visit Website
8) Wix – Best ecommerce platform for design aesthetics
Wix comes with 500 beautiful templates that you can customize with a drag-and-drop editor to create an awesome-looking ecommerce platform. The coolest part of Wix is the intuitive Artificial Design Intelligence or ADI, which designs a unique website for you based on a few simple questions about your use-case. For people with no technical experience, this is a great tool.
For product listings, Wix lets you group your products into collections. This helps customers to find your products and see related products that might interest them.
The dashboard is well organized. Wix integrates with apps like QuickBooks, MailChimp, and more. Wix’s ecommerce and business plans start at $23 per month.Visit Website
9) WP Engine – Best ecommerce platform for lightning-fast web speed
WP Engine is primarily a web hosting platform for your blogging needs, but its Genesis pro subscription plan packs a powerful statement when it comes to ecommerce functionality.
The Genesis framework comes with built-in SEO-optimized features curated by experts. The Gutenberg-ready site builder can be used to implement reusable modules for design and content. You can also freely change headers, logos, or any other aspect of your site to match your ecommerce store aesthetics.
Also, there’s an open-source community of developers backing the product with auditing and security updates. The community also provides useful integrations, plugins, add-ons, and extensions. It integrates with WooCommerce and other major ecommerce apps.
The pricing for WP Engine’s startup plan starts at $25 per month.Visit Website
10) Ecwid – Best ecommerce platform for adaptability and flexibility of use
Ecwid lets you create an online store that syncs and sells on your existing web page or social profiles like Facebook and Instagram. The tool provides you with everything you need to create promotion-ready collaterals and sell to your prospects.
In terms of inventory management, the product allows you to specify the stock quantity for each product and sends a notification when a particular product is out of stock. Also, once a product is sold out, the product will receive an out of stock label.
Ecwid comes with integrations for email marketing and point of sale functions. You can also use its mobile app that allows sellers to manage their products and sales on the go.
The Ecwid store also integrates with your existing website platforms like Wix and WordPress. Support is available Monday to Friday via email, chat, and phone.
The Ecwid venture plan starts from $15 per month with a free forever option.Visit Website
Easiest Ecommerce Platforms: Key Features
What ecommerce features make the easiest ecommerce software? I specifically scouted the web for these important features:
- Inventory management: Does the platform make inventory management tasks easier? Does it track stock levels? Does it give you stock level data in real-time? Does it let you add multiple variants of the same product?
- Analytics: Does the tool give actionable insights that you can use to grow your ecommerce business? Are the analytics easily accessible and understandable?
- Customization: What level of customization can you achieve with the product? Can you customize the platform according to your brand colors and design language?
- Support: How good is the support feature of the product? What are the various modes of support deployment? Is it available 24/7? Apart from direct help, is there also a knowledge base available?
CONCLUSION
It is undoubtedly challenging to select a payment gateway for your online store. The benefits of different ecommerce platforms vary, depending on the features and type of business you run. However, many ecommerce buyers tend to be confused when looking for a suitable ecommerce platform as they are bombarded with numerous options.
The online retail business has been at the peak of success for the last decade, but it won’t last forever. In fact, improvements in AI and IoT technologies threaten to shift the power from sellers to buyers. This means an equal playing field where all customers have access to the same information. Accordingly, e-retailers will need to work hard and consistently improve their services to stay competitive.