Best eCommerce Platforms for Building Online Stores! The online retail industry is booming. Retail e-commerce sales worldwide reached $4.28 trillion in 2020, according to Statista. It is up 27.6% from the previous year. In 2021, e-commerce revenues were $4.9 trillion. What does this mean for online stores? This is the perfect time to start an online business because the e-commerce market is growing faster than traditional enterprises, giving you more opportunities to generate money.
Nowadays, a company’s online presence is extremely important. Operating an e-commerce store is less expensive than opening a physical store. E-commerce has a low cost of entry. You won’t have to pay rent or utilities, and you’ll probably need fewer employees and have lower operating costs. Though e-commerce websites necessitate regular expenditures for technical support such as hosting, website updates, and maintenance, these costs are significantly cheaper than those of traditional online stores.
Best eCommerce Platforms for Building Online Stores
1. Shopify
Shopify is one of the most well-known and widely used e-commerce platforms for businesses of all sizes. It also focuses on social commerce and mobile shopping.
The user interface for this website builder is incredibly user-friendly. To create your store, you don’t need any IT or coding knowledge. Many companies like Shopify because it allows them to create a beautiful, customisable store without having to learn how to code or design.
When it comes to design, there are hundreds of themes to choose from. Shopify has pre-made templates, so consumers don’t have to start from scratch when it comes to personalization. Shopify offers a wide range of themes to suit a wide range of businesses. You can select the theme that best suits the aesthetic of your company.
If you have any issues in building your site, Shopify offers phone, live chat, and email assistance 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. This ensures that consumers receive immediate assistance from the staff.
2. Bigcommerce
BigCommerce is a great e-commerce website builder for medium to large businesses, such as wholesalers or B2B companies. It works for businesses of all sizes and industries, and it’s also a good option to provide a brick-and-mortar store with an online presence.
BigCommerce provides a comprehensive range of e-commerce solutions to assist you in the development of your website. You can also include social media on your website and sell your products through those platforms.
BigCommerce makes it simple to expand your business and sell your products through different channels. You can create stores on other websites using your BigCommerce site. It’s an excellent method to broaden your company’s reach while maintaining consistent brand identity across platforms.
BigCommerce provides social media integration as well as search engine optimization (SEO) capabilities like rich snippets, custom URLs, and a content delivery network (CDN) to help your site load faster. These features assist in increasing site traffic and improving search engine results.
3. Squarespace
Squarespace is a fantastic all-in-one platform for setting up a profitable online store. This website builder provides a variety of store themes for businesses to choose from when creating a website.
You’ll have access to Squarespace’s inventory management system when you build your site on their platform. This may be integrated into your website to keep track of your inventory and alert you when certain products are running short. Their prices are reasonable, starting at $18 per month for annual payments with minimal services.
Squarespace gives you complete control over your website. You can manage your email lists, as well as set up coupon offers and shipping preferences. This allows you to easily maintain complete control over your website.
You’ll get access to a large number of mobile-friendly and customizable themes that you can further customize with CSS and Javascript. Although you can submit as many physical products as you like, the subscription selling feature is only available with the Advanced Commerce plan.
4. Magento
Magento is an e-commerce-focused content management system (CMS) for building medium and large-scale web stores. If you’re searching for a platform that gives you the most flexibility, this is a good option. But if you don’t have any Magento experience, you’ll need to hire someone who does.
Magento is mobile-friendly and an open-source platform at the same time, so you’ll have to develop your own store. This means you have the freedom to create rich content for products and other services. Additional e-commerce extensions are also available through Magento Marketplace. Magento has over 9000 plugins/extensions, including free social commerce extensions, allowing you to sell directly on social media platforms.
PCI Compliant Payment Solutions are integrated into the platform. Setting up payment gateways or obtaining an extension from the marketplace is your responsibility. Checkout, payment, and shipping modules are all integrated within the platform.
It also has a large resource collection for store administration. This is the greatest platform for e-commerce sites and enterprise-level merchants with high product volumes.
5. WooCommerce
WooCommerce is an open-source eCommerce platform that is accessible as a plugin for WordPress. WooCommerce is a plugin that adds eCommerce functionality to any WordPress site. With the WooCommerce plugin, you can easily develop an e-commerce-ready website.
You can add e-commerce functionality to your website by using WooCommerce. You make it simple for customers to browse and buy your stuff. It’s a simple plugin that you may use to rapidly create a website.
WooCommerce is an eCommerce platform that includes everything from inventory management to payment processing. When you invest in WooCommerce for WordPress, you gain access to a large developer community that will assist you in creating the ideal website for your company. You can also add hundreds of extensions, such as store administration, shipping, and marketing tools, to extend its capability.
6. Wix
Wix’s major goal is to make creating a website or an online business as simple as possible for its consumers. In fact, its platform is used by over 700,000 companies all around the world. Wix also offers hosting for your online store, with prices starting at $23/month for an annual subscription.
Wix Ecommerce is a great alternative if you have minimal product choices. Small businesses with less than 50 unique products can use this platform to build attractive websites.
Creating a good website is simple and straightforward. Wix Ecommerce, like other website builders, offers a variety of attractive website themes.
A drag-and-drop theme is used to build up Wix eCommerce. You have the freedom to add and delete features as you see suitable for your company. This makes creating your own unique storefront a breeze. Abandoned cart recovery, a configurable checkout page, rapid purchase buttons, add to cart from a gallery, wishlists, loyalty programs, discount codes, and user accounts are among the primary features of Wix’s eCommerce platform. You’ll also receive $300 in online ad credit and other helpful online marketing tools. Wix also supports Facebook, Instagram, and eBay for multi-channel sales.
Conclusion
With so many e-commerce platform alternatives available, choosing the correct one for your business is a critical decision. And while each solution has its own set of advantages and disadvantages, the ideal e-commerce platform for your business will be the one that best fits your needs and budget. As a result, when you begin your search for the best e-commerce platforms, you’ll need to know what you’re looking for in terms of a variety of criteria, including price, platform type, payment processing alternatives, and specialized features and capabilities.
Creativ Digital will assist you in creating a stunning e-commerce site for your business. We are a leading custom eCommerce web development firm in Sydney, dedicated to creating scalable and tailored eCommerce solutions. Our skilled web developers can help you with conversion-driven development techniques whether you’re starting your first online store or upgrading an existing one to shift revenue declines.
