Ecommerce businesses come in many forms – and many sizes.
Regardless of the industry, the business is based on or how many customers they have, businesses need the right approach to identifying the right ecommerce platforms.
The products you can give your customers must be good – but the same can be said of the experience. User experience is important. A site that offers a good UX is cost-efficient, it’s a proven formula for retention, and it keeps your audience around longer.
If you’re not savvy enough to code your ecommerce website from scratch or master the logistics of fulfillment services overnight, fear not – there are many ecommerce platforms out there you can use.
With a good ecommerce website builder, you can set yourself up for success. It’s not the same as having a dedicated website for your business, but it’s a stable foundation to begin (or streamline) your online sales efforts.
Which Ecommerce Platforms Are Best?
Small business consisting of a tiny team or maybe even a single person carrying the load? A thriving company with an established brand and a full product catalog? No matter the size of your operation, these are some great ecommerce platforms that have website builder options to try.
1. Shopify
Shopify is the type of versatile, flexible platform built for businesses of all sizes. You can enjoy a thriving ecommerce website that looks and feels more like a dedicated company site than an ecommerce portal.
It helps you establish your brand by letting you pick a custom domain name and one of the hundreds of themes. You’ll be sure your online store exudes the values, style, and persona you hope to maintain with your brand.
The portal simplifies things, which can help even the most efficient and experienced sellers save time and money. From one platform, you can customize your store, add new sales channels, manage an uncapped inventory, activate one-step order fulfillment, and even track your data for smart planning.
Shopify currently powers hundreds of thousands of businesses and has over one million active users. The platform is evolving fast, with the potential for technologies like AI to be used in the near future.
There’s unlimited bandwidth, integration with sales channels on platforms such as Instagram or Amazon, and even 24/7 support. If you’re ready to start a new Ecommerce store or streamline an existing effort, this is a great platform to consider.
2. Magento
Magento ecommerce web builder is marketed as a platform to help you launch your site quickly and begin seeing greater ROI. This platform certainly knows what users look for – but can they deliver?
Further, judging by their share of the market and their ongoing success in the ecommerce industry, the answer is an emphatic yes. Using the Magento dashboard, users can track their inventory and sales metrics to see how the business is doing and get data-driven insights on how to improve it.
There’s also a feature that allows repetitive order management tasks to be automated – saving users valuable time in the process. For newcomers, this is a great way to take the tedium out of ecommerce. For established businesses, it can free up the time of team members so they can focus on other more profitable tasks.
Solutions are offered for small, medium, and enterprise businesses. Users can also get resources for individual sectors of ecommerce like B2B and mobile.
It makes it easy to manage inventory by putting everything in the right place, making it possible to drive new revenue growth. There’s also a focus on the experience – Magento works to make things easier for the customers and the people serving them.
3. Squarespace
The Squarespace ecommerce platform exudes style – it’s what could be called Squarespace’s main brand value.
Entrepreneurs, freelancers, and artists want their online presence to look good. Squarespace provides award-winning templates and photos to help anyone set up a website, portfolio, or online store. If the latter is what you’re aiming for, you’ve got some great features to look forward to.
The site is set up with all the features you’ll need to post products and facilitate engagement. But it also helps out with marketing.
Users of Squarespace can reach more people and grow their audience thanks to a comprehensive marketing toolkit consisting of SEO, email campaigns, social media promotion, and much more.
Marketing Features Aside, What Does it Offer for Sales?
Back to the shopping side of things, there are handy features beyond the ability to post a detailed product catalog. You can set up subscription-based products with ease, and even remind customers about products left in their cart and entice them to complete a purchase.
These tools are great for the upstart ecommerce business, but they can also help even the largest enterprise location. The platform is secure, it’s flexible, and most importantly, it is made with the customer’s experience in mind.
When you’re looking for a place to start, grow, and/or maintain an online store, consider Squarespace.
4. WooCommerce
WooCommerce may appeal to a very specific segment of the market – the segment that’s familiar with WordPress. It’s their custom ecommerce platform.
Citing stats from BuiltWith, WooCommerce boasts its platform as the top choice in its industry – edging out Shopify by a few percentage points.
WordPress remains one of the most popular content management systems for a variety of industries, meaning many people may have experience with it even if they don’t have experience with an online store.
The customization and ease-of-design it offers make it a great choice. But the individual features are also impressive. For one, you have access to plenty of themes including each year’s default WordPress themes.
There’s also the option to customize any part of the site – redo your entire homepage or tweak small touches like the buy button. No WordPress-based ecommerce website builder would be complete without a built-in blogging feature which can be used as a marketing tool for the business.
You can use shortcuts to add product advertisements and checkout options to every page, show off product reviews, and even let customers sort through products by a variety of criteria.
Sell physical, digital or both, managing everything from your shipping rates to tax calculators based on each customer’s unique location and order.
5. Wix
For a company like Wix, ecommerce is a perfect fit. You’ll start with a blank slate and more than 500 templates to choose from.
Wix calls their drag-and-drop builder the most innovative in the world. And while that may be a lofty claim, they’ve convinced many customers through what they deliver. Video backgrounds, animations, parallax, and more are all available and require no coding knowledge to implement.
There’s also the Wix Artificial Design Intelligence (ADI) feature. You can build a personalized website for you with just a small amount of information needed.
Wix stores are built to turn heads with beautiful storefronts, and convenient layout options to make shopping easy. Things are made easy for the sellers, too – with a single platform, they can track orders, manage inventory, and show off their entire product catalog.
There are also options available for those who want to boost sales by creating discounts, or opening their store up to more payment options. Allow users to check out with their PayPal account for added security, and even create an option for offline payments.
Wix is a vital ecommerce platform for anyone looking to quickly have an online presence.
6. BigCommerce
Big is right – but this platform isn’t just built for enterprise locations with a hundred facilities.
BigCommerce offers a big list of features, including site customization, and product listing options for popular platforms like Amazon, Facebook, eBay, and more.
With clients like Toyota automobiles and Gibson guitars, this platform is geared to bring companies success no matter how large they grow. It allows users to create an engaging appearance using responsive templates. Basically, if you prefer, you can build a fully custom site.
Marketing Resources to Help Grow Your Store
There’s also a host of marketing and conversion tools that the company says helps merchants grow twice as fast as industry averages. These tools won’t necessarily drive up sales, but they’ll at least help users get more traffic from which they can find leads.
Boasting an impressive average uptime of over 99.99 percent, this platform embodies reliability. The site also claims to cut down the time required for managing the technical aspects of things. Thus reducing costs with the help of cloud functionality.
Big, medium and small businesses alike can all find potential benefits by trying out BigCommerce’s ecommerce portal.
7. Volusion
Another cloud-based ecommerce website builder, Volusion has been around for nearly two decades and has done billions of dollars in sales during that time.
The site’s drag-and-drop builder makes beautifying your digital retail space easy. There are many themes to choose from, including several free options. Also, the ability to make a custom creation.
When it comes to the features that actually help you with the process of commerce itself, you have plenty. For starters, there’s the option to add rich-text product descriptions. You can manage subscription-based products for recurring sales. Likewise, you can even create native fulfillment options to make selling easier than ever before.
However, you can even create loyalty programs to reward those customers who do keep coming back to your store.
There are SEO features, social selling options, and the chance to integrate onto platforms such as eBay and Amazon. It is worth noting that Volusion is at tiered service, so not all features come with every plan.
The finishing touch is 24/7 support via chat and via phone for higher plans. Combine this with a detailed and comprehensive knowledge base, and Volusion is relatively easy to learn.
Which Ecommerce Platforms AresRight For You?
Generally, in order to succeed in ecommerce, you have to make a choice. Comparably, the right platform is similar to the right physical space for traditional sales.
The store with the leaky roof on the noisy corner of town doesn’t get as much business as the facility in a prime location. The same is true online. Go with ecommerce platforms that are flexible and holistic in their design. Then you’ll have a better chance to improve your business.
The best ecommerce builder depends largely on your tastes. As mentioned, some options on our list have unique characteristics. Again, for someone who is a big fan of WordPress, WooCommerce may be the best option. Choose your platform based on the layout options, or how much customization is available in a given tier.
Furthermore, the best Ecommerce platforms are those that help you and your business operate at peak efficiency.
Which ecommerce website builder seems like the best option for you?
Share it with us in the comments below!
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