Statistics indicate that in 2021, over 2.14 billion people worldwide are expected to buy goods and services online, up from 1.66 billion global digital buyers in 2016. Without a second thought, given the rising trend the potential for an ecommerce store is huge. Today’s competitive and convenience focused community no longer wants to venture to the high street in order to buy items. Instead, consumers prefer shopping right from the comfort of their home. This decision to go online and shop might sound favorable to consumers but for businesses it appears to be complicated and frustrating until they fail to think which ECommerce Platform is Best for Your Business. Staying competitive, going global, increasing reach are the most common challenges faced by the businesses when it comes to attracting buyers digitally.
If you too are perplexed about best ecommerce platforms 2020, we have put hours of research work and narrowed down top 5 best e-commerce platforms list by highlighting their strengths and weaknesses to help you choose the best for your business needs.
E-Commerce Website Builders Investigated, Reviewed & Tested
#1. Magento
When it comes to competing in an evolving marketplace, Magento is recognised as the world’s most flexible ecommerce platform. It delivers everything your business needs for growth and survival. Empowering over 200,00 online retailers to date, the popularity of Magento has reached to the point that it has been opted by 1 of every 4 online businesses. The power to create unique as well as engaging shopping experiences is what makes Magento a ready to go platform for businesses. Magento employs the MySQL or MariaDB relational database management system, the PHP programming language, and elements of the Zend Framework. It also applies the conventions of both object-oriented programming and model–view–controller architecture. Top brands that use Magento include Coca Cola, Ford and Rebecca Minkoff.
Strengths :
Open Source Technology
Built on an open-source technology, Magento provides online merchants with a flexible shopping cart system. Its unrivaled ability to customize turns out to be convenient for many businesses.
Freedom To Choose Hosting Services
The obligation to stick with one hosting company ends with Magento as eCommerce retailers have the freedom to freely select hosted platforms of their own choice.
Optimal Viewing Experience
From large to high resolution desktop, computer monitors to mobile phones, Magento is known for keeping optimal viewing experience across a wide range of devices. Hence, it establishes a fulfilling brand experience for consumers.
Advanced SEO
The platform was built with keeping SEO efficiency in mind, as a result it gives products a better chance to rank on search engines.
Easy Multi Platform Integration
Ebay, Paypal, Mail Chimp, Google Shopping, Quickbooks and many more, Magento makes the third party integration easy across multiple platforms.
Weaknesses :
Expensive
For smooth and fast running of your e-store, Magento requires high speed dedicated servers. This ultimately results in adding extra expenditure to your total budget.
Require Skill Set
It can be hazardous for the team to function accurately and efficiently without proper skills. It requires an expert team who has good experience working on Magento platform.
Slow Speed Intervals
During the heavy process, Magento applications might consume more gigabytes of RAM so there are chances of platform working slow.
—————————————————————————————-
#2. Shopify
Shopify is a web application that allows you to create your own online store. Shopify is happily opted by a large number of entrepreneurs and startups around the globe to expand or migrate their businesses to the web. By providing a wide range of templates, it brings with it the convenience to customize so as to match with individual users branding requirements. Shopify is more a users platform, which facilitates in performing technical or design skills without any in depth knowledge. Whereas people who have associations with HTML and CSS will be pleased to discover that Shopify gives them the convenience to edit both giving a desired control over the design of templates. Let’s look into its features and find out what makes it an ideal and desired ecommerce platform.
Strengths :
Affordable
Cost is something which is hard to ignore when it comes to building a strong market presence. Shopify helps by providing quality services at the most affordable rates.
Appealing Stores
The platform withholds a variety of professional templates, which facilitates the creation of unique and compelling online stores. Loaded with lucrative themes, both designers and developers can jointly work to create a store with rich UI and exceptional UX.
Secure and Reliable
Another benefit of Shopify is its rendered security and reliability. Whether it is dealing with sensitive information, server maintenance and upgrades, all of your security concerns are being taken care of.
Mobile Ready
All of the Shopify themes are mobile responsive and the platform comes with free built-in mobile commerce shopping cart. This gives your customers an unparalleled freedom to shop freely wherever they are.
Ready to Download App
Shopify app store is a storehouse of functionality that comes packed with tonnes of built-in features where you can add reviews, loyalty programmes, customer wishlist, get in-depth analytics, print labels, integrate with accounting software and almost every social media site.
Downsides :
Shopify Blogging Functionality
The blogging functionality of Shopify is not as sophisticated as what can be found on WordPress site. When it comes to categorizations, Shopify blog posts only allow you to use tags without any categorization.
No Email Hosting
Email hosting is not provided with the web hosting. This means you can’t host a domain based email address.
High Pricing for Advanced Features
Shopify base plan comes with limited features which might not solve the purpose for many businesses. To upgrade with advanced features like reports, fraud analysis, gift cards high tier plans are available for businesses.
—————————————————————————————-
#3. WooCommerce
The most popular and by far the most well known WordPress ecommerce solution is WooCommerce. Exclusively set to sell both physical and digital goods, WooCommerce is a free WordPress plugin that adds e-commerce functionality to your WordPress website to have your online store. In just a few clicks, your website turns into a fully functional ecommerce website. WooCommerce facilitates basic store functionality by providing a free plugin available from the plugin repository or from your WordPress dashboard.
Strengths :
Flexibility
By using various WooCommerce plugins also known as add-ons, you can extend its functionality. The features like booking, subscriptions, shipping platform integrations, sales tax collection makes it extremely flexible for business owners.
Audited by Sucuri
As it is audited by Sucuri, this ensures that WooCommerce sticks to the coding standards and helps protect your business from existing and unforeseen security threats.
Complete Control of Inventory
Whether you are selling one particular product, one product with many or dozen, WooCommerce provides complete control of your inventory by simplifying and streamline product management.
100% Customization
Businesses can completely customize their individual needs to match with their brand designs and functionality. Header, footer, checkout, product sheets customization of all types is possible.
SEO Integrated
WooCommerce has strong SEO capabilities amplified with dozens of SEO plugins, which ultimately helps increasing the visibility of your store in Search Engines.
Weaknesses :
Ease of use
Irrespective of the fact that you can start with the pre-installed version, the setup process may turn out to be difficult for inexperienced users.
Lack of Support
Unlike Shopify, WooCommerce fails to give a central support system. Every theme, plugin and hosting come from different support channels.
Pay for Extensions
The installation of some extensions come with a pricing which at times adds extra financial burden to businesses.
—————————————————————————————-
#4. BigCommerce
BigCommerce is a pro e-Commerce platform that brings with it a lot of powerful features through a single platform. Operating more than 90,000 online stores, BigCommerce provides startups and established companies with everything they need to start and grow their business online. Toyota, Martha Stewart, Original Moxie are some of the big business names using BigCommerce. Struggling brands with relatively simple businesses that are growing modestly is definite to find BigCommerce sufficient and reliable.
Strengths :
Interface and Ease of Use
The straightforward, intuitive and easy to use interface is what makes BigCommerce a much sought after platform especially for SMEs.
All in one Solution
BigCommerce all-in-one platform includes hosting, themes and apps, multiple payment gateways access including blogging capabilities and lots more. Business owners who are reluctant to hire a developer can get everything they require.
Multiple Sales Channels
Without relying on a number of different services, BigCommerce primary feature lies in its ability to allow anyone to build and run their own online store. This primarily includes online marketplaces like eBay, Amazon and Google Shopping coupled with in-person sales through integration with social media integration like Facebook and Pinterest.
24/7 Support
With BigCommerce you will receive 24/7 one-on-one support through chat, email and phone. Their BigCommerce University provides a lot of helpful articles in case you are stuck somewhere.
Payment Gateways
One of the most advantageous features of BigCommerce is that it supports major payment gateways. PayPal, Google Checkout can be easily integrated so that it gives your customers a convenient shopping experience.
Weaknesses :
Difficult to Edit
With the newly updated stencil themes, it is not at all easy for ordinary users who are not a developer to make template related changes.
Yearly Sales Threshold
Each of the offered plans comes with an yearly sales threshold limit. When the annual sales is exceeded, the plan would be automatically upgraded resulting in stretching the budget of businesses.
Lock-In
If you have ever decided to move to another self hosted or different platform, it’s not going to be an easy process. Your entire site design, functionality, payments and content are all going to be sort of built into a BigCommerce platform that can have a direct effect on the budget.
—————————————————————————————-
#5. Wix
All those who are looking forward towards feature-rich ecommerce stores without giving up creative control over brand and storefront design, Wix eCommerce turn out to be perfect choice for them. By combining intuitive editing tools with easy and engaging ecommerce functionality is what makes Wix a must sought after eCommerce platform for businesses to showcase their products online.
Strengths :
Excellent Templates
Wix offers a wide variety of professionally designed templates for online stores.
Easy-to-use Dashboard
The easy to use dashboard of Wix comes with a drag and drop interface that is fairly simple for absolute beginners to grasp. This way you need not to worry about messing around your settings.
Nominal Pricing
The plans like VIP, eCommerce, Unlimited, Combo and Connect Domain are nominally priced and especially catered to startups and small business.
Mobile Responsive
The eCommerce store is responsive and optimized for mobile, desktop and tablets. This keeps users engaged towards stores around the world, anytime.
Easy Inventory Management
With Wix, it is fairly simple to add a product, track inventory, display units which are left, product options, order check and so on. It provides support for collections, tags, store promotions and more.
Weaknesses :
Not Feasible For Large Stores
It often becomes difficult for largest stores to showcase their products because the navigation menu fails to accommodate complex substructures.
Lack Of Total Control
With Wix, it often gets tough to customize everything. Irrespective of their drag and drop functionality, making major changes to an existing site can be no more than a hassle on Wix.
Not SEO Friendly
If you want your store to grow organically, Wix may be a slow process. Advanced SEO techniques are missing and still require a lot of improvements.
—————————————————————————————-
A Quick Ecommerce Platforms Comparison
The Takeaway
To conclude, choosing an e-Commerce platform based on popularity is not solely true. The aftermath of how to choose the best e-commerce platform is based on the adaptability, affordability, objectives and outcomes of businesses, which varies from one to another. To better understand this, it is always imperative to head towards professionals who can help you assess business goals in detail and work in line with your goals to increase your online visibility.
Still perplexed about which e-Commerce platform can help take your business to the next height? Bank upon experts and get simplified solutions to all your complex problems. Our expert team at Seraphic can help you in development solutions for all leading ecommerce platforms, from Magento, Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, Wix to many more.