People are increasingly buying products and services through e-commerce stores. And meanwhile, enhance their delivery services and experience. Experts predict that retail e-commerce sales worldwide will increase up to $6 trillion in 2022.
Therefore, e-commerce businesses need to think about how to improve their sites and customer experience to be competitive in the marketplace. Therefore, nowadays, there is a huge demand for web hosting services.
Also, starting a new eсommerce platform is a good idea for exponential growth. Some renowned name generator tools such as name generator engine help you generate professional business names.
This review will help you manage your online store and automate workflows intelligently. With it, you will be able to confidently choose a powerful software platform that is perfectly suitable for your business needs.
With that said, let’s get our list of e-commerce platforms, And learn more about the relevance of eCommerce PPC.
Woocommerce
If you have a site on WordPress, then the features of this platform will be free for you. However, retail businesses need to add various plugins to extend the capabilities of Woocommerce.
The basic features of Woocomerce are as follows:
- Online store building with multiple web pages;
- Money transfers via payment systems (e.g., PayPal) or banks;
- Order/product management;
- Marketing analytics;
- Templates and customization.
Woocommerce can also be integrated with WordPress themes, CRM, messengers, SMS-mailing services, spreadsheets, and many page builders like Elementor, Divi, etc.
Magento
Magento offers many extensions and integrations, providing users with powerful basic SEO tools, including the ability to add keywords, sitemaps, meta tags, and so on. The platform can be used for all business niches but will be more suitable for fashion, automotive, food & drinks.
Magento’s Advantages
Include built-in scalability, special multi-channel shopping, the ability to handle multiple transactions quickly, powerful SEO, and a large support community.
Shopify
The platform is known to thousands of online retailers for its convenience and simplicity, which made it quite popular in the e-commerce market. A large number of templates and Shopify page builder apps allow you to build your website in no time and launch it on the Internet.
This level of simplicity helps businesses in their strategies for increasing customers and building a stronger brand. Moreover, you can also hire a 99designs designer to create a unique theme that will fit your business needs.
Shopify’s advantages include ease of use (anyone can set up their online store), fast integration with social networks, other functional apps (like review apps), and great flexibility (the platform is suitable for small, middle-sized, and large stores).
Squarespace
Squarespace is a website builder that is suitable not only for creating online stores but also for blogs and portfolios. No special knowledge is required to work with Squarespace, as everything is intuitive.
In addition, you can evaluate the benefits of the platform and all of its functionality during a free 14-day trial period.
Squarespace’s Features
include free hosting, domain, and fonts, as well as the sale of digital products, unified payment system (Stripe), convenient document management, image manager, plenty of templates, built-in mobile websites, custom domains, marketing analytics, and SEO tools.
You can consider SMS marketing as another option to promote your brand, but Squarespace has it all in one place.
Squarespace websites are easy to set up, but getting them to rank well on search engines isn’t a walk in the park. You may need to consider paying for Squarespace SEO services from agencies like Pearl Lemon that specialize in this.
That way, you have a higher chance of getting your website to rank higher than your competitors.
BigCommerce
BigCommerce offers a large set of features for creating online stores (integrations, marketing tools, reliable hosting, etc). Using the platform with a well-thought-out omnichannel marketing strategy, businesses can sell their products on many marketplaces (Amazon, eBay, Google, social networks, and physical stores).
The platform has a lot of useful features that help increase sales. Thus, you can connect a software tool that allows you to send notifications to visitors who left their shopping carts without making a purchase.
BigCommerce’s Advantages
Include strong SEO, flexibility, scalability, and great multi-channel e-commerce capabilities (integration with multiple channels) including BigCommerce eBay integration tool, BigCommerce Etsy Integration tool, etc.
3dcart (by Shift4Shop)
3dcart is not as well known as the previous platforms on our list. However, it has everything you need to build a solid online store, from real-time shipping to your choice of payments. 20+ years of business experience make 3dcart superior to many similar platforms in the field of SEO.
The platform offers all-in-one software and a powerful API for integration with other apps and tools. You can set up sales functions through social networks, there’s a large number of templates of themes optimized for conversion.
The platform complies with 1PCI, which means that your customers’ data is secured.
3dcart’s Features
include the industry’s best built-in SEO, mobile-ready themes, no transaction fees, unlimited data storage/bandwidth, no limits on products/categories, built-in advanced reporting, effective marketing tools, quick payments, tons of integrations, and much more.
Wix
Wix is known more as a website builder, offering many quality templates, images, and background themes. The main goal of the popular platform is to provide online e-shop owners with powerful tools to help launch and develop online stores fast and efficiently.
Wix has a simple control panel and user-friendly interface. There are no restrictions on products or categories. You can use a convenient tool of the platform to help accept payments, as well as tools for inventory management, sales, marketing, and SEO
Wix’s Advantages
Include unlimited bandwidth for any plan, the ability to list up to 50,000 products, logo creation, handmade illustrations, hassle-free customer support, website performance tracking and analytics tools, advanced SEO tools, and much more.
As you may know, Shopify is considered one of the best alternatives to Wix by offering fully responsive designs, support for mobile pages, product pages, multi-currency selling functionality, and tons of integrations with other key apps.
So, you should learn more about Wix vs Shopify to gain more information and make a decision about which one to choose for your business.
SalesForce
Salesforce is the largest web-based platform that offers customer relationship management (CRM) tools, as well as marketing and sales software solutions to its users.
Not only that, but it also integrates with hundreds of other platforms, including contract automation software, finance systems, and communication tools. The uniqueness of the platform is that it’s AI-based.
This means that it allows businesses to provide their customers with a unique shopping experience, providing a deeper understanding of their customers.
Salesforce’s Advantages
include a high degree of adaptability, management convenience, AppExchange features for data import, email marketing, research, and integration with Gmail (e.e. Dataloader, Mailchimp, Growpromoter, and Ebsta), standard API links, scalability, easy access to data, popular integrations, artificial intelligence (AI-based CRM), mobile-first CRM, top performance (ranked #1 by IDC 4 years in a row).
Volusion
For the most part, Volusion is used as an alternative to Shopify in terms of convenience and simplicity. While for experienced e-commerce managers, the all-in-one e-commerce solution’s features may be insufficient, it’s still a great platform that is definitely worth considering.
Volusion’s Main Features
Include responsive themes, a rich content editor, a custom domain, a navigation editor, product category pages, advanced search tools, professionally-designed Slideshow feature, logo + favicon upload, CSS editor, and much more.
PrestaShop
PrestaShop is an open-source platform, which makes it especially valuable. It was created specifically for e-commerce and is free to use. Setting up PrestaShop is easy, as is setting up your online store, which is also one of the key advantages.
The platform helps improve your SEO and attract more potential customers through marketing tools. By setting up a payment gateway, the website can become more functional, and emails after transactions with help keep in touch with your customers.
PrestaShop’s Benefits
Include simplicity, integrations with popular apps, a high level of security, great tech support, and powerful SEO tools.
Big Cartel
Big Cartel is a platform for musicians, illustrators, and filmmakers who want to sell their creations online. Despite a relatively small number of features, the program is easy to understand and use. Big Cartel will suit users who have no experience in programming. Also, you can choose to learn online programming and become a pro.
The platform offers 6 different themes, a stock tracking feature, great SEO and marketing tools.
Big Cartel’s Advantages
Include no transaction or listing fees, various artwork options, code editing, flexible SEO settings, real-time statistics, and affordable paid subscriptions.
OsCommerce
Last (but definitely not the least) comes OsCommerce, offering an open-source and self-hosted platform for businesses to generate quality sales reports, send promotional offers to customers, and add/edit products. And have a complete Business model. The platform is successfully used by Printzone, Buybies, and Wishlets. You can check their websites to know what to expect.
A huge number of OsCommerce’s add-ons allow businesses to build highly customizable and extendable online stores, taking advantage of many useful features, e.g. integrations, database backups, template sets, multi-currency support, customer/product statistics, feedback management/editing, payment processing, and more.
Oscommerce’s Main Features
include product catalog management, a great number of plugins/add-ons (8,689 free add-ons), special offers, tax handling, extension through modules, easy customer management, currency/language settings, and a large enthusiastic community of experts (290k+ online store owners).
Conclusion
Choosing an e-commerce platform should be based on your business needs and goals. The first thing you should do, as a business owner, is write a list of what you want to get by using this or that service or software solution. And keep in mind that a website can always be moved from one platform to another.
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