Best Ecommerce Platforms to Start Online Business

Today, e-commerce has become the most convenient way to do business. No matter if you're a new start-up entering into the market for the first time or an already established business looking for opportunities and capturing the attention of your targeted audience, your ecommerce platform decision is a key factor in reaching your goals. Due to the numerous available options, it is appropriate to examine the platform features, pricing model, and scalability to select an appropriate platform that meets your specific needs.

In this article, we discuss the best platforms for building online stores. This will help you make a more conscious decision. But before that, let’s get a basic understanding of the ecommerce platform.

What is an ecommerce Platform?

ECommerce platforms are online marketplace software that enables businesses to sell their goods and services over the Internet. Such platforms give you all the necessary elements to start an online business. You can create an interactive and scalable website with such platforms. Apart from displaying your products online, these platforms help with inventory management, processing orders, and payment management.

Establishing an online store can be challenging and lengthy, from building an interactive website to accepting payments online. Create an eCommerce store with us that scales quickly and brings higher ROIs.

List of The Best ecommerce Platforms

There are many eCommerce platforms that can help you ease the process of starting an online business. Let’s have a look at the best eCommerce platforms for your business:

Shopify

Shopify is a popular eCommerce platform known for its user-friendly interface. With its robust and scalable features, Shopify offers businesses an efficient space to set up and manage their online stores. One of the key advantages of Shopify is its simplicity. It provides a hassle-free experience for creating and customizing an online store without requiring extensive technical knowledge. The platform offers a wide range of professional themes and templates that can be easily tailored to match a brand's unique identity.

Shopify also excels in its extensive app store, offering a wide array of plugins and extensions to enhance an online store's functionality. These apps enable users to add features such as inventory management, marketing tools, customer support, and much more, further streamlining the e-commerce experience. Shopify offers many packages that businesses can choose from according to their needs, requirements, and budget.

Get in touch with our team and leverage the potential of Shopify development services to build a highly scalable and robust ecommerce store.

WooCommerce

WooCommerce is another eCommerce platform that enables owners to add their online store functionality to their WordPress site. It is beginner-friendly and has a simple setup process, which makes it a popular choice among business owners. Once you create a store on WooCommerce, you can easily manage it directly from your WordPress. WooCommerce covers a wide range of online store features, such as payment processing, inventory management, shipping, and marketing. It offers a range of themes with customization and plugins to choose from. This platform is free to use, but you need a hosting service, a WordPress site, and a domain name.

BigCommerce

BigCommerce is an e-commerce platform that provides businesses with the necessary tools and features to establish and expand their online stores easily. It offers a user-friendly interface and a wide range of customization options, allowing merchants to create visually appealing and unique storefronts. A notable advantage of BigCommerce is its scalability, accommodating businesses of all sizes. Whether you're just starting out as a small business or operating at an enterprise level, BigCommerce can handle your growth. It ensures reliable hosting and a flexible infrastructure that manages high traffic volumes and extensive product catalogues while maintaining optimal performance.

Shift4Shop

Shift4Shop is a full-feature ecommerce solution that not only offers valuable tools for SMEs but also provides industry leaders with cutting-edge technology. It provides you with services that include the ability to create unique designs, secure hosting, and sales and marketing tools to enable you to build a professional portal. A Shift4Shop system is equipped with efficient inventory management as well as the ability to process and send customer orders that make it easy to shop online for not only the merchants but also the customers.

Magneto

Magneto is an open-source eCommerce platform for starting medium—to large-scale online stores. You can edit or add code to the website as needed, making it highly customizable. The best thing about Magneto is that it offers staging environments that help in reducing downtime in case of updates. Moreover, it offers a personalized AI shopping experience and various other extensions. Magneto provides robust security measures to ensure the safety of customer data and transactions. It also offers reliable hosting, scalability, and responsive customer support, making it an ideal choice for businesses of all sizes.

PrestaShop

PrestaShop is an open-source e-commerce platform that provides a number of features and customization opportunities with a single license. It grants the modern and simple structure modular approach and reaches the markets of modules and themes to enrich the functionality and design of your online store. The e-commerce service PrestaShop provides multi-language capability and international shipping options. PrestaShop is a good option for enterprises wanting to conduct business globally.

Volusion

Volusion, a turnkey platform, offers everything from store design and management to customer support and success for retailers that want to go online. You get to use customizable templates and embedded safety, plus there is the option to integrate marketing tools to bring and convert clients. Volusion comes with the in-built SEO features and responsive designs that ensure the good performance of your online shop, which is available on devices and search engines.

OpenCart

OpenCart is a user-friendly platform based on open source that is available free of charge. It allows users to create their own eCommerce stores with minimal effort. It provides an array of features, including flexible designs, multiple store subscriptions, and rich extensions to expand your online store's functionality. OpenCart has an active community of developers and users; thus, they will guarantee that your business progresses by releasing regular improvements.

Wix

One of the notable website builders is Wix, which offers E-commerce functionalities through its Wix Stores tool. It offers features such as customizable templates, a vertically oriented drag-and-drop editor, and a secure payment system that helps one establish a native-looking store in no time. Success through SEO tools and social media gives businesses the opportunity to attract and engage their customers with Wix via different channels.

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Exemplary Features Of Our Ecommerce Platforms

Ecommerce platforms exhibit superb features that assist businesses in performing numerous operations and growing sales to the optimum level. Have a look at some of them as under;

Product Management

Using in-built tools, businesses are able to add, delete, and properly organize product listings with utmost ease.

Multi-channel Selling

Enables businesses to sell their products on different channels, expanding the market presence and enhancing exposure.

Secure Payment Gateways

With secure payment gateway integration, businesses are allowed to accept payments via different payment modes.

Order Management

Allows businesses to handle shipping and returns/exchange and track orders without any hassle.

Third-party Integration

It provides capabilities and power to streamline backend operations and thereby increase efficiency.

SEO Tools

Allows businesses to upgrade their online stores, including URLs, product pages etc, for greater visibility.

Importance Of Ecommerce Platforms For Businesses

Ecommerce platforms play a crucial role in modern business operations for several reasons. Every business wants to be in demand in this competitive age. The biggest advantage of e-commerce platforms is the availability of different tools and systems that will help build and manage an online store in just a few taps. Businesses can connect with their customers beyond geographical boundaries and create exciting opportunities for business gains.

E-commerce platforms provide intrinsic benefits such as convenience and flexibility to customers without limitations from any location and device. Moreover, managing the business through the e-commerce platform becomes more affordable than spending money on the operation of the physical storefront in terms of rent and staff. Ultimately, the high costs of infrastructure investments and overhead costs are predominately reduced, maintaining cost-effectiveness.

Such platforms facilitate inventory handling through systems to track products and do stock listing and repetition alerts. It gives companies a chance to stay on this level, remove excess stock, and grow in terms of operations. All in all, it wouldn't be wrong to state that ecommerce platforms tend to streamline operations, optimize user experience, improve scalability, and drive massive sales.

How To Choose The Right Ecommerce Platform For Your Online Store?

When choosing the best e-commerce platform for your online store, it is recommended that you closely examine the key factors that will inform your decision.

• First things first, you should define your business needs, including what kind of things you are willing to sell, your customer segment, and your budget restrictions. If you know your needs, you will easily find the specific platform that suits them. This will help you choose a suitable platform that is aligned with your business objectives.
  

• Identify the platforms that fulfill your criteria, such as WooCommerce, Magento, Shopify, Wix, Squarespace, etc. It's important to learn about each platform's unique features, pricing models, and customer reviews to make the best decision.
  

• Select a platform that is easy to handle through a user-friendly interface and provides the required tools for you even if you have less technical expertise.
  

• Another important thing to consider is solid analytics, which will display all the valuable insights that will help businesses make accurate decisions.
  

• Examine the customization options to ensure that you can create a unique shopping experience for the customers so that your brand stands out among many other brands.

Conclusion

E-commerce platforms have completely transformed the way businesses connect with their customers. With the incorporation of advanced tools, entrepreneurs are empowered to surpass geographical boundaries, paving the way for borderless transactions. The power of ecommerce platforms has made it convenient for new businesses to break into the market, and following that, the potential for growth and expansion is just remarkable.

So, what are you waiting for? Talk to our experts at Hyperlocal Cloud, discuss your ideas, and begin your development journey!