Top 5 eCommerce Platforms

One of the quickest ways to launch a start-up is to open an online store. Among too many eCommerce platforms, it becomes difficult to choose the one which best fits your business needs. Below are the top 5 eCommerce platforms with their solutions for different business needs. The article was written based on reviews and personal experience.

Shopify

Shopify is in the first place of the “Top 5 eCommerce Platforms” list, taking into account its advantages over the other eCommerce platforms. It is the first most used online shopping cart, with the usage of over 400.000 online shops. It has an easy setup and hosting.

No matter if you are just getting started to launch an online shop or you already have your offline store but want to continue your sales online, The website works excellent for both. It is easy to navigate with the hand dashboard area, making it comfortable to add products, customize the look, and more. It has the full control panels with all the necessary tasks from processing orders to managing inventory.

Shopify has more than 100 professional and modern themes; 9 of them are free of charge. You can browse all themes by category, which helps you to find a suitable template very easily. This e-commerce platform offers a large App Store, with over 1400 available apps. These applications provide helpful tools for running a business, such as accounting, inventory management, shipping, reporting, marketing, and more.

You can expand the feature set with the help of add-ons because there are lots of add-ons. Another advantage of this platform is its speed and load time, so that, your website is speedy and has a shorter load time. This advantage is, especially in e-commerce, where competition is very high.

Security of the website is a critical factor nowadays, and Shopify offers super secure sites: you shouldn’t worry about hackings, because it handles security at a “global” level. Compared with other eCommerce platforms, this one has the best customer support, 24/7 support system, with colossal FAQ database, email/chat, and phone support.

This is a hosted platform, and with it, you can build your online store within several minutes. It also has premium SEO tools, helping your business to stand ahead.

 

Volusion

Volusion is the second most used online shopping cart, with the usage of over 40.000 online shops. Its themes are quite expensive, compared to Shopify themes which have more beautiful looking actually. It has 359 not bad looking eCommerce focused themes from which 82 are for free.

The wide range of templates is beneficial for choosing the right one for your specific industry. Some of the templates are also mobile responsive, which is great considering the increasing use of smartphones and tablets.

This platform is easy to use with a competent online store. The good news is that it does not require programming skills. However, if you are looking for easy use, the Shopify is better. Unlike other e-commerce platforms, it does not require transaction fees and does not charge any setup.

Volusion has easy to use checkout process. You can integrate it with Paypal and with more than 35 different payment gateways, as well as with Amazon and eBay. It also has guest checkout options, which is another great plus of it.

Having only 80 Apps (Shopify has 1400+), it covers some of the essential categories for online business such as marketing, accounting, shipping, consumer support, etc. Volusion has a wide price range for different user needs: Mini, Plus, Pro, and Premium. It also offers a bulk discount of 10%.

 

Magento

Magento is a professional system for online retailing. It is excellent for you if you want to run your store on your server with the exact features you need. This platform is an open-source, build on the Zend framework which makes adding features, modifying or expanding platforms extremely easy in the way you like. However, it is complex and too big, so if you consider building your store for several hours, Magento cannot be a choice. Also, it requires specific development skills.

The platform has a broad community of users, developers, and service providers. It is rich with features, templates, extensions, and modules and also provides you with great SEO resources, and you have complete control over SEO settings, meaning that you will get the maximum benefit from it.

This e-commerce platform has a great product management system: you can upload thousands of products with a single import. It also has useful features for product comparison, ordering history, recently viewed products, etc. Being a partner with NetSuite, Monsoon, QuickBooks, ShipStation, and ShipWorks Magento offers excellent order processing integration.

The platform has a variety of good hosting providers to choose from and has easy integration with 3td party services such as Google Analytics, Google Website Optimizer, Google Checkout, and a variety of payment processing services.

Magento offers multiple pricing options, helping you to price items differently when you integrate a pricing strategy for your online business. The platform has easy integration with 3td party services such as Google Analytics, Google Website Optimizer, Google Checkout, and a variety of payment processing services.

Yo!Kart

Yo!Kart is a self-hosted, robust multi-vendor marketplace platform built on the latest technologies with user-centered design principles. The platform is fully customizable tailored to meet all your business requirements. Plus, it is easily scalable to help you speed up the growth of your business.

From multi-channel inventory management to abandoned cart recovery, the platform is equipped with essential eCommerce features to run an online marketplace successfully. Many third-party APIs such as QuickBooks, TaxJar, PayPal Payouts, Stripe Connect, ShipStation is pre-integrated in the platform.

Yo!Kart offers complete ownership with a lifetime license and no monthly/yearly recurring payments. There’s a free installation with a 12-month free technical support. Plus, digital marketing services worth $500 are free for one month. 

As mentioned on Yo!Kart website, the platform is tested for over 1 million products and 250+ concurrent users with a 100% pass rate. Also, they are pre-integrated with 15 popular payment gateways for seamless payment processing. And that’s not all, with every Yo!kart license you get complete source code (without framework) so you can customize your store just the way you want. 

When it comes to security, Yo!Kart systems are second to none. Each Yo!Kart system is built using an in-house framework and delivered in an encrypted form. Also, the complete library is tightly bound, making it impossible to run the code on an unauthorized domain. But, while the platform is exceptional for all businesses, the only complaint first-time users had is you need to invest time to learn the system. It has a rating of 4.5 on Capterra and is featured on Inc, The Telegraph, Forbes, Business Reporter, and many popular magazines.
 

BigCommerce

 
BigCommerce is a hosted platform that provides everything for your online business needs and very similar to Shopify; however is more expensive, with only seven free templates. It offers an excellent guide to follow step by step while building your online shop. It puts an enormous focus on education, helping you to learn how to do your successful online business.

This platform offers speed and security. It is not as fast as Shopify; however, it competes. BigCommerce has a big theme store; however, you will not be able to see any free themes before signing up for its 15-day trial.

This e-commerce platform has the cleanest dashboard and obvious built-in features, helping you to get your site ready in several minutes. The platform also offers convenient and useful tools, such as email newsletters, coupons, and promotion campaigns, etc., included on its monthly package.

With BigcCommerce, you can integrate your online shop with different social media channels, such as Facebook. You can also integrate your store with eBay, Google Shopping, Shopzilla, Bizrate, Beso, Nextag, PriceGrabber, Shopping.com, etc. Here is a large app store, created by 3rd party developers. These apps have more advanced tools, and some of them are free.

BigCommerce has easy design meaning that you can upgrade the default look without professional help, and still have a beautiful looking website.

 

Woocommerce

Woocommerce is a WordPress plugin and is a popular E-commerce platform with a wide range of users worldwide. It works only with WordPress and as it works with WordPress, the knowledge of WordPress is essential.

If you are familiar with this platform, the rest will go smoothly. There are no limitations for this platform because it has plenty of add-ons, which are continually being updated. It is one of the best WordPress plugins running correctly with WooTheme and is a very light application.

This e-commerce platform has beautiful, mobile, and responsive themes, which are less expensive than many cloud-based services. The Woocommerce base plugin is free, but unfortunately, you need a premium extension if you want to take your business at a higher level.

You still get some important features for free, a feature like mobile-friendly design, sell digital and physical products, geolocation support, smooth purchasing, inventory management, shipping options, SEO, reviews, analytics integrated with Google Analytics.

 

Bonus: eWroldTrade

eWorldTrade is one of the largest global B2B eCommerce marketplaces, connecting over 40 million buyers and sellers worldwide. With this platform, global trade for Food products is very easy for everyone.

eWorldTrade is committed to making global trade easier. This portal connects over millions of customers and vendors from around the world, making global trade more accessible than ever before.

They are dedicated to helping businesses grow and succeed on a global scale. This multi-vendor eCommerce platform offers a wide range of resources and tools that businesses can use to connect with new customers and grow their operations.

There are a lot of other good, but lesser-known eCommerce platforms like Sellosity. It's really just a matter of comparing the features that you need and making sure that you're getting the value for your money.

Want to learn more about eCommerce business? Here is the article for you.  The Ultimate Guide to Abandoned Carts - Leave No Cart Behind!