Whether it’s buying a physical item or booking a salon arrangement, clients are getting utilized to acquiring more items, administrations, and enrollments online.As a mid of 2022, ecommerce sales make up 14.5% of retail sales in the US. So far, 27% of small businesses in the United States don’t have websites, making it tough for their customers to shop with them and, in turn, affecting them to lose out to competitors that are using dedicated ecommerce stages to create a seamless shopping experience.
We studied over a dozen popular ecommerce platforms based on price, range of features, friendly use, scalability, and more. Here are our top choices.
- Best Overall:Shopify
- Runner-Up, Best Overall:BigCommerce
- Best Budget Solution:Volusion
- Best User-Experience:Wix
- Best Free Platform:Weebly
- Best for Creatives:Squarespace
- Best for WordPress Sites:Woo Commerce
Contents
Shopify (Best Overall)
Shopify was started in 2004 by three business visionaries attempting to begin an internet snowboarding hardware store, Shopify has developed to over 5,000 workers around the world serving millions of businesses in 175 nations. We chose it as a one of the best ecommerce platform since it’s a reasonable, strong, and easy-to-use stage for both fledglings and developing businesses.
As an all-in-one ecommerce stage, Shopify is simple to set up and regulate, making it an incredible choice for businesses with small in-house specialized back. The stage lets clients offer items from an internet store, social media stages like Facebook and Instagram, online marketplaces like Amazon and eBay, and in-person with Shopify’s point-of-sale (POS) framework.
Shopify offers a few of the foremost progressed stock administration highlights of all the stages we checked on. Clients can effectively see stock levels and orders at a look and make point by point item pages with custom metadata, pictures, estimating rules, and more. Shopify too streamlines shipping errands counting printing names and sending following data to clients.
Shopify features a built-in installment processor that works with major credit cards, charge cards, Apple Pay, and Google Pay. Clients can select from third-party installment processors like PayPal for an extra expense.
Planning a Shopify ecommerce store is simple with a drag-and-drop store builder, around 100 paid and free store topics, and the capacity to customize anything without requiring plan abilities. At long last, Shopify coordinates with thousands of promoting, deals, stock, bookkeeping, and other apps to extend its as of now broad ecommerce capabilities.
BigCommerece (Runner-up best overall)
This ecommerce platform built initially as a web shopping cart by two engineers in 2009, BigCommerce presently gloats over 1K representatives and serves over 150 nations. We chose it as the runner-up since it is comparable to Shopify with a center on bigger businesses and more vigorous SEO capabilities.
One put where BigCommerce contrasts from Shopify is in installment handling. Not at all like Shopify, which charges 0.6% to 2% per exchange for utilizing third-party installment processors, BigCommerce lets clients select from over 65 processors, counting PayPal, Square, and Stripe, without additional expenses. This can be extraordinary for businesses that need to stay with their set up dealer accounts.
Like Shopify, BigCommerce makes it simple to construct excellent ecommerce locales and offer on social media stages like Facebook and Instagram and marketplaces like eBay and Amazon. It too offers a similarly noteworthy commercial center of apps for shipping, showcasing, bookkeeping, client relationship administration and more. Where BigCommerce pulls absent from Shopify is with SEO and analytics. BigCommerce’s SEO increments page stack times for way better client encounters conjointly lets clients customize page titles, metadata, and item URLs to make strides the chances of items appearing up in Google look comes about. Numerous of these progressed SEO highlights are as it were accessible from Shopify as add-ons.
BigCommerce offers advanced reporting and analytics with each plan, unlike Shopify, which only provides this on its further expensive plans. In addition to getting real-time data on orders, clients, and conversions, users can also drill down and create custom reports on income, customer habits, order details, etc.
VOLUSION (Best budget solution)
Volusion was started in 1999 by a 16-year-old coder building websites for customers, Volusion has grown-up from a simple online shopping cart to a full-featured ecommerce platform processing $28 billion in sales through over 30K dealers. We selected it as the best budget solution because it gives businesses everything they need to sell online.
Volusion makes it simple to plan a proficient ecommerce location with handfuls of topics and a drag-and-drop page editor.
Arrange and stock administration are straightforward and adequate for littler venders. Volusion too sticks to the essentials when it comes to announcing and analytics, permitting clients to check activity, item execution, and surrendered shopping carts.
Volusion’s straightforwardness does have a couple of disadvantages, be that as it may. For one, the platform doesn’t back offer items on social media or marketplaces like eBay and Amazon. In expansion, Volusion’s add-ons and integrative are much more constrained than those of Shopify and BigCommerce. In any case, Volusion may be an incredible choice for ecommerce platform fair getting begun and not needing to induce overpowered by complex stages and highlights.
Wix (Best user-experience)
Wix was founded in 2006 by three developers upset with the expense and difficulty involved in building an ecommerce website. Today, the company has a staff of over 3K employees global and over 200 million users in almost 190 countries. We chose Wix for the best user experience since it lets businesses create an ecommerce site easier and more reasonably than any of the other platforms.
Wix comes with hundreds of professional templates and a drag-and-drop editor, making it relaxed to create a beautiful ecommerce site in just minutes. Setting up and running a basic personal website is free, but advancing to a paid plan is the only way to unlock Wix’s ecommerce features.
Wix offers 50+ payment gateways globaly including the in-house Wix Payments. Managing inventory and orders and getting income and conversion rate reports is handled through Wix’s clean and simple dashboard.
Finally, Wix offers further add-ons and integrations (counting Google Analytics) than Volusion but less than Shopify or BigCommerce, letting businesses to expand their ecommerce capabilities as desired. Wix supports selling on eBay and Amazon along with Instagram and Facebook.
Weebly (Best free Ecommerce Platforms)
Weebly was founded in 2007 with the goal of making it easy for everyone to build a personal website with just a single platform. In 2018, Weebly was developed by Square, further expanding its ecommerce competences. Today it powers more than 50 million sites around the globe. We pick it as the best free platform since it is the only platform we reviewed that lets users create a simple, functional free ecommerce site.
Weebly’s intuitive drag-and-drop editor rivals that of Wix, allowing users to create a beautiful online store in minutes. The platform walks users step-by-step through setting up a store, including choosing a basic layout, selecting fonts and colors, adding pages, and choosing a site name. Inventory items can be added right away or once the rest of the site has been built.
All of Weebly’s plans feature a fully integrated shopping cart and safe checkout. Users have a choice of a few different payment processors counting PayPal, Stripe, and Square. Weebly’s Personal, Professional, and Performance plans also support a shipping calculator for customized shipping rates based on geographical places.
Weebly keeps inventory controlling and reporting simple, with easy bulk importing and exporting, SEO, and site performance tracking features. Apps and integrations are existing, adding even more marketing, sales, and promotion abilities to any Weebly store.
SQUARESPACE (Best for creatives)
This ecommerce platform was created in a dorm room at the Maryland University in 2003 as a basic platform for building and hosting blogs. In 2013, it added ecommerce features and a simple drag-and-drop interface, making it a strong contestant along with Wix and Weebly. We picked it as the best for creatives because it makes it easy to create sleek, visual, portfolio-style sites for showcasing and selling creative works.
In addition to selling goods, Squarespace makes it easy to sell services and gift cards, create subscriptions and membership plans, and for clients to book schedules online. Integrated email marketing features let customers build loyalty by offering discounts and deals. The platform also supports a number of third-party integrations, counting Printful and ShipStation, so custom goods can be easily created and shipped.
Figure 9: Squarespace
Squarespace possesses payment processing simple as well, letting customers to pay via PayPal, Stripe, Apple Pay, and After pay. Checkout is streamlined and simple for quick transactions, and consumers can customize the checkout process by adding surveys or gift messages, setting custom tax rates, and alerting clients when inventory is low. Easy social integrations allow goods to be shared on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Tumblr, and LinkedIn.
Squarespace’s intuitive dashboard lets users to speedily check and manage inventory, fulfill and ship orders, and get valuable insights on site traffic, sales trends, and customer data. In brief, Squarespace is an ideal
platform for creatives who don’t want to mess with complex data sales tools.
WOOCOMMERECE (Best for WordPress sites)
This Ecommerce platform was established by Woo Themes in 2011 as an ecommerce extension for the general WordPress content management system. We picked it as the best for WordPress sites as it is the most popular, elastic, and reasonable extension for WordPress consumers who want to create a full-featured ecommerce site.
WooCommerce is a free plugin that can be used to add ecommerce purposes to any WordPress site. Because WordPress is one of the best Search Engine Optimization platforms in the market, WooCommerce makes it relaxed to create a scalable online store of any size.
Like many of the other platforms we studied, WooCommerce offers its own payment processor. Customers can also add PayPal, Square, Amazon Pay, and Stripe with free extensions. In addition to a extensive variety of templates and back-end-management tools, WooCommerce features integrated analytics, reporting, shipping, tax tools, and more, all for free.
Figure 10: WooCommerce
WooCommerce offers basic inventory management that, while beneficial for basic stock management, isn’t well suited for high-volume businesses. Order management is more robust, still, letting users to drill down to view goods sold, billing and shipping addresses, and customer records.
Finally, this Ecommerce platform extensions let users to sell goods on social media and marketplaces, as well as Facebook, eBay, Pinterest, and Amazon. In short, many of WooCommerce’s limits can be overwhelmed with its enormous library of paid and free extensions.
Although WooCommerce is totally free to use, some of the more valuable extensions that bring the platform close to the standards of Shopify or BigCommerce can cost upward of $300.
NOTE: To review the upgraded plans of any of these Ecommerce platforms, please visit the respective sites.
