7 Best Ecommerce Platforms 2020 – Select the Best Ecommerce Platform for Your Business
- Mar-17-2020
- Bilal Uddin
- 0 comments
Can you take a random guess how much ecommerce industry sells in a year?
Hint – it is in Trillions of USD.
By the year 2021, the ecommerce industry is expected to reach $4.9 trillion.
Hundreds and thousands of people are willing to enter in this multi-trillion dollar ecommerce business.
Many of the young entrepreneurs want to get benefit from this market rather having the trouble of finding the best ecommerce platform for them.
However, every ecommerce newbie merchant comes up with a diverse need and the most common are:
Which ecommerce platform is best for startup?
Which is the ecommerce platform for small business?
Which ecommerce platform is best for dropshipping?
They were some of the major issues every newbie goes through before staring their ecommerce business.
There are more than 120 ecommerce platforms out there and every platform serves best for some particular sector and need.
In this article, I tried to answer all every major issue that would help you to select the best ecommerce platform for your business.
Here is the list of items covered in this article,
- Best Ecommerce platforms of 2020
- Best Easy-to-use Ecommerce Platforms
- Best Platform for Dropshipping
- Best Platform for Startups & Small Business
- Best Platform for Large Businesses
By the end of this article, you will definitely have the complete answer to the query of your ecommerce business.
Best Ecommerce Platforms of 2020
This list has been created after the study of some avid new-age ecommerce entrepreneurs and successful ecommerce sites.
These platforms are the hottest and most sought after ecommerce right now.
1- Shopify
Shopify is the quintessential ecommerce platform that provides a complete ecommerce package.
It is one of the most popular ecommerce platforms of the current age that has generated over $100 billion in sales. Its easy to use, fast and safe payment is making it the most sought after online platform.
It provides an easy and quick store setup. You just need to sign up via email and start creating your shop and sell online right away.
The user-friendly interface makes it much easier to create and set up the store without getting into any programming hurdle or having any developer consultancy.
You can easily add SEO features just like WordPress. Shopify provides complete CMS where user can manage the function and layout of their store.
Along with that, Shopify also offers a free creative theme that you can setup with your cursor. There are other themes available that you have to purchase.
It is easy to customize your store on Shopify, however, for further customization, you need to understand its own coding language – Liquid, that need some coding consultancy for customization.
To know how to set up a Shopify store, check out the step-by-step Shopify guide.
Pricing
Shopify plan starts from $29/month that offers two staff account, 24/7 support and unlimited product.
There is also Shopify lite plan for $9/month that gives you option to sell on social media easily without having a proper ecommerce store.
2- Big Commerce
BigCommerce, just like Shopify, is also a very user-friendly ecommerce platform. Its self-explanatory steps help to easily set up the online store and running it in just a matter of minutes.
BigCommerce is a host of over 155000+ websites that have generated over 4 billion sales collectively.
BigCommerce provides a dashboard from where you can do all your customization of your store easily.
In addition, BigCommerce also allows you to sync your website with ecommerce marketplace such as, Amazon and eBay, which helps your business to grow exponentially by selling across different platforms.
It also offers multiple cool themes to design as well as more than 40 payment options with zero transaction fees.
The automatic programming interfaces allow you to customize your online store without getting into the technicalities of coding by using multiple templates.
The only sad part is that there are only seven free templates for more template you will have to pay the fee per template, which is a bit expensive.
Pricing
BigCommerce basic plan starts from $29.95/month that will provide you enough services to start a fair enough ecommerce business. It charges 1% transaction fee. There is a 15-day free trial so you can find out the best plan for your business.
3- Magento
Magento is a go-to platform for all the larger organization and big brand’s ecommerce sphere. Brands like Nestle Nespresso, Nike, Huawei, and Coca Cola are using Magento.
However, using Magento is not everyone’s cup of tea, it needs excessive dealing with coding to do your preferred customization – if you have a budget to hire a developer team then Magento is a perfect platform for you.
Magento offers a marketplace where are all the extensions and themes available to boost and optimize the functions of your sites.
You can also target your potential customer with its multilingual website – you can separate website for you different niche in their native language.
Pricing
The basic version fee of Magento is free, however, to scale up the enterprise functions you need to pay up to $20000/year.
4- Volusion
Volusion has been in the market of ecommerce solution provider for the last couple of decades. It is the most preferred site of the merchant who sells in brick-n-mortar and wants to step into the digital world.
As an ecommerce platform, it offers the most comprehensive store customization with options of drag-and-drop to build your site with in-page editing and a variety of templates and themes.
It also provides multiple product management tools to optimize the SEO and marketing functions including rich content editor, navigation editor, search functionality, custom domain and many more.
There is a lot of self-explanatory material available for beginners – step-by-step guidelines to set up your store. The dashboard is highly comprehensive to handle inventory management and marketing function.
On higher plans, Volusion also offers marketplace integration for eBay, Amazon and others along with social selling and 24/7 live chat support.
However, it does not come with blogging service and their pricing is a tad confusing as its package come up with limitation of product.
Pricing
The packages start from $29/month; you can save 10% by paying annually.
5- Squarespace
Squarespace is another easy-to-use website builder that provides comprehensive website design capabilities by using different templates.
The templates are simple and elegant that comes with capabilities of mobile responsiveness. You can list unlimited product listing and you can have the fulfillment services by integrating your store to Shipstation and Shipbob.
With the help of marketing tools, you can get email marketing campaigns service, SEO boosting, social integration, blogging, analytics, and multiple other services to provide efficacious results to your business.
However, it has very limited payment option available on Squarespace and you cannot integrate with marketplace like Amazon.
Pricing
The package starts from $26/month and with 3% transaction fee on every sale. The advance plan offers other additional features such as; abandoned cart auto recovery, gift cards, and discounts.
6- WooCommerce
WooCommerce has the biggest market share in ecommerce usage distribution, has over 3 million online stores that cover 28% of all online stores. This fact somewhat describes its significance as an ecommerce platform.
With multiple extension, you can have the facilities of multiple payment gateways, social media, and email marketing, 1-click selling and shipment.
WooCommerce works with WordPress, you have to integrate your ecommerce store with WordPress all you need to do is to install the WooCommerce plugin and start adding your products.
However, you might face a problem of speed when you add excessive products or large traffic comes to your site.
Pricing
WooCommerce pricing is free for the plug-in and turns any WordPress site into an online store. It offers many free themes but there is a price for some extension and WordPress themes.
There is a dedicated hosting requited for WooCommerce for that the best option is Bluehost that offers automatic WooCommerce installation for $6.95/month.
7- WIX
Wix is a hotshot website builder with the drag and drop option along with custom domain.
WIX is one the easiest website building where you literally do not need any coding skill to setup your store. You can easily edit your site by just dragging the content.
You can choose your store design from over 500 templates (72 free themes) along with the help of stock image that can you can use.
However, it only provides only 20GB of storage that is quite low as far as an ecommerce site is a concern. In addition, there is no option to change the template of your store once you have created and published your site.
Pricing
WIX is a general site builder; it is not solely made for ecommerce purpose. Therefore, you need to get ecommerce plan to get all facilities of online store that starts with $17/month.
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Best Ecommerce Platform for Dropshipping
Shopify
Dropshipping has become the most preferred ecommerce business model for young entrepreneurs. However, there are certain things in dropshipping of which you are in-charge and out of your control.
In dropshipping, you do not own any inventory, when a customer places an order on a dropshipping store the dropshipper simply contact the supplier to deliver the order to the customer directly.
The biggest advantage to start your dropshipping business on Shopify is that you can install Oberlo App – that helps you to integrate products from different suppliers to your store. Also with the Printful, you can also get into the business of print on demand too.
From Oberlo verified suppliers you can select your product from different kinds of suppliers such as; Oberlo Suppliers, Oberlo verified supplier and Aliexpress suppliers.
Best Easy-to-use Ecommerce Platform
WIX
Many enthusiast entrepreneurs are willing to get into the market of ecommerce. Therefore, for the first timers, an ecommerce platform should be a user-friendly and easy to build that requires no assistance of developer and getting into the technicalities of coding.
If you are a first-timer or beginner and do not want to get into any tech-related issue then as per our study no platform can be easier than WIX.
It provides all the facilities to start your online selling without having known anything about website building and setting up an ecommerce store.
For starting, WIX is the perfect ecommerce platform; however, you need to move on to some other platform to scale up your ecommerce business.
Best Ecommerce Platform for Startup and Small Businesses
WooCommerce – Volusion – Shopify
Ecommerce market is booming in full swing and majority of the startup are related to ecommerce sector. Likewise, Ecommerce small businesses also need a platform that can scale their business and giving the opportunity to grow exponentially.
For startup and small business where business scaling is quite significant, it needs a platform that could easily boost some functions in order to scale up the business that includes, SEO, marketing tools, multiple platforms to sell, good UI and UX along with user-friendly outlook.
All three recommended platform provides all necessary services that are required to start a successful ecommerce business and scale up your small business to ultimate glory.
Best Ecommerce Platform for Large Businesses
Magento – BigCommerce
In order to run big ecommerce businesses, you need to have complete control over your store. You will need to have your own virtual private server that you will have to obtain from web hosting companies.
Since you will be having thousands of orders on weekly basis, you will need an ecommerce platform that will provide you flawless service and flexible services – you can easily integrate your warehouse and inventory management systems to your platform.
In addition, you will prefer the platform that supports different languages, currencies and multiple stores can work on it simultaneously.
Magento and BigCommerce are perfect to fulfill the entire aforementioned requirement in a large ecommerce business.
Wrapping Up
Ecommerce business required extreme care and diligence in order to run a profitable online selling business. To make sure the solid foundation of your ecommerce business empire you need to make sure the right selection of ecommerce platform so you never miss any sales channels.
Making a choice of your ecommerce platform is highly dependent on your need and priorities – it means you have some of your own concerns such as; are you really want to get completely into the ecommerce business or want to continue it as a side hustle or just want to have an experience of it.
I hope this guide comes handy for your assistance to choose the best ecommerce platform for you.
If you are still enigmatic in making a decision to choose your platform to let me know in the comment below!