What is an eCommerce Platform?

Ecommerce is typically a software application that brings your store online. It is essentially the backbone of your online business. Ecommerce platforms make use of the network effects to connect more and more people with your store. An e-commerce platform provides the functionality for accounting, inventory management, order management, and customer service all in one place, which is essential for the online business.

What are the key features to look for?

There are a lot of e-commerce platforms that have an enormous number of features to get you overwhelmed, but there is a key set of features that are considered essential for the e-commerce store. Let us see what those features are:

• Unified platform – platform should provide accounting, inventory management, POS, order management, marketing, financial, merchandising, customer service at a single place on the cloud.
• Complete customer view – Customers should view all the transactions, offers from a single view, and be easy to navigate.
• Nice Order Management – it should be easy for the customer to manage orders on the platform, tracking placed orders and mechanism for canceling the order.
• Excellent Customer Experience – the platform must provide a friendly, responsive, and personalized experience to the user of the platform.
• Supports expansion – it should contain the support for various languages and internationalization, various currencies and payment methods, and business models required for the expansion of your business.
• Security – Security is another important thing that should be present in the platform to carry out safe and secure transactions.
• Easy content creation – it should offer nice and easy content creation. Content is very important for marketing; if a platform has a nice content creation ability, then it is a plus.
• Support and documentation – it should have very well-defined documentation for usage and configuration settings. If the platform has a large customer base, its community support is also strong to help you get stuck.

There are various e-commerce platforms available out there, and no single platform is the best choice for all kinds of business needs; all of these have their qualities specific domains where they perform best. Let’s see the most used and popular platforms and their features.

Shopify

It is one of the most popular and well-known e-commerce platforms, and it has a lot of templates from which you can choose to put on your store, and all these templates are highly customizable to fit into your business needs.

Shopify claims that you do not require any technical knowledge and designing experience to use this platform, that it is easy to set up and very user-friendly. In addition, it has various credit options to integrate with your store’s payment gateway. It also ensures the security of customer data by using 256-bit SSL encryption and has level 1 PCI compliance.

It has a nice content management system, and it also has a mobile app through which you can manage your store.

Magento

Magento Platform is among the most used e-commerce platforms. It is very powerful in terms of content creation and managing a variety of product catalogs. In addition, it is easy to scale and grow. Another important thing is, Magento is an open-source platform and comes with a community version to try it out before going to the paid or enterprise solution. The feature that makes it stand out from other e-commerce platforms are mentioned below:

• Powerful content management: “what you see is what you get,” the content management tool in Magento is very powerful as highly skilled developers of Adobe develop it. It allows you to customize features in your online stores on the fly.
• Mobile-friendly: Stores built using Magento are responsive to mobiles and tablets.
• Advanced SEO: With advanced Search Engine Optimisation, it gives online stores the capability to rank higher on search engines.
• Huge Capacity: Capable of handling 500,000 products and 80,000 orders in an hour.
• Flexible Magento extensions and third-party integrations: There are many third-party modules or apps available to increase the functionalities in your store, such as Google Shopping, MailChimp, etc.
• Security options: Magento allows you to choose between multiple levels of security permissions and ensure your site’s safety.
• Time and money efficiency: Several custom extensions can be shared between different Magento users. Through a single instance of Magento, you can manage a number of eCommerce stores with support for internationalization and various currencies.

3D Cart

The 3D Cart has more than 22,000 clients over the period of 20 years. It is designed to rank the business higher and create more opportunities to sell. It comes with more than 200 built-in features, a lot of free themes, and various SEO options. It supports 100 payment methods.

All the themes are mobile-friendly and have all the necessary modern features. Let’s see the 3D Cart:

All-inclusive: It includes all the necessary tools that are required to build an optimized e-commerce platform, and it is highly customizable; you can customize shopping carts, appearance, product catalogs. Hosting and domain names are also available, so you don’t need to look somewhere else.

Customer Friendly: its designs are customer-friendly and provide the best user experience. It allows you to display high-quality product images.

Synchronization with Social Media: 3D cart stores can be associated with social media to increase customer attention which is very important nowadays.

Security: It is a highly secure platform with various security settings like HTTPS, PCI certificate, anti-fraud tools, and two-factor authentication. It ensures the safety of your customer data.

Scalability: It is suitable for all sizes of businesses and can be extended at any level.

Reliability: You can set up your store with 3D Cart without worrying about downtime and slow speed. Reliability is not an issue here. 

BigCommerce

BigCommerce is also among the most popular e-commerce platforms. It is best known for its low setup cost and flexible APIs.

It contains a lot of configuration options and features to build your customized store. It contains out-of-box support for various e-commerce solutions.

It is ideal for both B2B and B2C businesses and can be used to create different catalogs for different customer groups.

Built-in features are a little bit complex to learn in starting, which can be seen in its high learning curve as compared to other SaaS products. 

WooCommerce 

WooCommerce Platform is a freely available extension of WordPress, which is used to convert a WordPress site into an online store. It also contains some paid features to extend initial functionalities.

It is considered as an ideal solution for small businesses with WordPress as the content management system, which is really easy to use and very common among people. Moreover, it has a secure payment procedure with a PCI certificate and secure communication between its users.

One drawback of Woocommerce is that it cannot handle too much theme data and plugins, so it is not ideal for scaling up.

Salesforce

Salesforce is the most popular CRM solution. Salesforce corporation claims to improve customer relations with CRM tools and techniques. It applies all the modern techniques like Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning algorithms to customer data to help foster the growth of your business and maintain healthy relations with the customers.

Salesforce is a cloud-based service built for both B2C and B2 B-type businesses. It makes the best use of customer data to help grow your business. It has a lot of other modern features that are necessary to build a modern online store. Its features include Personalisation, order management, integration with Salesforce services.

It is a good choice for Large Scale businesses but might not be a good choice for a small-scale business or if you are trying out your business online for the first time.

Squarespace

Squarespace is also an easy-to-use platform that claims anybody can use it without any technical expertise. Websites built using Squarespace are really beautiful.

It has all the necessary features to grow your business online, and it got a lot of awards for its nice designs. Moreover, it is available in different packages to suit your needs. 

You can drag and drop to create designs and customize, which is really nice for people not having technical knowledge or coding skills.

Yo! Kart

Yogurt is a multi-vendor e-commerce platform, and it can be used to create multi-vendor online stores like Amazon or eBay. In addition, it has a nice customer base with some of its users among the fortune 500 companies. So it is a really powerful platform.

It contains all the required features to create a future-ready online store. Moreover, it is very flexible in terms of scaling. Its latest release, V9.3.0, contains advanced features like split payment, Geolocation, pick-up-from-store, and integrated APIs for taxes and shipping management. In addition, it has mobile apps and web apps to help business owners succeed in this competitive market.

Volusion

Volusion came out 20 years ago and has gathered a lot of happy customers. It is an all-in-one solution for you to create and scale your online store. It has a lot of cool and handy features to assist you.

It has a nice content creation tool, well-designed themes, and navigation styles. It gives a nice user experience and makes your store engaging.

If you use Volusion, you don’t worry about the design, and it has eye-catching components that will definitely help increase your conversion rate. In terms of security, it provides various security options and ensures the safety of customer data.

It has a really nice SEO tool to make your content reach the maximum audience. It also has a modern order and payment system with payment security considerations.

Social media integrations are a plus to boost your sales. And the report’s features give you insights into the customer response.

Prestashop

Prestashop is an innovative platform, and it’s efficient about the design and usage. It is also open-source software. It has all the necessary features required to build a powerful ecommerce solution and scale. You can freely download and use Prestashop. More than 300,000 businesses are using Prestashop.

You just need to pay for the hosting and SSL certificate to set up an online store using Prestashop.

It has a lot of cool themes, which are highly customizable too. In addition, there are many addons and third-party modules available that you can use to increase the functionality of your store. You can manage orders, products, and customer relations using these third-party modules. You can find these modules on PrestaHero, which is a Prestashop module Marketplace.

It has a built-in content creation tool and nice support for integrating to social media. In addition, it supports internationalization with various languages and currency support.

Wix

Wix is another very popular e-commerce platform; it is easy to use and a nice option for hassle-free coding and serverless computing. In addition, it provides 72 free themes to choose from and is very easy to set up, thus making it a nice choice for starting a new online store.

It is highly customizable in terms of design, and its themes are mobile-optimized; you can see and edit the mobile views of your website in the mobile view editor.

You can also use SEO tools for configuring your content and making your content top the searches.

However, it’s not ideal for large-scale businesses as it lacks some large-scale features.

Quick e-Selling 

It is another hassle-free eCommerce solution where you don’t require any coding knowledge and easily set up your online store. It is used by more than 25,000 B2B and B2C businesses. 

Quick selling is a hosted and fully managed e-commerce platform that comes with many payment options and a CRM system to manage products, orders, and customers. It offers 1000 product caps in its free trial; to exceed this limit, you need to upgrade to the purchased version.

Conclusion

So here we have provided you with the overview and necessary information about the popular e-commerce solution. If you want to know more, you can visit the official website of these platforms and check out. Choose what best suits your businesses, don’t just follow somebody and what they choose. Hope you found this article helpful.

The post Which Is The Best Online ECommerce Store Platform appeared first on AscureTech.