Category: Ecommerce

Like many other business enterprises, you might be looking for a platform to sell your products online. Ecommerce is a great platform to reach the potential audience and increase brand awareness. As per reports, over 60% of people prefer buying products through Ecommerce platforms.

To reach this huge amount of potential consumers, it is important to invest in online business. However, just because you own an ecommerce store, doesn’t mean people will reach it. For the success of an online store, users must find it appealing, engaging and smooth to use. In order to get that happen, simply align with an ecommerce platform.

An ecommerce platform is a software application allowing a business to manage their inventory, sales and website operations. They are important because building an online store from the start is an expensive and complex job. Most of these platforms support a reliable plug-and-play solution for businesses looking to build an online store.

There are hundreds of ecommerce platforms available for enterprises, but selecting one is a challenging task. The best platform is the one that makes you comfortable while using and meets your business standards.

Selecting a platform will depend on your business needs, in addition to that many things need to consider, but a few of the most important ones are:

• Number of products your store has
• Type of products
• Budget
• Time restrictions
• Business Scalability

For small business owners, money can be an issue. To address this issue, we have mentioned only the platforms, which are free or economical to use. Even though WordPress is highly popular, there are others also available having incredible benefits. Let’s discuss some of the platforms in the detail.

#1. WooCommerce

The WooCommerce platform is an independent software application that gets installed on the server and fully integrates with an existing E-commerce website.

WooCommerce Features:

• Quality order and product management
• Supports customer management with third-party plugins
• Multiple payment options
• Hundreds of paid and free themes available
• Mobile-friendly
• Proper reports on inventory and sales tracking
• Bandwidth limited
• Features to provide coupon codes and discounts
• Hundreds of sales extensions available

It is available as both free and paid version, but the free WooCommerce does not come with customer support.

#2. Magento

The Magento platform is the leading ecommerce platform offering a free open-source solution for the online industry. Magento is free to use and edit as per the business requirement. It hosts numerous customization features including plugins and extensions, which can be accessed from third-party developers or from the strong community base.

Magento Features:

• Catalog Management
• Tools for Marketing
• Fully SEO Centered
• Order Management
• Mobile Friendly
• Support Multi-Store
• Multilingual
• Complete Site Management
• Customer Service & Support
• Order Tracking & Analytics

#3. Shopify

Shopify is very popular among startups. It’s a paid subscription-based application that requires hosting for the online store as well. It also includes a subdomain that you can link with your main domain.

Shopify Features:

• Order, product, and customer management
• Support multiple payment gateways
• Support 100+ inbuilt themes
• Feature to edit HTML and CSS directly
• Mobile-friendly with hundreds of apps
• No restriction on bandwidth limit
• Sales tracking and store activity report available
• Supports social integration to sell through multiple social sales including Facebook.
• 24/7 customer support

Many brands opt Shopify all because of its ability to adapt to different sales channels. It also means a brand can start with an online store and later move to a brick-and-mortar store using Shopify.

#4. BigCommerce

It offers the facility of both standalone and a subscription-based platform service. It is quite similar to Shopify in operation and offers hosting services too.

BigCommerce Features:

• Product and order management
• Customer management
• Mobile optimization
• Customer groups availability
• 40+ payment choices without any transaction charges
• Minimal themes
• Unlimited bandwidth
• Advanced reporting on sales
• 5,000+ presence of extensions
• Feature to provide discounts and coupon codes
• Flexible shipping services with instant rate calculations
• Multi-lingual support options
• Options for returns
• Options to create newsletters
• Multiple APIs present
• Integration with social channels including eBay and Amazon

To make store owners experience engaging a large number of tools and extensions are available with BigCommerce. Check their official store to find multiple options for product promotion, email marketing and automation.

#5. OpenCart

It is the last eCommerce platform on this list. To make its use, simply install it on your ecommerce server or search a third-party to host the website. You can also opt for the cloud option that depends on the Amazon Web Services if you are uncomfortable to host the website yourself.

OpenCart Features:

• 14-day trial
• Product and inventory support
• Single dashboard to control multiple stores
• Unlimited products, categories, and order management
• Ability to sell products digitally and physically
• Support payment options like PayPal
• 13,000+ themes
• Options for product reviews and ratings
• SSL Certification
• Decent sales reports
• Automatic backups
• Thousands of available plugins and extensions
• Recurring payments
• Multilingual

Be aware this ecommerce platform offers dedicated customer support to cloud users only. Other users can get answers to the queries in their large community forum.

You can use an eCommerce platform to move your traditional retail business to online business for better business operations. There’s no specific answer to what is the best eCommerce platform for a small business or startup. That completely depends on you, your particular requirements, and your customers.

Conclusion:

Ecommerce platforms allow a business to grow online by implementing all the features that a customer requires. With these five platforms, you can start your traditional business online within just a few hours. The features of the online store ensure a user doesn’t require any coding knowledge to use ecommerce platforms, and you don’t need skills to implement web hosting or security. With these platforms, anyone can join the ecommerce business.

This article is contributed by Ashley Brown, Magento developer at Agento Support.

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Consumer choices, as well as preferences, are demystifying with time. The advent of the digital marketplace has completely revolutionized the world of business in every sense. Today, ecommerce website development company have a unique place across industries & we find enterprises making rapid transitions to find their target consumers in the digital space.

The importance of mobile e-commerce sites

The advent of smartphones have completely changed the dynamics & today customizing e-commerce sites to numerous platforms available holds the key.

• Your website must be responsive and should enable consumers to have a flexible experience across multiple platforms. Patience is fast running out in a modern consumer.
• The availability of options have made them wiser, and unless you are interactive with your mobile responsive website development services across major mobility platforms, you will fast run out of any credibility in this fiercely competitive market.

Vital stats for e-commerce sites

It is true that businesses both large as well as small-scale are looking to advance and drive ROI with their responsive e-commerce sites. Understanding your target market and catering to it in a holistic manner holds maximum impetus these days.

• The age is mobile, and confinement to laptops & desktops are no longer a possibility. Mobile websites design is of prime importance and today majority design as well as development are targeted for mobility devices.
• Stats prove that mobile users spent nearly 90% of their time in smartphones on apps. Today, there are over 125 million consumers in the US only who use smartphones while over 50 million consumers use tablets.
• Dollars through e-commerce comprise over 10% of the entire revenue earned through retail these days.
• In the US, the sale through e-commerce website is set to reach almost 434 billion! Thus, it is eminent that providing a user-friendly experience and automatic adaptation to multiple platforms as well as devices is indispensable for your website’s actual reach.

Tips for customizing for multiple mobile devices

Today, it is important to have the right strategy in place for your mobile site development. Understanding of your business vertical and services and its simultaneous alignment is critical. Developing your unique identity and what sets you apart from your competitors has to be crafted in the right manner.

The idea that is unique: It can be hugely confusing as well as competitive while you look to start your e-commerce venture.

• Understanding what’s generating interest and selling creatively that can catch your consumers by surprise will be an excellent move. To achieve it, a lot of secondary research with browsing major social media & e-commerce sites can be done. It will give you a distinct idea about your consumer’s secret needs and demands.

Layout optimization: One of most difficult tasks that your first need to incorporate will be to optimize your website’s layout.

• As the consumers usually have a small screen space on their mobile devices, you have to make sure that your services and products are visible to your consumers in a convincing manner.

Targeting the devices: Using of the right info graphics, content as well as imagery will be indispensable for your site’s responsiveness.

• Platforms like WordPress help attain high feasibility across multiple devices with perfect responsiveness. The site’s navigation has to fluid and relaxed, and development is a critical part to attain it.

Start a blog: While many may think how a blog will help achieve universality in mobility, you have to understanding the smartphones as well as tablets are an extension.

• Mobile customers will only be interested in your website today if they relevant content that will provide them with useful information.
• It will also portray an important message alongside peer networking that you are sound about your business and know what quality consumer engagement is all about.

Conclusion

Your idea and USP has to be driven with a strong SEO perspective in place. It is the very basic rule of responsive e-commerce sites and following the best practices alongside intimate campaigns across multiple platforms will find your e-commerce site the needed universality.

If you have already looked for a viable platform for operating an e-commerce store, you have surely heard about a few or all of them. However, the catch is to know the usability of each of these platforms and understand which one is suitable for your business. Although your decisions may not depend on the popularity of any of these platforms even though you may have stumbled upon them so many times, the motivating factor lies elsewhere.

You can think of options that can bring positive changes in your business and this is the most prominent reasons for which you can discard an option or choose another one. It is worth discussing on this issue considering the fact that many businesses are inclined towards an option and it is not without any reason.

The best option is to begin analyzing the options at first before delving deep into the reasons for choosing a particular platform which is suitable for your business. Have a quick glance at these e-commerce platforms and decide the correct option for your business.

Magneto

Being an open source platform, you can easily install this on your own server. It is an ideal option for medium-sized and large businesses that can pull along with the financial resource for spending on a reasonably feasible e-commerce platform and have a web department of their own. However, there are robust reasons for which many e-commerce stores prefer this option and one of the most important one that can be cited is the flexibility and the adaptive nature of this platform. The offerings that include everything from search engine optimization, mobile commerce, payment management has made this platform as one of the chosen options.

Shopify

With an easy dashboard that allows users to update their products readily, this platform includes everything that makes it easy to set up. Moreover, it is easy enough to customize the appearance of your website with the help of this shopping cart solution. The best thing is that this platform asks you whether you are willing to move on to another platform at the time of sign up. The usage pattern of the e-commerce platforms matter the most for business owners regardless of the fact that it might include some of the most amazing features. The fact is that you must understand the features properly to use them rather than be happy about choosing a platform which might not be relevant to your business.

3d cart

This is the oldest of the bunch and although it is not complicated, the not so valuable design makes you think whether it has been updated during the recent times. The growth of ecommerce website development company has compelled the online users to choose a favorable platform that helps them introduce and add new products along with the relevant prices and descriptions.

Volusion

This is one of the trickier platforms although it might not be as pretty as it looks but surely it does the trick. The flip side of this e-commerce solution is that you need to have knowledge of coding in case there is a requirement to change the design and layout of the web pages. It is in no way intended to discourage you about using this platform. However, if you have a robust ecommerce website development to back your business, you have to analyze the features to identify whether it is the right one for you.

Bigcommerce

This e-commerce platform comes next to Shopify and has the most amazing dashboard ever. Building a site within minutes no longer remains a virtual truth when you have this platform by your side. Surprisingly, the dashboard of this platform looks similar to Shopify and includes the options for customizing websites and the facility for accepting credit cards. When you are looking for an appropriate e-commerce solution, assessing the features is the primal factor.

Although it is hard to say which one is the best e commerce solution, pricing is an important consideration for a majority of users and to be honest it is a prominent factor for those who have just started operating an online store. Whatever it may be and it does not really matter when it comes to the number of articles you have read about e-commerce platforms, choosing the right one depends on the nature of your business and how you want to offer your products and services to the customers.

The new trend is all about eCommerce websites. People are not involved in dealing with a single product but they sell variety of products in order to make maximum profits. When you want to deal with multiple products and that too online, designing eCommerce website is the best thing that you can do with your business. But like every other thing in this world designing eCommerce websites have some rules to follow.

Let us check out what to do for designing a perfect eCommerce website:

1. Highlight the products that are less in number
If you highlight the products which are less in number by informing people about their actual number, your customers will run to get those products. This is the best way to grab attention of your customer towards the ending products.

2. Grab their attention towards important products
The products which are most useful and you are more interested in selling those products, try to design them and represent them in such a way that they look differently on the website and people should go for the products to buy them.

For example you are selling products like dresses then also include links for matching shoes, accessories like handbag or other relevant things.

3. Make your website easy to share
Do not forget to employ social media buttons to your website making it easy for your customers to share it on their personal profiles. If you are placing those buttons only then your visitors and customers would share your website else nobody would take the pains of doing this separately.

4. Make sure that products are described enough
When you paste products to your eCommerce website make sure that each and every product is described completely and is describing full features to make people understand your products and let them buy those products.

5. Easy navigation
Keep your websites easy to navigate. If the products on your website are not easy to browse and your website is very complex to manage, nobody would prefer to visit your website again.

Now the question arise how to select the eCommerce Platform?

There is a huge number of eCommerce platform available in on the internet, so how to decide which one is best for your website? There are some basic requirements that every eCommerce website needs. These basic requirements include:

• What programming language does your platform use? This is important when you are performing a lot of customization but it also depends on what type of web host plan you are using. Support differs for different platforms.
• Check whether the platform is free or paid? There are tons of eCommerce platforms that are available for free where you can check for your basic theme or designs that you want to give to your website.
• Whether it supports the type of products that you are planning to sell.
• If it integrates the shipping services with it.
• If the payment gateways also support you especially when you are already using a particular type of platform.
• Check for how easy it is to customize the platform that you want to use? How many options do your platform has for customizing the things out of the box? Before selecting make sure if you have to dive into the deeper codes every time you want to change the things from your admin area.
• What type of support is the platform offering? Is the platform completely community driven or is there any kind of support from the developer side? How much will it cost?

There are three things that are must for an eCommerce website

You really need to work hard for designing a successful online store. But there are three major key points that you have to pay attention for designing a wonderful eCommerce website.

1. Trustworthiness: Every eCommerce website needs to build having a sense of trust among shoppers. If a person who visits your website likes your website but does not receive the feel of trustworthiness, they will take your business in some other direction.
2. It should be simple and easy to use: An online store has to be very simple in the way it functions has to be very simple if it is not designed itself. If your website is easy to handle and navigate there will be no point that your customer will be left wondering what to do next.
3. Transparency: Your website and its relationship with its clients should remain transparent. You have to make sure that the things like contact information and he policies followed by the merchant like shipping should be easy to find. It should be easy to find what a customer is looking for. You can also tie it to the things like customer reviews on the website, and can openly address any type of criticism that might come to the merchant’s way.

Let us have a look at the free platforms that are available for designing your eCommerce website

1. Presta Shop
Presta Shop is considered as one the best eCommerce website designing platforms available these days. It offers more than 300 features that includes web service integration, one-page checkout, product support for downloadable, and a lot more. It is an open source platform and is free to download.

Presta Shop offers their users with full documentation and a large number of resources for making you started. They also provide you paid modules for extending the functionality. Also you can get paid themes if you do not want to design your own theme.

2. Magento Community Edition
Magento is also an open source eCommerce platform which is successfully used by more than 2, 40,000 online businessmen worldwide. Its features include scalability and flexibility and are highly reliable to meet your exact requirements.

It offers you a plenty of support to help and support you if you get stuck in between including the complete documentation. It also offers you a host of extensions with it and if you do not like it you can create it on your own.

3. OpenCart
Open cart also offers you a variety of features that include support for almost unlimited categories, it also provide support for multiple currencies, free documentation, languages and lots more. It can provide more than 20 payment gateways and will offer their users with 8 different shipping methods.

This platform also offer support for writing product reviews and ratings, multiple taxes, a coupon system and lots more. You can make it temlatized by using the defauly template available at the right of the box.

4. Os Commerce
This platform offers its users more than 7,000 free add-ons and compiles a network of more than 250,000 store owners and the service providers. It offers an extra active community for supporting and helping if you move into the issues. It will provide you free and commercial support for any issue you met during the usage of the platform.

People have been using OS Commerce from almost 14 years and now they know how to make a strong foundation for building your business. It also provides you templates and themes so that you could customize the looks of your website without even starting from the very start.

5. Zen Cart
This platform is also an open source shopping cart solution that is available free of cost, is user-friendly with a huge number of plug-ins and add-ons for extending its functionality features. There are some add-ons for the admin tools, payment methods, marketing, pricing tools and much more.

Zen Cart offers an excellent documentation making it very easy by taking advantages of all types of functionality that it offers. There is also a showcase of websites which is created with Zen Cart for inspiring you.

6. Virtue Mart
If you have a Joomla based website and you want to work with a CMS, Virtue mart would be a good option for you. It is designed as an extension to Joomla or any other related open source platform. Virtue Mart is a platform that is written in PHP language and it asks for MySQL database environment for all types of data storage. It is considered as best for websites going from low to medium level.

Conclusion
The basic elements for a good eCommerce designs are something that every designer has to be familiar with, if only it is not bounded to come up with the clients at some specific point. If you ignore these kind things, your design will either result in unhappy clients and making them move elsewhere.