Choosing an e-commerce platform can be extremely head-stroked, as there are plenty of those are available on the market. When selecting an e-commerce platform for your online store, you need to consider a lot of factors. To name a few: your site is distinguished or colorful, the platform that’s used can be applied if changes are made, or even the price that is compatible to your pocket… No matter how many things you can foresee and pre-plan, if you choose the wrong platform, your store will be completely destroyed.
In this article, Magesolution’re going to summarize some factors of an optimal platform and highlight the best eCommerce platforms in 2024.
Let’s dive in!
Top 10 best ecommerce platforms in
When picking the best ecommerce platforms, we’ve decide to focus on a couple of elements: popularity, overall reputation, functions, customer service, pricing, and ease of use – all depended on preliminary tests and our previous experience with the platforms.
1. Magento
Magento comes with an expansive back-end interface and an in-depth function list. You can expand and customize however you wish. There are two versions with Magento including open-source and Magento Commerce. The open-source option is great for users with professional web development experience, so not as suitable for do-it-yourself website developers as some of the other platforms. In particular, Magento is commonly used on medium to large eCommerce website that can afford a web person or department
Pros
- Deliver the powerful and feature rich
- Strong SEO
- 1-Click selling
- Provide lots of users and community
- Scalable and highly customizable
- Flexible to select where you want to host the software
Cons
- Pricey themes.
- Easily Slowed Down
- Requires Development Skills
- Virtually no support.
- Ask ample space and memory to perform well
2. Wix
Wix is one of the most easy-to-use eCommerce platforms offering simple alternatives to design a full-on website with serverless computing and hassle-free coding. It’s perfective for business new online stores with affordable pricing, free themes, and a easy-to- setup. Moreover, the platform provides you the freedom to build a website your way. You can choose a template and customize anything you want to showcase in your website. As your store grows, you can always add new features to enhance your store performance.
Pros
- Support tons of free amazing themes.
- Really simple to use and set up
- On-page support for numerous needs
- 72 free themes
Cons
- Trying hard to fight a bad SEO reputation. Made enhancements, but tested very poorly.
- Many website were not secured
- Lacks upselling functions and advanced automation
- Difficult to fully customize template
3. Salesforce Commerce Cloud
Salesforce is famous for its CRM solutions. Also, the company claims to support you strengthen the relationship with shoppers and grow with the world’s first CRM available with Einstein AI. Besides, Salesforce Commerce Cloud provides other functions such as order management, commerce personalization with AI, globalization solutions for international businesses, and more solutions categorize by business type, requirments, industry, and role.
Pros
- Contact tracking: Managing emails, phone calls, and setting reminders was great!
- Client Data storage: Great way to have a source of tracking our potential clients’ contact info and notes.
- Fast and easy implementation and deployment.
- Continuous innovation
Cons
- Inconsistencies in the user interface.
Buried features. - Greater need to incorporate user feedback
- Responsiveness: Need to do something to make this platform faster.
4. Sellfy
Sellfy is build for selling digital products, such as music, illustrations, photos, books or videos in digital files. Besides, it’s great for digital product businesses that need a comprehensive online store solution that is quick and easy to build and manage. However, businesses that consider using Sellfy also have to be willing to invest dedicated monthly funds for the subscription fee as well as the associated credit card processing. This mean that this may not be the most cost-effective option for business owners just starting out.
Pros
- Free forever plan – All plans come with a 4-day free trial, no credit card required
- Has a Wix integration
- Multiple options for online selling
- No transaction fees
- Email marketing included in all paid plans
Cons
- Poor ratings for SEO traffic
- Limited options for payment gateways
- Must use Zapier to facilitate most third-party integrations
- Missing key marketing tools like 1-click upsells
5. nopCommerce
nopCommerce is an open-source eCommerce shopping cart solution that permits you to upload an unlimited number of products, manage several stores from one admin panel. Especially, it help you increase your sales with built-in marketing tools. Every 6-7 months, the developers release a new version of their eCommerce software to keep up with the latest technologies and development trends.
Pros
- Shopping cart and related functions
- Open source: code with easy customization that allows the development of powerful additional tools
- Plugins availability
- Products management
Cons
- Could be more free templates available
- Integration with payment solutions
- Performance
6. BigCommerce
BigCommerce is the best ecommerce platform in out list. Its powerful product search engine makes it great for larger retail business. Moreover, it’s also a great choice for people who want to start an ecommerce store, or who have a brick and mortar store and need to expand their operations to include online orders. Its available tools make it possible for any niche or industry to be successful.
Pros
- Flexible and scalable
- Excels with multi-channel selling
- Strong SEO Performance
- Fantastic Theme Designs
- Comprehensive abandoned cart feature
Cons
- Inconsistent speeds in consecutive studies
- Gets expensive for high volume stores
- Cart abandonment isn’t on entry plan
- No 1-click Selling/Upsells
7. Oracle CX Commerce
Oracle CX Commerce is a cloud-native, fully-featured, extensible SaaS commerce solution, delivered in the Oracle Cloud. This flatform supports B2C and B2B models in a single platform. Besides, it allows you can to provide innovative brand experiences designed to suite the unique requirements of your business.
Moreover, Oracle CX Commerce allows you to deliver a great buying experience to your users anytime, anywhere they engage. It delivers unified SaaS solutions that permits you to innovate quickly, support seamless, personalized experiences, and drive shopper engagement, sales, and loyalty across channels.
Pros
- Their technical support is amazing.
- Webhook Service is great.
- Integration is easy.
- Modern framework
- Upgrades are free for customers
Cons
- No log access to troubleshoot issues,
- Changing of skins is not easy.
- Documentation is not great.
- Little technical knowledge is required.
8. Shopify
Shopify is one of the most best eCommerce platforms in the world. It is a web application that support you to build an online store quickly and easily with many available templates. Moreover, you can customize those templates to best match your online retailer requirements or design your own store’s look. On top of that, by providing a full CMS, Shopify deliver you the power to manage the functionality and the layout of your online store. In particular, Shopify is fully responsive so that users can easily track, manage, and modify their store anywhere regardless of access from mobile or desktop.
Pros
- Lighting fast load time
- Super easy to set up
- Lots of certified partners to help you
- 1-Click selling
- Allows multiple channel and social selling
- Great themes with varied designs
Cons
- Rated poorly in SEO in consecutive studies.
- Unable to customize the checkout process
- Apps can add up and become costly
- Need a developer for advanced features
9. Squarespace
Squarespace is an easy-to-use and friendly platform that support users without any coding background to build beautiful websites. Whether you’re a beginner or established brand, this all-in-one platform provides you everything you need to run and develop your business website. Moreover, Squarespace comes with numerous functions and tools for creating an eCommerce website and provide hosting’s in all available packages.
Pros
- Easy To Set Up
- Great For Simple Stores
- Stunning Designs
- Solid SEO tools
- Integrates with ShipStation and ShipBob
Cons
- No dropshipping
- No marketing automation integration
- No Amazon integration
- Could be faster for the price
- No app store for more features and functionalities
10. Elementor
WordPress is far and away the most heavily-used CMS on the planet. Providing websites that are both highly stimulating and technically comprehensive, WordPress is also the weapon of the choice for those looking to generating an ecommerce website. WooCommerce, WordPress’ flagship ecommerce theme is used in 24.5% of all online stores. But if you can’t code, developing a WooCommerce site can prove extremely challenging. Well, that is unless you use Elementor.
A powerful website builder, Elmentor allows users to build stunning WordPress websites without having to write a single line of code. And, with robust ecommerce features, Elementor can be used to generate comprehensive WooCommerce websites, code-free.
Pros
- Super easy, high quality and user friendly website builder
- Live Edit, Drag & Drop
- More than hundred Pre-Designed Templates & Blocks
- Custom fonts, Custom Icons
- Role Manager Feature
Cons
- Pre-Defined Templates should be more
- Advanced SEO feature should be included
- Customer Support is not good
Tips to choose ecommerce platforms for your online store
Therefore, we would like to give some recommendations on how to choose the best e-commerce platform that fits for your online store.
1. Make some research about the successful online stores
When building your online store, you should look for the CMS platform that the pre-flourished site used for. The research mainly applies for 2 tasks: running through a CMS checker and asking the owner of the store. It’s often as simple as running a store URL through a CMS checker. However, when the system can’t detect the CMS being used, you can always send the site owner an email to ask about it. There won’t be any particular reason for them to lie about it. If they’re willing to answer your questions, you can find out why they chose the system they use. The reasons might be applicable to your situation
Another way to check the ecommerce platform is by viewing the source code in their browser. Here’s the way: Using right mouse click, choose View Source Code (or using this key binding: Ctrl + U)
2. Put seamless, minimal yet powerful experience as one of the first priorities
The experience of customers depends on the e-commerce platform that your online store use. Believe us, no one may be willing to explore a website overloaded with information, even the power that this site can bring. On the other hand, customers may get bored when they visit such too basic online store. Therefore, the best option is that the e-commerce platform that supports your site must bring a seamless, yet powerful experience to the customer. By only including important factors on the webpage and boosting the performance on sale, your online store may flourish in its own way. To sum up, the more balance is the website, the higher conversion rates become.
3. Your team must get the hang of the e-commerce platform
It’s undoubted the interface that an e-commerce platform may support your site is important. However, the backend is also a situation to concern for your development team. Choosing the most easy-to-use methods of handling everyday tasks is the optimal solution that will make your site run smoothly. To be more specific, when it comes to customer support, the level of support depends on the scale of your team. Moreover, the changes that are made must be clear so that your team can keep up with your online store. If your team gets too overloaded, this will lead to the problem in site-maintaining. A system full of gaps and errors can cause a downward trend of selling rates, eventually.
4. Read inspirational blogs, reviews and stories of predecessors
It’s always important to read the reviews of an e-commerce platform that one particular online store use. However, many elements of user experience are subjective. For instance, an interface that works perfectly for you might seem barely unusable for someone else. When you go through reviews for ecommerce platforms, there are a couple of things you should keep in mind:
- Firstly, looking for sites that have one or more similar objectives. And the best option for researching is going and skimming over reviews, blogs, stories, etc.
- Secondly, looking for all types of reviews: positive, negative, even indifferent is also of great importance. Remember: If the reviews, posts, blogs… have no negative features on then these writings can’t be trusted.
5. Specify, optimize and foresee the site’s e-commerce platform
When choosing an e-commerce platform that is compatible to your store, consider these things:
- Through the chosen e-commerce platform, the purpose of this website must be clear and feasible. If the online store keeps beating about the bush, the conversion rates will inevitably drop down.
- The website must be fully optimized for satisfying the need of customers. It’s of reality that mobile devices are taking over in multiple subjects and methods. Therefore, the website must be optimized, or else this will result in the no-turning-back-visitor situation.
- Don’t be shortsighted. Your e-commerce platform having a clear, detailed plans for the future is a must. Make sure the platform can grow with your business without putting a hole in your pocket.
6. Trials and learns
An e-commerce platform may result in different outcomes, so you should try the chosen platform by using free trials that the platform may offer. This is because the e-commerce platform providers invariably offer free trials of their paid services – 30 days being the standard. Nevertheless, you should consider how your choice is going to affect your business for the next few years. Doesn’t it justify a month of testing? By the end of it, you’ll likely know exactly which ecommerce platform you want to use and be able to proceed with confidence. In short, you should think about the solutions, even problems may occur or not. Also, learning from the faults and errors is also a considered solution.
While it’s important to choose the best ecommerce platform for your online store, there are platforms that we personally prefer. One e-commerce platform we want to recommend: Magento. This e-commerce platform has tons of benefits, to name a few:
- Firstly, It’s free (for the Community edition)
- Being an open-source platform, you can control the design and development completely.
- The core code is updated regularly, so your site can continuously keep up with the upcoming trend.
- Finally, it is effortless to integrate with a custom design or downloaded skin.
The only drawback that Magento may encounter is that the cost and usage for hosting is quite a challenge, because of the specific creation that boost up the cost and hardly customize PHP modules. As a Magento user, you may find yourself frequently consulting the Internet for help. However, this e-commerce platform is always considered to be a must-try platform. This fits best with business, or experienced CEO, but beginners can also try and learn from this e-commerce platform.
The bottom line
By following these steps, the “choosing platform” phase for optimizing your e-commerce website will be much easier. Since you know your business idea better than anyone else does, it’s easier for you to compare the solutions based on the offered features. But remember, it all comes down to your business requirements, future outlook, technical knowledge, and integrations.
Besides, if you’ve been dreaming about testing the ecommerce waters, check out our Ecommerce Development Services. Every we service from consulting ecommerce strategy to website development services, no matter what your needs are, we will all provide you the most effective solution for your business. Let’s talk to our experts for help with building an eCommerce website. Whether it’s a quick fix or an omni-channel project, we’ve got all the bricks you need to build a robust eCommerce website
