In these modern times, every business, small or big, needs to have an online presence. All the business owners understand this thriving market and are thus offering e-commerce solutions to enhance their sales. Businesses are increasingly shifting from offline to online commerce and keeping your eCommerce house in order. According to Statista, retail e-commerce revenue worldwide is projected to grow to 5.4 trillion US dollars in 2022.
Benefits of E-Commerce
Furthermore, e-commerce offers the following benefits to the users as well as sellers, which is the reason why customers are embracing this trend.
Easy and Faster-Buying and Selling Process
An essential benefit of e-commerce to businesses is that traders can provide flexibility to customers. Consumers can spend less time shopping for what they want. They can comfortably browse through many items at a time. One benefit of e-commerce development when online is that customers can find things available in physical stores far from them or not found in their locality. The product and services are available 24x7. The outcome is that the trader can offer his item any place, any time.
Comparison Is More Active Online and Includes Many Products
E-commerce helps save time when making this comparison, as all specifications are available on the e-commerce site. In a physical store, buyers may not get access to so many products. When people see so many items and options for every product ready for purchase, they feel more confident about spending.
Businesses Leverage the Increase in Demand for E-Commerce
As more and more businesses are looking forward to e-commerce for better customer reach, the demand for e-commerce development has also increased like never before. The increase in demand for e-commerce solutions has led to many e-commerce development companies in the market.
Developers have a variety of options available, also in terms of platforms for e-commerce development. Having multiple options also makes the selection more cumbersome. A list of the best platforms can do the trick for developers. Here we go!
Top Platforms Used by Businesses for E-Commerce
When you look at e-commerce platforms, it can be difficult to tell how minor differences in features and performance can significantly impact your bottom line, but they can.
Here, we are comparing the features, performance, ease of use, design & themes, and integrations of the top eCommerce platforms using accurate site data. This will help you identify the e-commerce platform that satisfies your needs and performs the best.
Let's take a look at all the e-commerce platforms and the features which are used by businesses.
- BigCommerce
One of the most popular e-commerce platforms is BigCommerce. Let us see its features and benefits.
- Website Customization
BigCommerce is a platform that can be easily customized. The BigCommerce platform enables customers to improve fast-loading templates to their specific business needs. These responsive templates help you efficiently and quickly build an online store that resonates with your buyers and showcases your products.
- SEO & Analytics Optimization
BigCommerce incorporates SEO features to help businesses boost organic exposure. BigCommerce has an exceptional analytics dashboard that gives insights of the customer behavior for different levels of page and product performance. BigCommerce identifies the analytics suites as a significant differentiator.
- Payment & Inventory Management
BigCommerce maintains a variety of third-party payment services. This feature allows businesses to decide which service is the right fit for them based on features that align with their target users.
BigCommerce will not penalize businesses that use non-standard payment gateways and also helps you manage inventory and orders from a sole location. You can similarly use third-party fulfillment applications to balance your business as you grow.
- Integrations of Application
Connecting with other applications, BigCommerce runs a business of certified and authorized third-party apps. The active app developer community and a well-stocked app marketplace help companies find custom components or desired features to advance their sites.
2. Magento
Magento is one of the best and most popular e-commerce platforms. The reason behind this huge demand is the unique features of the Magento e-commerce platform. Let's go through its features.
- Analytics & Reporting
One of the most significant factors of an e-commerce website is its accurate analytics and reporting.
Magento offers Google Analytics support, and it also provides you various reports such as Sales reports, Tax reports, Best viewed and purchased reports, Product review reports, and Total sales invoiced reports.
- Product Browsing
Magento offers some functionalities that help you implement an intensified shopping experience for the user. The functions incorporate zoom-in & zoom-out on product images, multiple images per commodity, and display stock availability.
- Catalog Management
Magento has a lot of features that benefit you with catalog management. This comprehensive platform helps showcase virtual products, unlimited product attributes, editing & deletion of product reviews, complete inventory management, quick product creation, effective pricing, and social sharing of the products.
- Order Management
Magento covers the aspects of the order management process. The functionalities comprise viewing, creation & editing of orders from the admin panel, multiple invoice printing, call-centre support, shipping labels, email notifications, and feed for new orders. Magento also offers customization of order status and credit memos.
3. Shopify
Shopify is one of the top platforms of Ecommerce development as it is easy to set up and also easy to manage.
- Easy to Set Up
Shopify supports its users in building a complete website without having any professional knowledge about website building. All the technicalities that are involved in the process are taken care of by Shopify. Thus, by using Shopify you can establish a whole site quickly, and also your store can go live very soon.
With an intuitive setting, its web-based website builder enables you to design your custom online store.
Moreover, each of the pre-designed templates can be further customized to match your preferences. Apart from these, you also get to pick from so many payment gateways, all either free to use or to include minimal charges. Shopify even has its payment gateway named Shopify Payments. So, no matter where you are from or where you want to sell, your buyers can choose from multiple payment options.
- Easy to Manage
Shopify allows you to modify the site however you want, down to the most minute particulars. With Shopify, the estimation of the shipping charges is done automatically based on some factors like location and superiority of shipment.
Based on the setting, you can automate sending suggestions to customers who had added products to their carts but didn't check out. Shopify can automatically calculate the taxes included based on the country or state of a customer.
Shopify lets users control and customize their stocks, even from their mobiles or tablets. All the information linked to the orders placed and products available, along with the payment details and shipping information, are automatically synced between your store's site and the app with the availability of your stock. This ensures the constant functioning of your store.
You can also track order trends and traffic on your site and get detailed information related to current demands and sales.
- Boosting Sales by SEO and Marketing
Shopify gives SEO or Search Engine Optimisation services like giving your pages suitable titles and meta tags. It has a range of plugins like Plugin SEO, SEO Plus, and SEO Booster that can help you boost your sales by finding the problems on your site and fixing them.
Apart from this, Shopify has speedy loading and response times. The search engines prefer faster sites above the slower ones. Shopify, thus, helps your site perform better than competitors even in search engines.
- Outstanding Security
While selling online, the most crucial thing to be taken care of is security. If there is a security breach, it exposes the account details of your customers. To keep you and your customer secure from any attempted violation Shopify takes all the necessary steps.
Shopify gives you a 256-bit built-in Secure Sockets Layer certificate. This protects your site from hackers, encrypts all the stored data. Google is preferential towards sites with an SSL certificate, as it shows that the customer's data is protected and ranks such sites higher in order during searches.
4. WooCommerce
WooCommerce is one of the prime open-source e-commerce platforms that can be completely customized as per requirements.
- Effortless to Customize
WooCommerce offers countless themes to choose from, and it is designed to work seamlessly with themes you know and love. To stand out from the crowd, it allows you to edit parts of your site, from the homepage layout to the buy button.
WooCommerce enables customers to sort products by demand, uniqueness, rating, price, or attribute to find the right fit. It allows you to add unlimited products without any restrictions.
- Additional Features
It offers many variations like color, size, material, and many more for a commodity, with the advantage of setting prices, stock, and images for each variation. WooCommerce enables adding and updating product information. It has built-in payment processing from leading providers. It shows taxes based on your buyers' shipping address or your store's address and then automatically calculates significant country and state tax rates.
- Manage Orders
With WooCommerce, you can track levels of your stock, hold stock after an order is canceled, get a notification for low and out-of-stock items, hide out-of-stock items, and more.
You can conveniently send notifications to customers at critical stages after they purchase or when the order is complete.
5. OpenCart
OpenCart is among the most popular e-commerce platforms that are beneficial to startups as well as already well-performing brands.
- Selling Unlimited Products
OpenCart allows the sellers to register the end number of products for sale to the buyers. They have the advantage of registering their products across categories mentioned on the platform. Along with the advantages of listing all your products online, OpenCart also allows you to pick reviews associated with your products and ratings. This way, the users can get a better knowledge of the product.
- Easily Operated
OpenCart is easy to use and helps save time as all the operations are managed through a single interface. The admin board can help you do a set of tasks at the same time. During the initial phase, one requires the guidance of the developer
s and can take the functioning into their hands at a later stage. Hence, the time consumed on the various operations of the platform can come to a minimum, and the app owners can focus on other things in the meantime.
- Multi-Store Functionality
One can control various online e-commerce platforms at the same time from one admin panel. A range of online stores can be managed at the same time from one individual interface. This helps users set up online platforms for multiple brands, each with a different theme and preference. They can be separated accordingly. However, the admin can execute their control from a single place. The customer is offered complete support, and he can reach any online store seamlessly.
- SEO Friendly
Every platform looks for positive acknowledgments from the users, and the best way to get widespread coverage is by receiving integrated Search Engine Optimization (SEO). This helps the e-commerce platform to appear on the top of Google search. As all users like to look up for any direct store on Google first and check out its ranks and reviews, SEO allows it to appear on the top of the search and get more answers from the users.
6. Prestashop
Prestashop is one of the best e-commerce platforms, is free and open-source.
- Simple yet Adaptable Back-end
Prestashop has an adaptable and easy-to-manage back-end. The owners of the store can create invoices, generate coupon codes, search for queries, reflect customer activity, and many more features are available.
- Numerous Modes of Payment Available
Having an e-commerce store that is effective and looks great will not do you any good if you don’t do business. You need a safe and easy-to-use payment gateway. Prestashop offers integration with all the popular payment gateway solutions for your users.
- Easy to Customize the Store
The customization tools that come with Prestashop allow users to complete product organization and an internal search engine tool that will help your customers navigate your e-store easily. It allows you to set up different payment methods.
Wrapping Up!
We have listed the top e-commerce development platforms for you to choose from. Leading eCommerce developers rely on these very platforms to deliver the best results possible. Nevertheless, there are many more features available on these platforms and some of these would match your requirements better.
So, if you are considering getting any of these e-commerce platforms for your new online store, go for it. Don’t forget to check all the features and go for the most suitable platforms to match your needs.
Head on over to the Stock Sync website to get your online shop synced up with the future.
