Insights, Web Development
How To Choose The Right Ecommerce Platform
The most important factors to consider when choosing the right ecommerce platform and selecting the best one for you.
Why eCommerce?
The main reason many businesses prefer eCommerce is reaching the global market. By doing so, the sellers also reach a greater amount of consumers, and could easily offer a shorter service distribution and lesser pricing. It is simpler and faster than serving a physical place.
Selling and purchasing online services, however, is as simple as it is tricky.
Online transactions have evolved to be quite convenient for everyone in the comfort of their living room. Yet, this accessibility had glutted the market to the point it would get harder for sellers to emerge and get noticed among other numerous competitors.
It’s essential for every seller not only to boost advertising but also to build a great-looking, efficient, and user-friendly shop. To do that, the sellers need to choose the right eCommerce platform according to the type of business as well as the function of the website.
Surely, creating your online store requires equal efforts and strategizing as setting up and maintaining a physical store. There is a list of things you should keep in mind when planning their online business to grow into a successful one and how to choose the right eCommerce platform is definitely one of them.
We will highlight the things that make an online store successful as well as those we need to consider before choosing the right platform in each case.
What makes a successful eCommerce website?
- Ideal User Experience
- Customers Engagement
- SEO
- Branding
- Availability
These are the most important conditions we will take into consideration when reviewing the different eCommerce platforms. Of course, there are specific components like shipping prices and speed, and the clarity of return policies. We won’t refer to those in this article since they don’t concern the eCommerce platforms themselves.
The reason we highlighted the first two is simple: most eCommerce businesses fail because customers can’t understand how to use the website. Difficult navigation, bad structure, and unclear values and policies can play a bad number in your endeavor. Even so, this isn’t something that should discourage you.
📱 Ideal User Experience
This goes without saying: Your customers will want to have a great user experience. If you offer your customers a well-optimized UI, they will make their stay. If the UI is confusing, they will leave.
Even further, consider a mobile-first approach. The potential customers’ patience has shortened so everything should be related to the consumer’s convenience: from design to return policies.
Most users prefer to purchase from their mobile devices which pushes the need to prioritize the mobile experience over the desktop. An eCommerce website takes care of a smooth and easy-to-use navigation, checkout cart, clean design, and enough space for tapping on the buttons and CTAs.
👋 Customers Engagement
Whether you build your website from scratch or use a pre-made template, be clear about the structure of the categories and their labels. Keep it simple and user-friendly so your clients could easily find the thing they’re looking for.
The experience needs to be clear and intuitive and also engaging. A well-planned structure can heavily gain control over your customer’s interaction with your website and, respectively, your business.
📈 SEO
This component strongly relies on the SEO performance of your website. This is why for any eCommerce platform it is necessary to have clean yet detailed options SEO customization. Aside from that, some platforms have higher performance SEO than others. When you choose the right eCommerce platform you should consider this no matter if you like it or not.
Additionally, Google constantly changes its guidelines and pushes new algorithm updates. Those could hit your rankings pretty badly if you have content that violates Google’s Search Quality Guidelines.
Of course, climbing up the rankings would require some work in terms of content, images, and the usage of rich snippets. Keyword research is also of great importance.
⚜️ Branding
Branding is not just a logo. It sums up customer service and reputation, advertising, and distinguished design assets (logo, colors, shapes, fonts, etc.). Whether you have a company that wants to be recognized on the market or you’ve just started a small business, having a “face” creates trust. The more polished the business looks, the more legitimate and trustworthy.
We’ve gone over the main factors we should consider if we want to build a truly successful eCommerce business and we’re ready to build it.
The next step is to choose the right eCommerce platform upon which we can build our online business. There are also a few things to keep in mind.
The most important factors when you choose the right eCommerce platform
For starters, there isn’t such a thing as one particular best eCommerce platform. To base your selection on popularity is always a good way to start your search, however, the best ecommerce platform for you will be the one that specifically covers your objectives.
⚙️ Customization
It’s fair to say the best websites for online businesses rely on unique design and experience. Being able to customize your website with signature colors or shapes is extremely important for branding. That’s why most businesses are looking for eCommerce alternatives that offer a rich palette of customization tools instead of simply using a premade template. Surely, there’s also the opportunity to take a step further and get that website built from scratch by devoted coders.
Needless to say, source code access is vital if you want to create something truly distinguishable from the rest. This is especially vital for niche businesses with specific requirements, so that’s one of the most important things when you choose the right eCommerce platform.
👁️ Visual Editing
Sometimes, going back and forth between the panel and the website in order to preview changes could be tiring. Some platforms offer a real-time preview of the website as you’re working on it.
🏠 Hosting
This one heavily depends on the business owner’s preference. Big businesses and brands usually do require to take care of their own hosting, security, and updates. Small ones, however, prefer not to worry about these issues and use a platform that comes with all of this. With the new wave of SaaS platforms, however, this trend may change, as some of the biggest eCommerce platforms like Shopify are now taking big brands in their hats. So when you choose the right eCommerce platform you need to consider whether you have the capacity to handle the hosting on your side, or whether you’re okay to pay the price with a hosted platform.
💡 Intuitive Experience
It doesn’t matter if you’re a pro or not, it’s always better to experience an easy-to-use interface and know where to find the eCommerce and business tools you need.
🛠️ Tools
We’ll also include App Integrations as a necessary component. When you choose the right eCommerce platform, it’s important to get a complete suite of marketing tools. The powerful all-in-one solutions offer tools for the landing page, the website’s blog, and even for email marketing.
Make sure the platform offers accounting plugins for your sales, taxes, and revenues. It’s also great to have ways to reward your new and loyal customers. Let’s also not forget the plugins that make shipping more convenient for your users.
Always know what sort of tools you will need for your business before deciding on a platform.
📈 Performance
Not just for speed, reliability, and security but also for SEO. The authority on Search Engines defines the ranking and views for your website. The platforms should pack comprehensive features such as allowing you a domain name, customer reviews, and a blog.
🛡️ Security
When an eCommerce business is actively dealing with financial transactions, security is absolutely essential. It’s important to review the platform’s security track record and invest time in upgrades, security patches, constant maintenance, and updates. In terms of security, SaaS-based eCommerce platforms are theoretically safer than open-source.
💲 Pricing
Setting up your eCommerce site is only the beginning. What you could keep in mind is that there will be other costs for maintenance, upgrades, and new features. All of this varies depending on the type of platform you’re using.
With an open-source platform such as WordPress WooCommerce, the responsibility for maintenance falls on you (not on the platform support) and costs will vary depending on how complex your website is.
There are of course platforms, that are SaaS-based and they are created on one single codebase. These updates are maintained by the platform itself and require a monthly fee.
Although pricing and quality are often correlated, some of the expensive tools tend to be affordable for big businesses and organizations. In conclusion, be careful not to sacrifice important features for the sake of a cheaper initial price.
📞 Support
The need for fast and adequate support goes without saying. It’s essential for a platform to offer 27/7 support via different channels in case of emergency issues. Some platforms offer dedicated teams for issues with different components of your eCommerce website.
Choose the right eCommerce platform
Once you’re aware of your specific objectives, it’s time to choose the right eCommerce platform that suits you best. In order to help you, here are our favorite picks that definitely deserve the popularity they already have.
We’ve compared those 4 eCommerce platforms by the components we listed and also gave each of them detailed reviews, comparing their pros and cons, as well as their unique features.
| WordPress WooCommerce | Shopify | Squarespace | BigCommerce | |
| Type | Open- Source | SaaS | Closed-Source | Cloud-Based |
| Customization | High (rich library of customizable themes, plugins, and add-ons) | Medium (better customization requires altering the code yourself) | Medium (better customization requires altering the code yourself) | High |
| Visual Editing | No | Shopify Page Builder Apps | WYSIWYG | WYSIWYG |
| Hosting | Requires a hosted service and installed and configured WordPress CMS | Self- hosted | Self-hosted | Self-hosted |
| Experience | Suitable for both pros and beginners | Easy to use | Easy to use | Not suitable for beginners. Has a learning curve and specific terminology. |
| Tools | Thousands of tools and plugins | All-in-one solutions with a full set of tools | Limited (additions require altering the code yourself). It depends on the Squarespace plan you get. | A huge set of already built-in tools |
| SEO Performance | High SEO performance. Offers SEO plugins | High SEO performance | Medium to High SEO performance (higher requires advanced knowledge in SEO) | High (comes with its own analytics suite for key metrics) |
| Security | Requires constant maintenance by the user | Highest ( PCI Compliance Level 1) | High (everything is handled by Squarespace) | High (everything is handled by BigCommerce) |
| Pricing | Free for initial product and basic features. Require additional costs for other services. | Basic – $29/month + credit card rate
Shopify – $79/month + credit card rate Advanced – $299/month + credit card rate Plus – $2,000/month + credit card rate |
Personal $12 monthly
Business $18 monthly Basic Store $26 monthly Advanced Store $40 monthly |
Standard: $29.95 monthly
Plus: $79.95 monthly Pro: $299.95 monthly |
| Support | Huge community, documentation, guides, and forums. | Offers 24/7 | 24/7 | 24/7 |
In Conclusion
eCommerce websites are a powerful business tool that should be handled with careful planning and strategy. Choosing the right eCommerce platform to build upon is only one but extremely important step in this endeavor. This is why there are many things to consider before stopping on one of those platforms.
In the meantime, check out the related eCommerce platforms reviews: