As more and more people turn towards the online world for both shopping and income streams, hundreds of eCommerce platforms have popped up with the increasing demand.
Using an eCommerce platform rather than creating your own website can save many hours and costly fees and allow you to scale your business at a faster rate.
Add the bold text: With such a wide variety in these platforms, choosing the right one can be an overwhelming task. So how does one choose an eCommerce platform? Ultimately, it depends on your needs. If you’re looking for a B2B eCommerce solution tailored to wholesale distribution, Unilog might be the right choice for you. Here we will lay out a few of the main selling points to consider before choosing the platform.
Shopify has been around since 2006 and provides quite possibly the most intuitive and all around e-commerce product on the market.
They aim to provide you with everything you need to sell your products online to and from anywhere in the world.
They even have a beautifully simple mobile version of their product, complete with a dashboard, customer emailing, and full inventory management.
Volusion and Shopify are quite evenly matched. Although Volusion does require you to buy an SSL certificate separately, which is a minor headache in itself.
They are very similar in price and feature set. However, Volusions major downfall is their interface which doesn’t score well in terms of ease of use.
Bigcommerce stands out from the crowd by adding more features to their lower plans than that of Volusion or Shopify.
They do, however, come with sales limit of $50,000 per year and their lowest plan starts at $29 (same as Volusion) vs. Shopify’s lite plan at $9.
But that might be a small price to pay when they also offer 0% transaction fees on all plans!
Wix Stores is Wix’s e-commerce product that allows you to sell online through the Wix platform. Their main downsides are the shop themes which can be a little on the dated side visually, and they also have the most limited feature set of all our comparisons so far.
Their product is easy to use and a good price at around $15 a month (depending on the features you opt for.) However, if you’re looking to solely focus on an e-commerce business that you wish to grow, it’s not the right product for you due to its limited feature set.
Lemonstand is trying to outdo the competition by offering 0 transaction fees to its users on all plans and providing its advanced customized checkout features also for all plans.
Allowing users to control the checkout experience from the start and keep it on their own domain to avoid customer confusion at the most crucial part of the checkout process.
Their starter plan is $19 and their professional plan $199 – which makes them cheaper than Shopify monthly, along with their 0% transaction fee bonus.
Choosing the Right Provider
Ultimately, it’s up to you to decide which provider offer the features that you most require. For example, if you plan on drop shipping, if you want to automatically measure stock levels, or sell to multiple countries.
Your best bet is to make a short list of must-haves and run through the features of each platform, after all, you don’t want to waste the time or money on setting up an online store – only to have it need replacing pretty soon after! Or visit one of the eCommerce comparison websites and compare your chosen platforms with others.