The Top Ecommerce Platforms That Give You the Best Bang for Your Buck

Much like with most things in life, there is not one ecommerce platform out there that is the perfect fit for every company. However, if you’re part of a business that doesn’t generate an abundance of money and honestly, just can’t take a risk with anything just for the sake of it, it’s imperative for you to select the right ecommerce platform for you from the first try.

As scary and intimidating of a task that may sound, it’s really not impossible.

Before we go through some of the best platforms available to you currently, I’d suggest you take some time and really think about your business. You need to write down the features that your business would immensely reap from, tools that are an absolute must, the amount of money that you can afford to spend on a platform, etc. As soon as you’re satisfied with your list and you think that you truly know what you need out of an ecommerce platform, you’re ready to dive into this world of platforms and find the best one for you.

Ecommerce Software by Shopify

When you begin your search, Shopify is a brand that you’ll see come up often. However, you should take this lightly. Just because it’s popular, does not guarantee that it is right for you, or even work for you for that matter.

This all-in-one ecommerce platform lets you build your online shop in order to sell your items while giving users a nice shopping experience. Their app store offers many features that you’d need in order to get your online business going. They offer both free apps and ones that you have to pay for. Users have the freedom to use any of their free themes or premium ones and you have the opportunity to personalize them to your liking. They provide users with marketing tools such as title tags, as well as meta descriptions for each category page for SEO. Additionally, they offer an integration with payment providers, so customers can pay in a short amount of time.

It looks pretty good so far, but we do also need to take into consideration the negatives. For one, monthly, it can cost anywhere from $1,000 to $4,000. They also don’t use PHP in order to personalize the templates that they currently offer. Their blogging platform is incomparable to WordPress. Additionally, due to their lock-in feature, it isn’t very easy to transfer from one online store to another.

Ecommerce Platform by BigCommerce

BigCommerce isn’t as big as Shopify, but it is still a powerful contender. For one, they offer you so many useful materials for learning about the platform. They’ve also gotten support from Facebook and live forums, just to mention a few. Additionally, they let you dismantle the technical problems without the need to spend extra money on developers. Also, their simple POS offers users a breezy shopping experience. They’re integrated with Alibaba, which is the biggest wholesale marketplace, in addition to Google Shopping, eBay, and AdWords.

However, for one, they cost starting at $299 and can range to be over $1,000 due to extra fees. Additionally, you’re locked-in, too, so you’ll most likely lose all of your work when moving platforms, granted you don’t pay the large fees associated with switching. Also, you can gain access to the list throughout the screen instead of finding it in its specific location. Lastly, since it’s not open source, so it’s hard to change up the functionality to fit your needs better.

Ecommerce Platform by Shopping Cart Elite

This platform is the one that you hear about less often, but that’s only because it just hasn’t yet been around as long, so don’t let its popularity fool you! Additionally, don’t let their size scare you. In fact, you should embrace it, since they’re just the right size to really help you grow, while small enough to truly get to know you and help you out at maximum capacity. Apart from that though, those who have used it have only had good things to say about the platform, so let’s take a look at all that it has to offer.

This platform offers businesses the opportunity to grow by incorporating strong SEO, PPC, and social media marketing campaigns. They give themselves 30 days until your sales begin to grow rapidly so that confidence has to count for something.

One of the best parts is the fact that they automate every single process, including the graphic design, data entry, fine-tuning, and so much more. On top of their shopping cart, they created a marketing system. In fact, they are the only ones that offer a full A-Z development as well as marketing in-house for their users. SCE offers the perfect SEO ecommerce platform since they automate the majority of white hat SEO. They are also ready to sell on multiple channels, including the top two: eBay and Amazon.

Their backend is most likely one of the strongest that you’ve ever seen. They’re capable of taking care of all of your business operations including order management, CRM, ERP, as well as shipping and inventory. Additionally, it’s a SaaS cloud-hosted platform, therefore you’ll be working on a desktop app rather than a web browser and so everything is saved in a cloud-hosted data center. They’re very safe and secure since they’re both PCI compliant and have created a proprietary bank vault security in order to keep any financial information.

On top of that, you can guarantee that your page will end up benchmarking at a bigger speed than both Amazon and Yahoo.

Conclusion

When selecting an ecommerce platform, you should really get to know the ins and outs of your business before doing any research. There are so many to choose from now, but it’s really up to what your business needs and can afford. Therefore, when making the decision, don’t select based on popularity, but based on everything that the platform can truly offer you.