E-commerce businesses come in many forms – and many sizes.
Regardless of the industry the business is based in or how many customers they have, businesses need the right approach to e-commerce.
The products you can give your customers must be good, but the same can be said of the experience. User experience is important. A site that offers a good UX is cost-efficient, it’s a proven formula for retention, and it keeps your audience around longer.
If you’re not savvy enough to code your e-commerce website from scratch or master the logistics of fulfillment services overnight, fear not – there are many e-commerce platforms out there you can use.
With a good e-commerce website builder, you can set yourself up for success. It’s not the same as having a dedicated website for your business, but it’s a stable foundation to begin (or streamline) your online sales efforts.
Which E-commerce Platforms Are Best?
Small business consisting of a tiny team or maybe even a single person carrying the load? Thriving company with an established brand and a full product catalog? No matter the size of your operation, these are some great e-commerce website builder options to try.
Shopify is the type of versatile, flexible platform built for businesses of all sizes. No matter what you sell or how, you can enjoy a thriving ecommerce website that looks and feels more like a dedicated company site than an ecommerce portal.
It helps you establish your brand by letting you pick a custom domain name and one of hundreds of themes. You’ll be sure your online store exudes the values, style, and persona you hope to maintain with your brand.
The portal simplifies things, which can help even the most efficient and experienced sellers save time and money. From one platform, you can customize your store, add new sales channels, manage an uncapped inventory, activate one-step order fulfillment, and even track your data for smart planning.
Shopify currently powers hundreds of thousands of businesses and has over one million active users. The platform is evolving fast, with the potential for technologies like AI to be used in the near future.
There’s unlimited bandwidth, integration with sales channels on platforms such as Instagram or Amazon, and even 24/7 support. If you’re ready to start a new e-commerce store or streamline an existing effort, this is a great platform to consider.
Magento e-commerce web builder is marketed as a platform to help you launch your site quickly and begin seeing greater ROI. This platform certainly knows what users look for – but can they deliver?
Judging by their share of the market and their ongoing success in the e-commerce industry, the answer is an emphatic yes. Using the Magento dashboard, users can track their inventory and sales metrics to see how the business is doing and get data-driven insights on how to improve it.
There’s also a feature that allows repetitive order management tasks to be automated – saving users valuable time in the process. For newcomers, this is a great way to take the tedium out of e-commerce. For established businesses, it can free up the time of team members so they can focus on other, more profitable tasks.
Solutions are offered for small, medium, and enterprise businesses. Users can also get resources for individual sectors of e-commerce, like B2B and mobile.
It makes it easy to manage inventory by putting everything in the right place, making it possible to drive new revenue growth. There’s also a focus on the experience – Magento works to make things easier for the customers and the people serving them.
The Squarespace ecommerce platform exudes style – it’s what could be called Squarespace’s main brand value.
Entrepreneurs, freelancers, and artists want their online presence to look good. Squarespace provides award-winning templates and photos to help anyone set up a website, portfolio, or online store. If the latter is what you’re aiming for, you’ve got some great features to look forward to.
The site is set up with all the features you’ll need to post products and facilitate engagement – but it also helps out with marketing.
Users of Squarespace can reach more people and grow their audience thanks to a comprehensive marketing toolkit consisting of SEO, email campaigns, social media promotion, and much more.
Marketing Features Aside, What Does it Offer for Sales?
Back to the shopping side of things, there are handy features beyond the ability to post a detailed product catalog. You can set up subscription-based products with ease, and even remind customers about products left in their cart and entice them to complete a purchase.
These tools are great for the upstart ecommerce business, but they can also help even the largest enterprise location. The platform is secure, it’s flexible, and most importantly, it is made with the customer’s experience in mind.
When you’re looking for a place to start, grow, and/or maintain an online store, consider Squarespace.
WooCommerce may appeal to a very specific segment of the market – the segment that’s familiar with WordPress. It’s their custom ecommerce platform.
Citing stats from BuiltWith, WooCommerce boasts its platform as the top choice in its industry – edging out Shopify by a few percentage points.
WordPress remains one of the most popular content management systems for a variety of industries, meaning many people may have experience with it even if they don’t have experience with an online store.
The customization and ease of design it offers make it a great choice. But the individual features are also impressive. For one, you have access to plenty of themes, including each year’s default WordPress themes.
There’s also the option to customize any part of the site – redo your entire homepage or tweak small touches like the buy button. No WordPress-based e-commerce website builder would be complete without a built-in blogging feature, which businesses can use as a marketing tool.
You can use shortcuts to add product advertisements and checkout options to every page, show off product reviews, and even let customers sort through products by a variety of criteria.
Sell physical, digital, or both, managing everything from your shipping rates to tax calculators based on each customer’s unique location and order.
For a company like Wix, e-commerce is a perfect fit. You’ll start with a blank slate and more than 500 templates to choose from.
Wix calls their drag-and-drop builder the most innovative in the world. And while that may be a lofty claim, they’ve convinced many customers through what they deliver. Video backgrounds, animations, parallax, and more are all available and require no coding knowledge to implement.
There’s also the Wix Artificial Design Intelligence (ADI) feature, which can build a personalized website for you with just a small amount of information needed.
Wix stores turn heads with beautiful storefronts and convenient layout options that make shopping easy. Wix also makes things easy for sellers. A single platform lets them track orders, manage inventory, and showcase their entire product catalog.
Boost sales with built-in discount creation tools. The platform also supports multiple payment options to maximize conversions. Allow users to check out with their PayPal account for added security, and even create an option for offline payments.
The list of things Wix can’t do for businesses would be much shorter than the list of things it can do.
Big is right – but this platform isn’t just built for enterprise locations with a hundred facilities.
BigCommerce offers an extensive list of features, including site customization options. Sellers can also list products on popular platforms like Amazon, Facebook, and eBay.
With clients like Toyota and Gibson guitars, this platform helps companies succeed at any scale. Users can create an engaging appearance using responsive templates. Prefer more control? Build a fully custom site instead.
Marketing Resources to Help Grow Your Store
The platform includes marketing and conversion tools that help merchants grow twice as fast as industry averages. These tools drive more traffic to your site and help you convert visitors into customers.
Boasting an impressive average uptime of over 99.99 percent, this platform embodies reliability. The platform reduces time spent managing technical tasks. Cloud functionality also helps cut operational costs.
Big, medium, and small businesses alike can all find potential benefits by trying out BigCommerce’s ecommerce portal.
Volusion is another cloud-based e-commerce website builder with nearly two decades of experience. The platform has processed billions of dollars in sales during that time.
The site’s drag-and-drop builder makes beautifying your digital retail space easy. There are many themes to choose from, including several free options, and of course, the ability to make a custom creation.
When it comes to the features that actually help you with the process of commerce itself, you have plenty. For starters, there’s the option to add rich-text product descriptions. You can manage subscription-based products for recurring sales, and even create native fulfillment options to make selling easier than ever before.
You can even create loyalty programs to reward those customers who keep coming back to your store for more.
As for the marketing side of the platform, there are SEO features, social selling options, and the chance to integrate onto platforms such as eBay and Amazon. It is worth noting that Volusion is a tiered service, so not all features come with every plan.
The finishing touch is 24/7 support via chat and via phone for higher plans. Combine this with a detailed and comprehensive knowledge base, and Volusion is relatively easy to learn.
Which E-commerce Website Builder Is Right For You?
When you’re hoping to succeed in e-commerce, choosing the right platform is like choosing the right physical space for traditional sales.
A store with a leaky roof on a noisy corner doesn’t attract as much business as one in a prime location. The same principle applies online. Choose flexible, well-designed ecommerce platforms to give your business the best chance of success.
The best e-commerce builder depends largely on your tastes. As mentioned, some options on our list have unique characteristics. Again, for someone who is a big fan of WordPress, WooCommerce may be the best option. Others may choose their platform based on the layout options each has to offer, or how much customization is available in a given tier.
The best e-commerce platform is the one that helps you and your business operate at peak efficiency. When you’re looking to speed things along without skipping any important steps, any platform on this list is a great option to consider. Contact Us
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