Realizing your business objective is not a walk of cake – irrespective of how many entrepreneurs, in-corporations, fast-track companies or posts go viral within the executive community defining every know-how of the hockey stick growth.

But, the fact that matter is:

“The dedication to customer experience, market strategies, operational efficiencies, and the team of people you create are the reasons to make your business successful”.

So, the unique combination of all these factors unlike any other e-commerce app development solutions out in the market will ever prove beneficial to your brand.
“In the flooded option of sea for your online business, the biggest is which pipes you install”.

That is, selecting the right e-commerce platform powers your business and brace it for long-term and scalable growth. While the best fit for mid-size growing business, this technology is typically provided by Bigcommerce, Shopify, Magento, Salesforce CLoud Commerce.

“ Selecting one sure-shot from these 4 platforms is where you can unlock the performance”.

Basically, this decision has far-ranging implications for your customer, employees, and the sales graph.

For Customers

It keeps customer engaged with your brand and similarly reduce friction of getting the product they need.

For Employees

Provide a lending hand to the employees who plan and implement campaign strategies.

For Sales Graph

Being the bottom line, the sales growth chart and the cost of maintenance and installation is significantly impacted.

Here, in this blog, I have clutched the comparison and explanations for choosing the right e-commerce platform that will help you evaluate the critical skills on the right metric. Also, it makes an honest assessment of which software development services suit the need of your business.

We’ll cover.

• What is an E-commerce Platform?    
• What are the top e-commerce platforms?
• How e-commerce will benefit your business?

Let’s dive in…

The first and foremost question arises “What is E-commerce platform?”

The E-commerce platform is a piece of software that lend a hand in creating and curating an online store and run a business online. Even, it provides you with the right tools to develop and maintain your site, including products and daily to-do operations.

Here is the good news – most if not all, many e-commerce builders use drag and drop features too.In addition, there are many various reasons to opt for e-commerce app development solutions, but here are the most important ones.

1. Simple (For Newbie): In the early time, if you wanted an online store, you have to build the functionality at your own. Later came the shopping cart, but still, you need to imbibe some developer skills to integrate them into your website.

Now you have plugins. With the inception of e-commerce platforms, you have everything in your hand and can get started right away.

2. Affordable: The e-commerce platforms are not expensive; instead some of them cost meagre amount. However, you have a long list of expenses while running an online store. It’s quite less than developing your own website from scratch.

In addition, the more you pay for the e-commerce solutions, the more of your business can easily handover to the technical team.

3. One Solution Fits All: While you opt for a hosted solution, you are more able to let go of the parts running and managing your site — no more hassle of web hosting, frequent updates, security concerns, and even the likes. Instead, you can stay focus on accelerating your business growth.  

4. Customer Support Available: E-commerce solutions not only benefit from the commercial perspective, instead provide the benefit of the support structure. Utilizing open-source solutions as WordPress are often community-driven, thus making you rely on that community for support.

While that works fine – but what if you are in the urgent need of help at early hours of a holiday, better to have a guarantee that they will be there.

Now, you have a broader outlook for what to look in the e-commerce platform; this is the right time to talk about what’s out in the market.

In the following, we have pocketed the top e-commerce platforms available, their pricing factor, advantages and disadvantages and for what they make the right choice.

 1. BigCommerce

While trying to make the right choice among several platforms for your business, undoubtedly, you want the best. However, one size fits all is the old saying and not go with today’s trend. BigCommerce may seems a little expensive coming in at $29.95/month.

Although the right question is “Why Would You Pick BigCommerce For Your Business?”

The Answer lies in its staff accounts. Of course, it’s not a big deal, but if your firm has few employees that require access to the Shopify’s account, you cant cut it into two. Moreover, it comes along with directions on how to set up your business with round-the-clock assistance.

Pro’s :  This e-commerce platform comes with excellent managing dimensions. Also, it offers a wide array of tool and features, e.g. promotions, unlimited product versions, coupons and discounts, and choices to handle returns. 

Another added highlight is the flexible shipping options that provide live quotes and rate calculations. Additionally, it integrates with social platforms enabling you to sell across numerous sales channel. 

BigCommerce also has a vast app store with covering all the extension for all sorts of requirements like email marketing, product promotion, and automation. It comes with 40 payment processing option that too without transaction fees. 

The best part is “Templates”. The multitude of templates let you choose from a myriad range and let you design your website with extensive support.

Con’s: Traditionally, this e-commerce platform lagged behind in templates offers. While still they cover-up, the customer only gets seven free templates. Premium themes are a bit of expensive to create. And, unfortunately, custom designs are not always user-friendly.

Even, BigCommerce has no native POS feature as like in other solutions and has sales limit on your plan. So, it’s considered as an expensive choice to get an advanced feature.

2. WooCommerce

This is a general tier up from the novice at a business but is a bit more advanced. However, it’s not the right fit for beginners but offers a lot more feature making it the best choice for proficient developers. Basically, it’s a WordPress website and there is a need to purchase domain name. I know, it get’s a little technical but similarly allow you with complete customization for your website and make it your own.

What else?

It even comes with the top SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

However, it is wholly free with no hidden transactions. But, no comparison with BigCommerce as what you get is worth the price you paid.

Pro’s : Woocommerce is advisable for the ones who have previous experience with WordPress. Moreover, it’s 100% customizable as it offers customization options for all its section: Header, footer, checkouts, product sheets, etc.

The best is, Woocommerce has one and thousand plugins! It’s quite amazing how many tools and features can be added, which are the best to implement desired functions via CSS, Jquery, and HTML codes.

Con’s: Isn’t Woocommerce free? Downloading and installing WordPress is free and most of the widgets and add-ons are free to use. But, the installation of some extensions require punctual payment or hiring the premium plans.

Possibly, you are thinking, why extensions?It’s true launching an online store and starting to sell doesn’t require extensions but adding payment methods, subscriptions, inventory management aids, the cost has to be taken in count along with the option to hire E-Commerce developers.

3. Magento

Magento was one of its kind e-commerce website in the market and has dominated since its inception in 2014 when Shopify surpassed it in counts of popularity. Magento is mostly free, but on the other side, they have a paid version for a more significant e-commerce business which incline towards an expensive side but with a large number of advantages.  

It has a lot of users working on the same platform that is ready to help you out for a small amount or can give you a piece of free advice to help you build your website. 

Pro’s : Magento is a self-hosted solution giving you a lot of control. And, abiding with the technical knowledge you can alter anything in regards to functionality and design, adding to it you can choose your own environment.

If the latter is not your piece of cake, then Cloud edition might be the call for you. Irrespective of which way you go, you will always be benefited with Magento’s long list of features and tools. It includes membership subscriptions, discounts, recurring payments and the ability to alter content as per user is the tip of the iceberg.

Next comes, the feature of extending your website through the marketplace. There you can find numerous plugins and themes of all sorts, from customer support to marketing to site optimization to shipping.

This e-commerce platform is robust for multilingual websites too. You can create separate sites for different languages. There is an active community behind it who always support, develop, and improve themes and plugins. This all comes along with expert advice.

Con’s: It has a lot of downsides for the community edition. So, if you are from the same side, then be prepared for security and updates to make your store run properly. Consequently, it’s resource hungry, always requiring time and money to invest in optimization.

Also, the platform is developed in PHP, so if you want to make any changes, you need to have a comprehensive knowledge or else you can hire Magento developer.

But if you are opting for the cloud version, be aware it’s made for enterprise customers, and price varies accordingly.

4. Shopify

Shopify strives to create a considerable fan base for itself with quick and easy setup process along with a dashboard for adding products at a faster pace. All this contributed significantly for leaving Magento behind in the race of popularity, and simultaneously maintaining the crown as of 2019.

The time you sign up to Shopify, it let you port your products from the last used platform without much hassle. With Shopify, everything on their website is easily accessible, which makes their goal of enabling anyone to launch their business without requiring development and design skills.  

It proffers you with 24*7 support as well as unlimited storage, product offers and many more to list. Even, it offers excellent flexibility which is imperative to launch any business. 

Pro’s :  This e-commerce platform is super easy to use and quick to install. Simply, sign up with your email address and start building your own online store and selling. It’s intuitive interface also makes it easy to develop products and consist of SEO features such as meta tags and descriptions and title tags. 

Moreover, it offers dozen of free mobile-optimized and elegant themes. Many more premium ranges are available on purchase. No need of codes to customize them, just use the mouse for making any changes. 

Besides, this platform offers top-notch brace through phone, email, live chat and Twitter, which are available 24*7. They are beside the detailed documentation and online forums where you can get assistance from other users. 

Even, it supports numerous third-party payment gateways and has a significant app marketplace with over thousands offers to add functionality to your website that too with few clicks. 

Last but not least, they offer additional sales channel by providing you with the best outsourcing software services and hardware to sell inside physical store locations, selling socially and integrating with the marketplace. 

Con’s:  The most significant drawbacks of Shopify is that costing factor can instantly snowball. Besides the basic fare, you get to pay for many plugins, themes, and lot other features. While some are a one-time payment, some are monthly and yearly. Additionally, there are transaction fees also if you are not using the built-in payment features.

This all can get a bit complicated and even hard to plan with it.

Next disadvantage is in terms of customizing your website. As Shopify uses its own markup language, known as “Liquid”. It is based on Ruby on Rails and makes it’s enough to challenge to use for coding oneself.

It’s a good idea that you actually got a clear idea for what matters you the most for your online store. This makes a lot easier to weed out those options that don’t jell with the ticket.

How Will E-commerce Platform Benefit Your Business?

Adding to scalability and protection of your data, the E-commerce platforms, whether the hosted on-premise or in the cloud, they come along with a handful of benefits and business tools for your business requirements.

These consist of…

• Merchandising    
• A reliable product management suite    
• Promotions    
• Pricing    
• Searchability    
• The potential to personalize sales and services to your likings

Besides, E-commerce platforms provide business owners with the ability to customize product information and how it can fit precisely and accurately with the online needs, which can be mutually beneficial for both – business and client perspective.

Concluding…

Don’t consider my words for it!

There are numerous e-commerce platforms in the global landscape. However, I have chosen this one for a deep dive as it follows a reliable methodology and seems comprehensive.

But, if you still find yourself surrounded by clouds of scepticism, rely on Xicom Professionals. They are known to have an excellent track record in creating and curating project based on the latest trends for online e-commerce stores.

Check out our Portfolio here, this would help you in selecting the right e-commerce platform with an in-depth insight into the best e-commerce app development solutions. If it has, how about to start with a Free Estimation with a trusted and experienced e-commerce app development company.

Feel free to talk to an expert at +1.415.520.3551 to blow the world’s socks off by providing perfect digital e-commerce solutions.