Maybe you are planning to start a new e-commerce venture from scratch. Then, you came to the right place to know about some essential and popular e-commerce solutions for small business. Many business owners plan to hire developers to build their online stores. It’s not a bad idea. But if you can design and develop it by yourself, then? Isn’t it more exciting and fun? Yeah! There are a lot of well-known platforms around you. We have made a short list below to make it easier. Let’s go through the vital e-commerce platforms for small business.
Top 10 Ecommerce Solutions For Small Business
Now, we are providing you top 10 best e-commerce platforms. These include a lot of features to increase the capabilities of your web store. If you are going to build an e-commerce website, it will be beneficial for you.
Shopify
Shopify brings a kind of revolution in e-commerce business with its improved features. It is a multi-channel platform used by millions of entrepreneurs worldwide. Shopify was founded in 2004, and it currently has over 4000 employees. With over 800000 customers, it has been turned into the best e-commerce website builder for both small and medium-size businesses. You can easily install and use it with its great customizable theme.
There are several reasons for using this platform. It provides enterprise-level technology for users to run your business smoothly. Shopify offers different pricing plans that vary from $9 to $299 per month. Before starting a plan, you will get a free trial without a credit card. You will also get 24/7 customer service from their expert team.
Wix
Wix comes with a lot of features to build a professional online store for free. Isn’t it interesting? Yeah! You will hear many positive reviews on Wix from a lot of websites. This popular e-commerce platform was founded in 2006 and based in Tel Aviv, Israel. It will offer you an easy-to-use interface with great templates. Wix allows people to build online stores with 100s of templates without having coding knowledge. As a newbie, it can be the best e-commerce platform for you.
Wix is sometimes more than a platform to build an online store. You can sell both physical and digital products here. It will allow you to keep performance stats regularly. You can change, customize, and add anything to your web store. If you wish to with some extra functionalities, you may start at $13 per month.
BigCommerce
BigCommerce comes with the ultimate solution for both small and large businesses. It was established in the year 2009. It is one of the vital cloud-based e-commerce platforms around the world. BigCommerce offers many advanced features that make it an ideal choice for entrepreneurs. It has a vast collection of pre-built templates, custom layouts, and great SEO performance. It also enables selling products on social media through its extensive set of functionalities.
Apart from the basic features, you will get a full-featured CMS to make a complete website. BigCommerce starts its price plan from $29.95 per month. You will get the live support via phone, email, or instant chat whenever you need it. It offers a free trial of 15 days before choosing a plan.
Weebly
Weebly has all the possible features to build e-commerce sites for small business. This free website builder was founded in 2007 and based in San Francisco, CA. You will get a bunch of highly customizable templates to make stylish and mobile responsive web store. It’s drag and drops content builder, and built-in add-ons allow you to set up your small business instantly with less complexity. It can be a great choice as the best e-commerce platform for startups.
Weebly has a free version to use with limited e-commerce features. You can go with their business plan that starts at $25 and $38 US dollars. You can make a functional store without having enough coding knowledge. It also includes powerful email tools to empower your marketing strategy.
WooCommerce
Maybe you have used the most popular Content Management System, WordPress. If yes, then WooCommerce can be a very easy-to-handle platform. WooCommerce was established in 2008 and based in San Francisco, CA. It has an ecommerce store builder to make functional stores with all the facilities you want. Just install with a few clicks and set up your store with products. The functionalities include payment gateways, social media, email marketing, shipping, and many more.
It’s essential to learn WordPress before using this platform smoothly. So, make sure you know the basics well. To make a simple site, you will need the basic plan of $6.95 US dollars. The price is reasonable, undoubtedly. But if you add some extra features with premium themes and plugins, it will be higher.
Squarespace
Squarespace offers a well-structured web store to establish a small business online. It allows you to upload unlimited products to your webshop with a few clicks. Anthony Casalena founded this popular e-commerce platform in the year 2003. It has a user-friendly interface and a great template selection. In total, It’s one of the most popular e-commerce solutions for small business owners rather than high volume retailers.
Squarespace helps to build a simple online store without he advanced and functional features like payroll integration. It takes lower cost compared with BigCommerce or Shopify. You will need $12 US dollars per month for a personal plan. On the other hand, you have to pay $40 US dollars per month to get a fully integrated and functional e-commerce platform.
3dcart
3dcart can be another important choice for small size business entrepreneurs. It offers access to more than 200 built-in features including 50 free themes and over 100 supported payment processors. 3dcart was founded in 1997. Till then, it has helped a lot of webmasters to build SEO friendly online store. 3dcart also offers powerful marketing tools including promotions manager, loyalty system, gift cards, newsletter system, and more.
3dcart has a user-friendly interface with plenty of innovative features. The startup store will cost $14.25 US dollars covering one staff user with unlimited products. You will also get 99.9% uptime with 24/7 customer support. We suggest to check out their service with a free trial before choosing a plan.
Volusion
Volusion is a cloud-based e-commerce website builder founded in 1999. It offers all the necessary functions to operate an online store. It provides a user-friendly interface so that a beginner level user can handle this smoothly. You can add a lot of payment methods with your web store on this platform. It includes responsive themes, rich content editor, navigation editor, search functionality, and many more to make an attractive and functional business site.
Volusion has different pricing plans regarding features and advantages. It starts at $29 US dollars per month with unlimited bandwidth and support. You will get a free 14-day trial before paying for a plan. The platform has also its iOS and Android apps to check the activity of your web store.
Magento
Magento is a powerful and secure e-commerce platform for both small and large businesses. Since the beginning of this strong site builder in 2008, it has been turned into the most popular platform. You will get a lot of customization choices. It allows you to make the site functional and comfortable with over 9000 extensions. If you are not familiar with coding practices, Magento can be an easy way to handle. They also have a large size of the community to provide various solutions. There are already many top e-commerce sites built with Magento platform.
Besides its free version (open source platform), you can also get access to the paid one for enterprise solutions. The cost starts at $18000 per year. If you have a plan to establish your business on a large scale, you can choose the plan with many extension features. As their community is huge enough, you can get the solution quickly from experts in different purposes.
OperCart
OpenCart is another easy-to-use, powerful, and open source e-commerce solution. You can manage multiple online stores using this platform smartly. It has already over 13000 extensions to make your website feature enriched. The only thing to keep in mind is that you have to be familiar with some of the technical issues. If you are not good enough with programming skill, it may occur problems in maintaining the store.
OpenCart is free to download and use. Apart from this, you will also get lifetime support and updates. If you want to add some extra add-ons to increase the capability of your store, you have to pay more. There are plenty of themes to choose from their directory.
Focus on Users
Before starting a business, it’s essential to understand your audience. It should be very specified that for whom you are going to start your business. So, focus on users to get the most benefited. You can’t reach your destination before knowing your customers and their behavior.
Research Different Small Online Businesses
There are several reasons to research other small businesses online. It provides you a comparative data to compare yourself with your competitors. You will get ways to improve yourself by analyzing their choices and investments. Thus, you can pick the better products to reach your targeted audience effectively.
Be Connected With Social Media
Social media is an excellent factor in running and getting a better response. Whether you are starting an online business, it’s been a common and must criteria. It’s another way to make your online presence and communicate with your customers. So, don’t miss the opportunity to make a healthy relationship via social media.
Use Good Quality Web Hosting
Web hosting is another criteria to start an ecommerce business. A good quality hosting company provides better support even at higher traffic. It helps you to boost up the site speed. You will find several popular service providers around the world with friendly customer service.
Focus on SEO
How will you establish your business without reaching more people? Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the collective process to increase visitors to your online store. It is regarded as one of the essential e-commerce solutions for small business. Entrepreneurs are spending thousands of dollars every month on this to expand their businesses. It’s an ongoing process, and you have to be focused on these particular criteria.
Add Different Payment Methods
Payment methods are very crucial as an e-commerce solution to run an online business. Some marketers don’t keep all the famous international gateways. For that, many users don’t feel the interest to use the platform anymore. Try to keep as many payment methods you can. It helps to gain reliability and comfort to the audience.
Write Blogs Regularly
Blogs are the assets that provide value to your business site. It’s essential to write blogs regularly to keep it alive and trustworthy. You can put various informative contents to help your audience to know about your business and products. Blogs are the elements which are strictly related to the ranking of your website. You cannot think of reaching your customers without relevant contents.
Give Exclusive Offers
Who doesn’t expect offers from a business? If you research on marketplaces online, there are offers everywhere all year round in various occasions. Make the target of a festival and release some exclusive offers to your customers. You may provide 10-50% off to different products or free shipping opportunity in different areas.
Provide High-Quality Images
Images are sometimes the vital elements of a website. Primarily, it’s a must thing in an ecommerce business. A customer decides on buying a product after seeing it visually from the e-commerce store. So, provide clear and best quality images of the products you want to sell. Click the products from different angles so that buyers can clear up his/her doubts. If you have confusion on the image quality, make the retouch from a professional photo editor online. As an online business owner, you will need this service very often.
Deliver The Best Customer Service
In online business, the growth and faith depend highly on the quality of its customer support. You cannot deny the importance of this essential part of an e-commerce business. Every giant e-commerce company has dedicated teams to assist their customers in different purposes. Whether you are providing the best support, it increases the opportunity to get customers back again to your shop.
Finishing Thought: At this time of technology, building an online web store is not much severe. A startup company can easily make it done using the most popular e-commerce platforms. For that, we tried to provide the most e-commerce solutions for small business for you. Besides that, you got crucial tips to get a better eCommerce solution. Hopefully, it will help you to build a professional and efficient site for your online business. Do you have any other ideas to boost it up? Share your thoughts via the comment section or email. We look forward to hearing from you.