What makes the best eCommerce platforms in 2021

The online retail industry is a highly competitive space, and that includes the eCommerce platforms that power them, there are over 370 eCommerce platforms available for businesses.  An eCommerce platform is a software application allowing online businesses to manage their marketing sales, operations, and website.

It’s impossible for a single person to wade through hundreds of options to find the right solution.
The best eCommerce platforms offer all those essential features that are required to run the business along with all those business tools that allow the company to run and operate in the right direction. Integrating your company’s eCommerce platform with an ERP solution can help your business increase productivity, retain customers, and boost revenue.

Why is it recommended to use the best eCommerce platforms?

You are starting by expanding your business of hardware stores or looking for a solution to your business or to start your location from the initial level.

The best eCommerce platforms in India that you choose to promote your business have a massive impact on making your profit and maintaining the stability of your business.

Some alternatives that are worth of these eCommerce platforms are-

• You are making one from the start, taking the help of a multimillionaire company for the promotion of your business.
• Using a plugin is a guanine option for promoting your business if you are looking for expanding your business, even the smaller ones.

Options of the eCommerce platforms

The three ways to classify the types of best eCommerce platforms are-

• SaaS (Software as a Service)
• Open-Source
• Headline Commerce

Apart from these, there are two more ways through which eCommerce platforms offer hosting features to their customers.

Hosting features are required by every customer to run their eCommerce stores. The two classifications of hosting features are-

• On-Premise: Self-hosted on your business platform
• Cloud: Hosted on some other places

Let us see these on a broader spectrum: –

The open-source eCommerce platforms

• Hosting Environment: Cloud or On-Premise, though all patches and platforms need manual implementation throughout.

Each source of code can be improved and modified through these eCommerce solutions via open-source eCommerce.

On opening an open-source eCommerce store, your brand becomes responsible for the following-

• Update release and manual patch from the platform provider.
• PCI Compliance
• Building the net new look of the site that includes:

1. Merchandising and promotional tools
2. Discount and promotion engines
3. Design drag-and-drop builders

• Security Issues
• Hosting (depends if it is an open-source solution or is on-premise or cloud)

1. Cloud commerce solutions that are open source differ from that of the on-premise, and thereby the hosting environment is provided and managed by the off-site.
2. It nowhere says that because your eCommerce platform is hosting your store by using a cloud environment, means you can use unlimited bandwidth like a SaaS solution.

It would be best if you asked for a specific bandwidth allowance, especially while evaluating Magneto or Volusion.

• All the additional applications, often include integrations along with:

1. CMS
2. ESP
3. ERP
4. CRM
5. ERP system software
6. ANALYTICS and BI tools

Many brands have their open-source eCommerce platforms are too require too much technical knowledge, expensive maintenance, too cumbersome.

The two other types of eCommerce platforms have seen massive movements:

• Headless Commerce
• SaaS

Open-source eCommerce platforms that are hosted via the cloud are 46% into consideration for the large eCommerce brands.

Some of the best eCommerce platforms in India are: –

1. BigCommerce

Overall, the best eCommerce platform is known to be BigCommerce. It has its robust product search engine that makes it perfect for large retail brands.

The best choice for people starting their eCommerce store, or having their brick and mortar creates and is planning to expand it for including online orders.

One can customize their online without having knowledge about coding as the templates they provide are customizable, and can be used to design your store, sell, and market your products.

There are advanced and buyer-centric templates available in the store, but some of them are free. There are a total of seven templates free.

On the contrary, there is a broad community of designers and developers, along with the other partner directory that helps you to find some extra hand.

These are some of the pros and cons of the best eCommerce platforms-

Pros

• Strong SEO services performance
• Flexible and scalable
• Comprehensive abandoned cart feature
• Excels with multi-channel Selling
• Excellent theme designs

Cons

• Is expensive for high volume stores
• Clicks or Upselling
• Inconsistent speeds in consecutive studies
• In the entry plan, there is no cart abandonment.

2. Shopify

The best platform for Selling is known to be Shopify. Are you planning to dropship? Or relying on Facebook ads or Instagram Marketing- this is the perfect stop.

But recommendations are not to use Shopify if one is relying on SEO. Also, if one is looking for creating a large store having a vast range of products, they should use BigCommerce instead of Shopify.

Shopify proves to be better in various areas over BigCommerce like post-purchase, 1-click upsells- but indeed lags in terms of performance.

It’s accessible for setting up the best Shopify stores online with the drag and drop interface. The Shopify POS is for simple brick and mortar and looking to set up payment mode via mobile app. It is friendly for complex stores too.

Every coin has two sides, and the wrong side of Shopify is, it provides ten free templates as of now. The prominent disadvantage is its weak SEO, weak ranking performance.

Its significant disadvantage is its rigid URL; this one is non-changeable. There are many strange and unstructured URLs in Shopify sites that are beyond products, pages, and collections or slug restrictions.

It is seen that Shopify has very weak rankings and the transaction fee that they charge for not using Shopify as a payment method, which is not liked by people. But then again, Shopify payment is a good option for payments.

The Pros and Cons of Shopify are-

Pros

• 1-click Selling
• Lots of certifies partners for helping
• Great themes with various designs
• Lightning-fast loading speed
• Allows multiple and social Selling
• Very easy to set up

Cons

• Adding up ads make it more costly
• Rated very poorly for SEO ranking
• Requires developer for advanced settings
• Customizing the checkout process is not possible.

3. 3dcart

3d cart was released in 2001 and had been serving over 22,000 online businesses with clients that include PCMag since then.

3d cart is older than Big Commerce and Shopify but is not as good as them the reason is that it’s not for beginners.

Indeed, there is an excellent onboarding video once you log in to your dashboard. Still, the entire operation is tough to figure out, and the builder is not so appealing visually.

The templates they provide are very industrial but are very outdated. Customizing the store is very tough and takes a lot of time as the drag and drop is nonfunctional.

Thanks to the developing community, it has, which is willing to help and assist for every problem that you are facing with development and other modifications.

One of the strong points, they have is their shipping method. They provide advanced shipping solutions with no API required.

The volume of sales on each plan of 3d-cart is restrictive like Big Commerce. The lowest cost is $19 per month that allows 50k.

Overall, it is excellent, but the feature of atonement on the cart is still a lag and should be adequately treated.

Shopify tried to make a move by adding the feature but failed miserably and became out of the competition.

Still, it has many features that are out of the box than Shopify.

There are some pros and cons of 3dcart-

Pros

• All the Integrations that are required are supported.
• Great business user management tools (email, QuickBooks, inventory, etc.)
• The blog feature is better than that of the other SaaS eCommerce

Cons

• Not recommended for beginners
• Templates are backdated
• Potential issues are upgrading
• Negative Feedback for customer support

What are the best eCommerce platforms for small businesses?

Small businesses already have their budget low and do not needs the features to suck out money from banks like big businesses.

Asides, the pricing structure is fundamental, whether it is monthly, yearly, or be it some other fees.

Scalability, it is the features that decide the growth of your website also needs to be tested. As your sales grow up, your scale of the operations is seamlessly going to increase, which indicated multiple channels, selling on the other platforms or even in some other countries.

On that scale, the requirement might arise for your personalized app to grow your business on a new leaf.

Some of the recommended best eCommerce platforms for small scale businesses are mentioned below-

• Woo Commerce
• Volusion
• Big Commerce

Conclusion

The best eCommerce platforms should be chosen wisely as it has a direct impact on running or growing your business.

It is recommended to have an analysis of comparatively 10 best eCommerce platforms in India to make your business expand on a large venue.

Look for the pros and cons of every eCommerce platform before you choose for one whether it is for a large scale business or a small scale one.