To sell any product online, you need an ecommerce platform. A regular website provides everything you need to promote your business but people can’t pay for products, as it needs integrations with shipping providers and payment processors. A solution for this is an ecommerce platform that includes basic features like shopping cart tools, web hosting and payment processing. Depending upon your budget, sales volume, or industry, you may need extra features, like bulk upload or real-time stock inventory tools. When selecting an ecommerce platform, ensure that it suits your tech skills, provides features to improve customer experience and offers customization options. There are variety of ecommerce platforms available in the market, so it is important to consider the basic features that an ecommerce platform should provide you. Let us see the features that you can rely on, to choose a winning online shopping platform.
Important Features Of Ecommerce Platform-
- Run on a unified and single platform- ecommerce platform that you choose should offer unified ecommerce, order management, financial, accounting, POS, customer service, inventory, and marketing, merchandising on a single cloud-based eCommerce platform.
- Customer view- Ecommerce platforms must provide good customer service, targeted marketing, and deliver consistent experiences. All customer communication should be in single view across all channels and touchpoints.
- Good customer experience- You should choose an online business platform that creates personalized, friendly and responsive, and rewarding mobile, web and in-store experiences for customers for your store to stand out customers’ expectations.
- Content creation- Creation of smooth and easy content creation on new or existing pages is important as it provides a convenient interface to create and publish content on the stores.
- Support of bottomless expansion- Ecommerce platforms should fully support various business models, channels, brands, currencies, locations and languages on the same platform.
- Dedicated support and document- Best ecommerce platform should provide the support wherever you need. For instance, Shopify often provides support through various channels like email, phone calls, live chat etc.
Top 10 Best Ecommerce Platforms of 2021-
1. 3DCart-
It is a secure and powerful ecommerce platform that has served 22,000+ online businesses in 20 years of its service. This platform has helped online merchants to build online stores for ranking higher and selling more. It includes 200+ built-in features, highly rated SEO options, 50 free themes and support of more than 100 payment processors. 3Dcart is one of the top ecommerce platforms to provide intuitive features, mobile-friendly themes and marketing ecommerce tools to your store for higher conversion rate. It is a great platform for advanced ecommerce users. Some of the notable features of 3DCart are-
- built-in SEO tools.
- offers 24/7 expert eCommerce support.
- Customer-friendly
- Secure and scalable
- mobile-ready themes
- No transaction fees
- Free domain for one year
2. Bigcommerce-
BigCommerce was founded in 2009 and is a leading open SaaS solution, that provides merchants sophisticated enterprise-grade functionality, customization and performance with ease of use. Nearly ten thousand companies across 150 countries and various industries use BigCommerce to create attractive and engaging online stores. It is best suited for SMBs & MM who need more from their ecommerce platform with large or complex catalogs. Like other platforms, it allows the platform to be extended with third-party applications. It also supports both B2C and B2B businesses on the same platform.
This platform is easy to use for beginners. BigCommerce makes it easy to edit and modify SEO-related features like custom URLs, page titles and like. It’s multi-currency feature allows merchants to set prices in multiple currencies. BigCommerce also supports various Headless Commerce capabilities, CMS’s and DXP’s for merchants and agencies to build unique shopping experiences. Here’s the list of features available from BigCommerce standard plan-
- Unlimited product listings
- Unlimited bandwidth & file storage
- Multi-currency sales
- Reporting
- Custom domains
- 12 free themes and 160+ paid themes
- Gift cards
- Integrations with shipping and POS software
- Page builder
- Ratings and reviews
3. Square Space-
It is a popular platform for online business that is completely integrated with a built-in for each plan except for the entry-level option. With Squarespace, it is easy to build a beautiful website. You can install multiple templates,and switch between them any time. It works well with new ecommerce shops that are not sure what it looks like in future. This is because, squarespace helps its users to scale or pivot the direction of their sales strategy. One of the main drawback of using Squarespace is that they don’t have app store where you can add any other integrations or extensions. You can find useful and popular built-in applications, but one should check the complete list of features if they want something specific.
Here’s a list of squarespace benefits.
- Unlimited products
- Sell physical & digital products
- 24/7 customer support
- Built-in applications
4. Magento-
It is one of the most popular open-source ecommerce platform released in 2009. In 2018, it was purchased by Adobe and now available in two versions: Magento Open Source and Magento Commerce. Magneto is a best ecommerce platform for small-to-medium businesses having library of more than 5000 extensions.
Prices in Magento are in two tiers:
- Magento Open Source is free to download and use. But, expect to pay for everything else associated with the site like hosting, themes, development, add-ons, etc.
- Magento Commerce is the enterprise-level solution. Prices are quoted by a sales rep, and are reported to run anywhere from $15,000 to $50,000 annually.
Some of the popular site building features of magento are:
- Mobile-optimized shopping
- Integrated checkout, payment and shipping
- Global selling
- Instant purchase
- Catalog management
- Extended Functionality via App marketplace
- Site search
- Customization options available
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