4 of the Top Ecommerce Software Options Available Today
Regardless of whether you’re an individual that enjoys buying and selling items for a profit online, a small business that’s interested in having an online storefront, or you work at a medium to large sized company that would like to expand their market either nationally or internationally via the internet, you need an ecommerce platform.
Since you want to start selling your products online, you’ve chosen the ecommerce route. However, where do you get started? Although it seems pretty overwhelming, after reading this article, you’ll have a much better idea of what you want along with the best options out there.
Today, there are many shopping carts to choose from, however, the majority of them are either outdated, not built for ecommerce, or they just don’t contain some of the crucial features necessary for your company. Therefore, you actually end up with a pretty small selection of ecommerce software to choose from. Let’s take a look at that handful of ecommerce software that your company can actually immensely benefit from post purchasing it.
Top Ecommerce Software
BigCommerce
This ecommerce company that’s based in Austin, Texas lets companies set up their online stores so that they can sell their items on the Internet. Additionally, they’ve got an app store along with premium customizable themes that store owners can purchase as well as use so that they can enhance their storefronts. Sales channels include branded online stores, point-of-sale via a smartphone application, the Facebook store, and even Pinterest pins. On top of that, they offer Google trusted stores for both pro and enterprise clients.
They support a few payment gateways such as PayPal Powered by Braintree, Stripe, and Square in order to check out.
Shopify
This Canadian ecommerce company was founded back in 2004. Here, companies can set up their own online stores and sell their items. It’s also got an app store and themes where developers sell their applications that can be integrated into Shopify storefronts. You can pick out a theme or a template based off of the look and the feel that you’re trying to go with, but the themes are pretty cookie cutter. You can also find premium themes that you can customize to suit the needs of your company. Shopify is a good alternative to building a website on your own instead of paying a developer. They make it easy for you to implement on your own. However, should you have any questions, they offer customer support 24/7.
You can sell your items via various methods whether it be through a conventional online store, by button, by Pinterest pin, by Facebook shop, by Twitter links, and even in real life with the help of a point-of-sale system. Here, the seller can utilize a smartphone app and a card scanner accessory so that payments can be accepted without the need for a merchant account.
Their payments are powered by Stripe, therefore signing up for merchant accounts on multiple payment gateways is unnecessary for selling items. However, they do support more than 70 third-party payment gateways such as PayPal and Skrill.
Your shopping cart experience goes off of your website and onto Shopify so they own that data. If you want something customized or want to make an integration, although Shopify has a few plugins, it’s more out of the box so whatever you get up front, you’re going to receive.
WooCommerce
WooCommerce offers more flexibility. If you’re familiar with WordPress, this may be your way to go then since you can just log into the WooCommerce dashboard and you can add your items. It’s an open source ecommerce plugin for WordPress. You will need a developer, though, for customization. They also offer many more themes than Shopify.
WooCommerce is great if you’ve got a tight budget, but are extremely technical. Also, this is a good platform to choose if you’ve got many little shops since you’d just have to pay for hosting once.
Shopping Cart Elite
The ecommerce powerhouse offers lots of room for customization along with automation options in order to handle the design of your website, marketing, inventory, shipping, hosting, as well as sales processes. The learning curve may be a bit steeper than the other ecommerce software out there, but putting in the time and effort will result in much better outcomes than with the other ones. A few of the features that they offer include:
Their site building systems give users the options to create an entirely custom design that will remain up to date on its own, along with menus that you can style yourself with HTML and CSS.
You can either run the cloud version on a computer or you can download the software that way you can work on it without the need to be connected to the Internet.
Now, keep in mind that every single one of these is great, but not every one of them is great for your business. You really need to break down your business and figure out the features and tools that it can’t live without and which ones would be very profitable. Having figured out all of your wants and needs, you can proceed to buy ecommerce software.
- Search and SEO
Their algorithm-based predictive search lets users locate the items that they want to find without the need of scrolling through multiple pages
With their site-wide SEO, there are a number of things that you can do such as make automated sitemaps, alter item names and metadata, as well as include rich snippets for the items, just to name a few
- Item and inventory management
They offer a variety of different ways that you can monitor your inventory, make unique items, as well as sell them to customers
- Auto-ship items
If you’ve got items that are ordered constantly, you can take advantage of their renewal feature in order to set up recurring orders and shipments
- Live inventory management
This lets you have an up to date overview of your item inventory
- Bundles, upsells, and discounts
Their item bundle feature lets you sell items that need several components with ease
- And so much more
Their site building systems give users the options to create an entirely custom design that will remain up to date on its own, along with menus that you can style yourself with HTML and CSS.
You can either run the cloud version on a computer or you can download the software that way you can work on it without the need to be connected to the Internet.
Now, keep in mind that every single one of these is great, but not every one of them is great for your business. You really need to break down your business and figure out the features and tools that it can’t live without and which ones would be very profitable. Having figured out all of your wants and needs, you can proceed to buy ecommerce software.