The Cloud Based Ecommerce Platforms That You Can Depend On
Today, if you want to sell your items successfully online, it’s a difficult feat to accomplish on your own. Fortunately, though, there are now many ecommerce platforms to choose from in order to make the transition into ecommerce an easy and prosperous one. However, there are a lot of factors that you need to take into consideration when selecting a platform. Often time, one of the biggest questions that businesses face is whether they should get an on premise or a cloud based one.
This decision is made particularly based on how much money you make and spend in order to operate. Additionally, you need to take into consideration your business’s ability to expand as well as whether you’ll take advantage of market opportunities.
On-premise vs Cloud-based
Since on premise ones need to be installed locally in the business’s hardware systems, you’ll need to have the funds for the investment into infrastructure. Additionally, there will be ongoing costs for things such as hardware maintenance, power and cooling, etc. More staff will need to be trained, too. On premise systems are usually pretty reliable, but this remains true until there is an update, which would cause the company to run into problems, which is why many of them prefer to continue to just run outdated technology. In addition, since they aren’t the easiest to customize and make them better, it hinders businesses from going after any new market opportunities that could potentially increase profits.
Cloud based ecommerce software, on the other hand, is a SaaS, therefore all customer information can be found on the Internet “cloud”, which is where the vendor both hosts and manages the software. They are also responsible for things such as data security, bug fixes, and creating new features. The user ends up having a significantly smaller initial cost. Here, if there are any updates, they just can be automatically updated with the consent of the user. A cloud based ecommerce software also lets businesses take full potential of any market opportunities since you can quickly add any extra sites for various business models, brands, and locations. In addition, they also for easier scalability, therefore you have more flexibility with managing the number of customers that you have as your company expands.
Having dug in a bit deeper into the both of them, it’s safe to say that a cloud-based ecommerce platform is much more advantageous to those with little funding and that are looking to grow, not to mention it’s a whole lot less of a hassle. However, today there are many cloud-based ones to choose from. Selecting one should be solely based on your business wants and needs, but it may be beneficial to outline some of the best ones out there to see whether or not they could be beneficial to you since after all, these are the ones that have been tried and tested.
Shopify
This cloud based commerce platform is especially beneficial to little and medium-size companies. Users utilize the platform in order to design, establish, as well as manage their stores on multiple channels such as online, mobile, social media, and physical stores. For the website, they offer templates, mobile templates, designs, social and security tools, payments and API. The page speed is around 4-6 seconds. When it comes to marketing, they don’t offer users much apart from abandon autoresponders. The same can be said for online operations. Offline, however, they do offer shipping. In regards to support, they also offer customer and emergency phone support. They also provide users with expert marketing tutorials.
Monthly, you’ll be spending anywhere from $1,000 up to $4,000.
BigCommerce
This cloud based ecommerce solution provides users with many tools and features that are useful for creating an online shop such as a securely hosted site, shopping cart, item catalog, etc. They offer themes as well as point-and-click design features, easing up the creation process, regardless of the skill level that you hold. Additionally, they’ve got built-in marketing and conversion optimization tools that are beneficial towards the promotion of your company.
For the website, the offer mobile, design, social, and payment tools along with API. Page speed is somewhere around 4-6 seconds. They also provide abandon autoresponders for marketing. Online operations, however, are nonexistent, but they do offer shipping for offline operations. Much like Shopify, they do offer support such as customer and emergency phone support along with tutorials.
Monthly, BigCommerce costs somewhere between $299 and $1,000, but with room for an even higher cost due to many additional fees.
Shopping Cart Elite
Shopping Cart Elite is great for you if you want to successfully implement SEO, PPC, as well as social media marketing campaigns. They really work with your company to figure out what exactly you want and how to accomplish it with a well thought out plan.
When it comes to the actual website, SCE offers mobile, design, social, security, payment, and email account tools. They also have smart search, CMS, B2B, data entry, live chat, and API. The page speed is below 2 seconds per load. Additionally, you can sell on multiple marketplaces such as Amazon, eBay, Google Shopping, Rakuten, Sears, Newegg, Overstock, and Jet. Additionally, they provide SEO, email marketing, abandon and custom autoresponders, CRM, predictive analytics, and automation, just to name a few.
They also offer an abundance of both online and offline operations. A few online ones include order processing, customer service, reports, and projects. Offline, they offer shipping, warehouse, accounting, and POS. When it comes to support, they offer you all of the support that you could possibly need including customer, on screen technical, and emergency phone support. On top of that, they also provide users with tutorials as well as an account manager.
As you can see, there’s a reason why these three are some of the top cloud based ecommerce platforms. However, it’s up to you to figure out which one meets your business wants and needs the best.