Having a successful eCommerce store depends on the software you choose. After all, your store will be the face of your brand and the main point of contact between you and your customers. If you choose something that’s too difficult to use or has a clunky interface, it could mean the difference between an eCommerce success story and abject failure for your small business.
With literally hundreds of options available, choosing the right platform for you can be overwhelming. In this post, we’ve done all the hard work for you by reviewing the best eCommerce platforms available today. We’ll show you how to choose one (and which ones to avoid), plus some tips on what features to look for when selecting your next shopping cart software.
Forget setting up an eCommerce store from scratch – today, there are plenty of hosted solutions that do most of the heavy lifting for you. All you have to do is select a design, add products, integrate payment gateways like PayPal and Stripe, and then market your store to attract customers.
However, some platforms are more beginner-friendly than others, giving them an edge over their competition in terms of usability. The best platforms don’t have a learning curve, anyone could do it.
Top 5 eCommerce Platforms for Small Businesses
The best small business eCommerce platforms offer low and predictable costs, high levels of customization, and advanced features. These features can help you sell your products online with ease. We consider pricing, plugins, templates, and other factors to narrow down our top five choices.
BigCommerce
BigCommerce is the best eCommerce platform for small business owners. They have a 15-day free trial, so you can give it a try and see if it’s right for you. If you’re just starting out, here are 10 reasons why BigCommerce is your best bet:
1. No transaction fees on your orders.
2. Hundreds of beautiful themes to choose from.
3. Integrated reviews and rating system.
4. Integrated blogging engine (for search engine traffic).
5. Integrated social sharing tools (to promote products).
6. Built-in email marketing software (to automate promotions).
7. Integrates with 100+ apps including Google Shopping and Facebook Ads Manager (for Facebook advertising).
8. Mobile responsive design that looks great on all devices including smartphones and tablets.
9. Abandoned cart saver to automatically recover missed deals by sending emails with discount codes when someone abandons their shopping cart without buying anything.
Shopify
Shopify is an e-commerce platform and service provider that provides a complete system for setting up an online store, with features for every step of the process, from payment processing and shipping to marketing.
Shopify provides e-commerce solutions that help people set up, manage and scale their businesses. The company offers both a DIY site builder and hosted shopping cart, as well as integrated payment gateway and point-of-sale (POS) systems.
Shopify offers integration with 70+ payment gateways so you can accept payments from all over the world. You can also access your entire order history across all of your sales channels in one place, so you have the data you need at your fingertips when it’s time to analyze your sales and make business decisions.
Magento
Magento is the best eCommerce platform for small business owners who want to start online businesses. Magento is an open source eCommerce platform that gives online merchants a flexible shopping cart system as well as control over the look, content, and functionality of their online store. It uses the MySQL/MariaDB relational database management system, the PHP programming language, and elements of the Zend Framework. It applies the conventions of object-oriented programming and the model-view-controller architecture. Magento also uses entity-attribute-value model to store data.
Magento was acquired by eBay in 2011 for $180 million. Today, it’s one of the most popular e-commerce platforms in the world, with over 250,000 merchants using it to power their stores.
ecwid
Ecwid is a fully hosted and cloud-based eCommerce solution, which means the Ecwid team handles all updates and maintenance of your software for you.
Ecwid does not charge any transaction fees. They charge a monthly fee to use the platform, and this starts at $15/month for their paid plan which allows you to sell up to 10 products.
The setup process is simple, intuitive and fast. You can have a store up and running in just a few minutes.
You can easily add Ecwid to your existing website or blog – they offer over 40 integrations with popular platforms like WordPress, Facebook, Joomla!, Wix, Tumblr, Squarespace, Weebly, and more.
