What is the Best Ecommerce Platform for Small Businesses

In this fast-paced world, most of the retailers aspire to give their business an online presence! The reason why the eCommerce industry is growing more significantly than ever. The most important million-dollar question is, what is the best eCommerce platform for small businesses?

Of course, there are many options available. Here, let’s explore some of the best eCommerce platforms for small business owners.

What are the Key Stats About eCommerce and Small Businesses?

Before diving deep into the topic, let’s understand where small businesses stand

• Small and Medium Businesses(SMB) accounts for 90% of the businesses and 50% of the employees worldwide.
• 55% of the GDP is generated by SMBs in developed countries

This shows that small businesses form the core of the business world. Now, how significant is eCommerce for small businesses?

The pandemic has made people go digital in every possible aspect, and business is no different.

As a result, eCommerce has become the go-to way for most small businesses not just to survive but to thrive in this field.

23% – the growth of the eCommerce industry year over year.

The above graph shows the expected global eCommerce sales predicted by eMarketer.

Why Choosing the Right eCommerce Platform Crucial?

Well, here is the answer.

Any eCommerce platform can have several features. But you won’t get the desired results unless they match your business’s scale and operational objectives.

Consider giving importance to the following factors while choosing the eCommerce platform for your business.

• Business size and budget
• Type of products you sell
• Targeted locations and market
• Your technical expertise

So, choose the eCommerce platform based on how well it fits your bill and not just on a popularity basis.

What to look for in an eCommerce Platform?

Once your business pain points are listed, now start looking for the features and factors that help you run an eCommerce business efficiently.

User-Friendly Website Builder,

Not everyone who wants to set up an eCommerce store needs not be well-versed in the technical aspects of a website. So, an eCommerce platform should have tools and features that are easier enough for small business owners to use and build their stores.

More Customization Features

Setting up an eCommerce store means not only website creation. It means building your brand!

You may prefer to have your own logos, own themes, and own slogans. Considering that, the eCommerce platform should offer a versatile set of customization features, enabling you to have complete control over your branding.

Integrations and Plugins

There will be a lot of operations involved in running an eCommerce store like shopping cart integration, marketing automation, customer relationship management, cart abandonment recovery, conversion rate optimization, and so on.

Being the store owner, you will need specialized plugins not only for these processes but for many other purposes. Eg: The Email Customizer Plus plugin allows the store owners to edit and modify the transaction emails of their WooCommerce store.

Therefore, an ideal E-Commerce platform for small businesses should allow software integration.

Safe and Secured Database

The retailers will have to deal with a huge amount of data regarding their e-business. By providing a centralized, safe, and secured space for them to store and access these data, eCommerce software can turn out to be the store owners’ best bet.

Budget-friendly eCommerce Platform

Last but not least! As a retailer, you may expect an ideal value for the money you invest on eCommerce platforms. You are not alone! Any small business owner will expect the same.

So, an eCommerce platform providing cost-friendly pricing plans can benefit small businesses a lot.

Best eCommerce Platforms for Small Businesses

We have seen the list of characteristics that could make an eCommerce platform the best for small businesses. Now, let’s explore some of the popular eCommerce platforms available in the town.

WooCommerce

Built for WordPress websites, WooCommerce has emerged as one of the best eCommerce platforms for small businesses over the years. Thanks to its flexibility, building an eCommerce store using WooCommerce is an easy process.

Special Features:

• Highly Adaptable to Integrations
  Its ability to easily integrate with different types of plugins makes it superior to other eCommerce software. Apart from its official extensions, it supports third-party plugins too.
• E-Commerce Developers like Flycart offer different kinds of plugins, fulfilling many purposes, specifically for WooCommerce stores.
• WordPress Model
  Similar to WordPress, WooCommerce is also easy to use and highly secured. It’s easy to turn a simple WordPress website into an eCommerce store using WooCommerce.
• Top-Class Content Management System
  Being an application based on the world’s best Content Management System(CMS), Woocommerce has some valuable content management options, letting you produce high-quality content for your eCommerce store.

Shopify

Featuring a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model, Shopify powers millions of small eCommerce stores already. It offers a cloud-based service for retailers who wish to start an eCommerce store. Its advanced features make it one of the top eCommerce sites for small businesses.

Special Features:

• Boundless Customization Options
  With its wide range of customization features, Shopify lets you optimize and enhance your eCommerce store with utmost ease and perfection.
• Pay on Need
  Its SaaS model allows small business owners to choose a pricing plan that suits their business needs perfectly. They can purchase the add-on features only when they find a need for them.
• Free SSL Certificate
  You never have to worry about data security with Shopify. Providing free Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificates for the retailers, Shopify ensures complete data protection.

BigCommerce

BigCommerce is yet another SaaS eCommerce platform that gained the acclamation of many small and medium businesses over the years. Its incredible set of built-in tools can simplify the process of building and managing an eCommerce store.

Special Features:

• One-Page Checkout Optimization
  Many customers find a long, sequenced checkout process a tedious task. BigCommerce’s optimized one-page checkout lets your small business ensure a trouble-free checkout experience for the customers.
• Visual Merchandiser
  This is an add-on feature of BigCommerce that allows you to sort and customize the order of the products displayed for your customers. With a simple drag-and-drop tool, arrange the products the way you want.
• Flexible Product Listing Options
  A product listing page should always be dynamic and informative, and that’s why listing optimization is crucial. Providing several formatting options from drop-downs to size charts, BigCommerce paves the way for you to list your products flawlessly.

Wix

If you are looking for a high-performing eCommerce platform to enhance your small business, Wix can be the right choice. Renowned widely as one of the beginner-friendly eCommerce platforms, Wix focuses primarily on the performance features of an eCommerce website.

Special Features:

• Wix ADI
  Have design ideas for your eCommerce website but don’t know where to start? Don’t worry. Wix’s Artificial Design Intelligence(ADI) will guide you. All you need is to feed all the details to this AI website-building tool about how you want your website to look and it will take care of the rest.
• Wix Mobile Website Editor
  Automatically extracting the content from your desktop site, this tool creates a mobile-responsive version of your eCommerce store. It modifies the layout of the site in a way that suits all screen sizes, providing a smooth experience to your mobile users.
• Wix SEO Wiz
  Increased visibility is what every small eCommerce site owners yearn for, and Search Engine Optimization(SEO) has been their trump card to achieve that. Offering step-by-step guides, tutorials, and suggestions, Wiz SEO wiz ensures that your site ranks higher in the search results.

SquareSpace

The small business owners who are raring to build an eCommerce store with unique designs and an eye-pleasing interface may find SquareSpace as the ideal platform. Its extraordinary site-building tools allow any retailer to completely personalize their store as per their preferences.

Special Features:

Enormous Collection of Templates and Layouts
Build all the pages of your eCommerce site in minutes, using the pre-built layouts of SquareSpace. Designed exquisitely, each of its templates carries the potential to provide a top-notch look to your store’s interface.

Outstanding Social Media Marketing Options
Need to promote your brand vigorously through Social Media? This is the tool you are looking for! Enabling you to integrate your social media pages with your site, SquareSpace offers multiple options to meet your Social Media Marketing targets.

Incredible Inventory Management
In SquareSpace, the number of products you can sell is unlimited. No matter how many products you sell, you can manage the inventory information of all your products without any sort of hassle.

Signing Off

Now, we have seen some of the best eCommerce softwares for small businesses in the town. With the continuous advancement of modern-day technology, it’s evident that the world of eCommerce will continue to be blessed with more and more promising eCommerce solutions in the coming years.

But again, even though there will be many options, choose the eCommerce platform that is perfectly suitable for your business. Best of Luck!