eCommerce Platforms - The Basis For Rock-Solid Online Stores

“Without a solid foundation, you’ll have trouble creating anything of value.”
- Erika Oppenheimer

The above quote hints at the importance of a strong foundation while creating anything of value. Be it a multi-storey building or a house, you can’t think of sturdy architecture without a strong foundation. This analogy also holds true when it comes to website development. Here foundation basically refers to the platform for developing a website or an eCommerce store. A robust platform is pivotal to ensure a capable and scalable website that can stand the test of time.

Whether you’re a startup or a well-established firm, the prime reasons for creating an eCommerce website is to build your brand and reach your target audience far and wide. What might be a humble setup, in the beginning, can turn out to be a big shot in the coming years. Take the example of Amazon. What started as a small online store selling books, today, stands as one of the largest multi-store selling all kinds of products. Considering the lucrative opportunities of digital space and a promising future, it is crucial to create a flexible eCommerce platform, capable of adding more products, categories and handling higher user traffic. Similarly, if your eCommerce store has a few products in the beginning, it must be scalable enough to add more categories, products, vendors, payment gateways and customers when the need arises.

Furthermore, you need to ensure that the platform is highly dynamic to allow integration of new functionalities and features. This is necessary to keep pace with the upcoming technological advancements such as mobility, AR/VR, analytics and digital wallets. Another crucial factor is the ability to handle user traffic which, gradually, will increase over time. Along with this, the platform should easily integrate with various add-ons such as payment processing systems, shipping platforms, and currency conversions.

All the aforementioned requisites are essential for the success of your store and a sure shot way to get these rights is by hiring a professional eCommerce development company. They will ensure a store that is robust, scalable, secure, fits your budget and obviously attends to your business objectives. So, to help you kick-start your project, here’s a list of some of the best eCommerce platforms.

Popular eCommerce Platforms

Magento
One of the most popular eCommerce platforms, it powers more than 200,000 stores globally. It is a popular choice for building sturdy, flexible, secure and high-end eCommerce stores. Magento is among the top 3 eCommerce platforms performing highly across various metrics and is being used by popular businesses such as Coca-Cola, Ford, Nike, Samsung, Land Rover, Omega Watches, Huawei and Lenovo. If you wish to have a robust eCommerce store then Magento is the perfect fit. Simply ask an expert IT company offering Magento store development services for a custom store.

Highlights
1. Faster loading
2. Wider customization opportunities with more than 9000 plugins
3. Responsive designs for improved performance on smartphones
4. Highly secure
5. Improved SEO capabilities with features such as sitemaps, layered navigation, social media extensions, and URL rewrites

Shopify
A licensed software by a Canadian firm, it offers easy to customize online stores platform and retail point-of-sale systems. A great choice for small stores, it allows an enjoyable shopping experience even from mobile platforms. Some of the popular names running on Shopify include The Protein Bakery, Megpies, Tattly, and WWF Canada. with a really flexible architecture, a plethora of inbuilt features and a stepwise walkthrough, creating eCommerce stores with Shopify is as easy as a pie. You too can use Shopify to build your store by hiring Shopify Development Services from a professional company.

Highlights
1. Subscription based model (Allows 14 days free trial)
2. Allows integration with Facebook account and converts it into an eCommerce store
3. Provision to recover an abandoned cart
4. More than 2000 plugins for shopping, payment gateways, marketing, accounting and more
5. Proficient and mobile-friendly store management features

BigCommerce
With a 15 days free trial, BigCommerce comes with a subscription model. It offers numerous features such as newsletters, coupons, shipping, and analytics. It has a great interface, comes with Google, Facebook and eBay shopping and 80+ paid professional themes. When it comes to popularity, it empowers more than 40,000 online stores across SMEs and large enterprises. Some of the famous names running BigCommerce include Toyota, Sharp, Skullcandy, PayPal, Pandora, Ford UK, Fujitsu, and Motorola.

Highlights
1. A wide choice of both paid and free responsive themes
2. Availability of Sub-domain and hosting space
3. Mobile responsive for an immersive experience across multiple devices
4. Multiple payment gateways and unlimited bandwidth
5. Additional features such as stats for abandoned carts, detailed analytics, and purchase funnels

WooCommerce
A great choice for small to medium scale enterprises, WooCommerce is an open-source plugin offered by the popular WordPress. A staggering 2 million websites around the globe are built using WooCommerce, making it the most popular platform for eCommerce stores. Besides the support for multi-vendor eCommerce stores, it is a complete feature-packed choice. It comes with various advanced features such as hundreds of plugins (paid and free), secure payment gateways and a plethora of attractive themes.

Highlights
1. Supports multiple payment options
2. Easily integrates with WordPress
3. A wide choice in terms of responsive themes, plugins, and extensions
4. Analytics to track user behavior and plan marketing strategies

Conclusion
Having an online version of your business has now become more of a necessity than a choice. To widen your reach and attend to the need for a viable eCommerce platform, it is important to choose the right platform. However, deciding which platform is the best of all is difficult as what might work for one kind of business may not yield desirable results for another. A platform should be such, that aptly attends to your business objective, nature of the business, target audience and help you expand your sales funnel.

A Step In The Right Direction
Developing an eCommerce store requires expertise to ensure quality solutions.
The best way to do this is to connect with professionals who can ensure highly scalable stores capable of handling loads and deliver an immersive user experience. You can connect with the experts at TechnoScore for all your queries. Simply drop an email at info@technoscore.com and get a free consultation. After all, there’s no harm in getting an opinion from the industry experts.