How to choose the right E-commerce platform [in-depth guide]

The e-commerce business is extremely profitable niche and it’s rapidly growing. Just look at the chart below. According to Statista E-commerce stores have approximately generated 2800 billion dollars globally in 2018. And this number is going to be almost doubled in 2021. But to take a sweet piece of this big pie, you have to have a powerful website. Below we’ll cover how to choose the right Ecommerce platform.

E-commerce sales in billion US. dollars

Requirements Gathering

Before researching all the platforms out there, you should understand your business needs and what you expect from the platform. Here are few questions you should ask yourself:

Operational requirements

• Do you need a specific product’s configuration?
• Or specific logic of products bundling?
• Are advanced subscriptions required?
• How many items and in which way will be fulfilled per day? (e.g. automatic/manual fulfillment, special services integration?)
• Will shipping cost calculation be there?

Think about any additional business operations specifications that are crucial for your business.

Integrations

• Do you need to integrate specific third-party services (e.g. CRM, email marketing service, analytics etc.)?
• What is a connection type of the services (e.g. API, a third-party app, script integration)?

Design & UX

• How do you want your website to look like?
• What are the key user journeys?
• Do you have specific front-end features requirements?
• Do you want to use a ready-built theme or custom front-end solution?
• Do you need an AMP/PWA version of the website?
• Maybe your website should work as a web application without page reload and with the highest performance?

Content management

• Do you need content like pages and blog posts managed?
• Does it have to be one system E-commerce + CMS or two separate united on the front-end (e.g. headless E-commerce)?
• What is the preferred type of page building? (e.g. drag&drop, blocks structure, visual editor)

Catalog management & setup

• How is product catalog filled (e.g data import, manual filling)?
• If there is data import, which way it is imported (e.g. CSV file import, inventory management systems integration)?
• Do you need specific product types?
• What are the product details(e.g. size, weight, color etc)? And how do they have to be managed?
• Are there any complex price calculations?

Promotions

• Are you going to do promotions, sales, discounts?
• What type of discounts and sales are they going to be (e.g. time-specific, first order, etc.)?
• Do you need to place banners, forms, popups?

Payments

• What payment’s methods do you want to support?
• Are any third-party payments getaways required?

Marketing

• What are your marketing channels (e.g. SEO, social media, contextual advertising)?
• What specific integrations do you need for successful marketing (e.g. email-marketing, schema-markup, social media sharing buttons, analytics, BI tools, marketplaces, etc.)?

Understanding your requirements will help you easily filter e-commerce platforms. For example, if you want to build a big enterprise e-commerce website with tens of thousands of items and personalized experience for each user, you should definitely look to enterprise solutions.

Open Source, SaaS (Software as a Service) or CaaS (Commerce as a Service)?

E-commerce platforms can be classified by 3 types:

• Open Source
• SaaS (Software as a Service)
• CaaS (Commerce as a Service)

Let’s learn more about each of them below.

Open Source E-commerce Platforms

Open source means that you have full access to the code. Usually, you have to download the whole system and host it by yourself.

Consider this before choosing this type:

• Where you will be hosted? How much bandwidth and storage do you need? Do you need VPS, standard hosting or cloud hosting?
• You will have to do manual updates when the new version of system or apps is released.
• How you will secure your system?
• How PCI compliance will be followed?
• CRM, ERM, analytics, etc. integrations
• Is there themes marketplace and is there the possibility of custom development?

Open source platforms require more time and money for maintenance than SaaS solutions but give you more control over the website.

Considering this, more and more brands are moving towards SaaS and CaaS solutions.

Because in today’s fast-changing world it’s too expensive to maintain the whole system as on average open-source e-commerce platforms are 6 times more expensive to maintain than SaaS or CaaS models.

If you would like to use an open-source system, consider these vendors:

Best open source e-commerce platforms

• Magento is a leading free open-source e-commerce platform. It provides you with all the necessary tools for building an online store and if you need something additional, there is a store with plugins and themes. Highly flexible and scalable CMS.
• PrestaShop is in a list of top open-source e-commerce systems. It is used by more than 270,000 online stores worldwide. It has thousands of plugins and themes to enhance your website.
• WooCommerce is an e-commerce extension for CMS WordPress. It has a lot of powerful features that help you build full-featured online store based on CMS Wordpress.
• Opencart is another free opensource online store management platform that gives you an opportunity to manage multiple stores from one place. It is easy-to-use and scale.

SaaS e-commerce platforms

You can remove a lot of the weight from your shoulders by just “renting” a SaaS e-commerce platform that will take responsibility for maintenance, hosting and security. In addition, it’s much cheaper than owning the platform itself.

Developers often complain to lack of flexibility in customization as there is no direct access to the code, but it can be solved with a help of APIs and third-party apps.

Best SaaS e-commerce platforms:

• Shopify is one of the most popular e-commerce platforms that are already hosted, you only pay a monthly subscription for using it. It has a lot of powerful features to run a successful online store like rich product details, analytics, coupons, apps, but it is mostly focused on small and mid-sized business. If you want to build an enterprise-level business using Shopify, consider Shopify Plus.
  Shopify provides unlimited products and bandwidth, which give you the opportunity to scale as fast as you want. Moreover, there are a strong analytics system built-in and mobile app to track your store’s data.
• BigCommerce is the most popular SaaS E-commerce platform on the market. They provide unlimited storage, products, and bandwidth with features like real-time shipping quotes, gift cards, and 24/7 support.
  As BigCommerce is an old and powerful player, it provides a strong and easy-to-use store management system with detailed analytics, not to mention easy integration with third-party services like CRM, ERM, email marketing.
  In addition to basic features, there is a marketplace with additional apps and themes to enhance your website.
• Volusion is another top player on the market which is used among the top 10,000 e-commerce websites of the world. It provides all the same features as its competitors to build a powerful online store, but it differentiates by providing built-in loyalty program for your customers and Deal of the Day option.
• Wix is a popular website builder and its e-commerce part doesn’t impress with its features. But it can be very effective if you have a small number of products and need a well-branded website, as Wix’s strong side is a visually appealing page builder.

CaaS e-commerce platforms

Commerce as a Service (CaaS) or headless commerce platforms gives you an opportunity to “plug in” e-commerce service into your CMS like Wordpress or your web application via API.

First, there was a monolithic solution like open source CMS, where everything was under your roof and managed in-house.

Then, a SaaS solution emerged providing companies with more speed, features, and scalability.

Nowadays, e-commerce websites become more and more complex. They have to be high-performable, beautiful, contain a lot of content, personalized and smooth user experience, integrate a lot of third-party services for analytics and marketing and use a strong and reliable e-commerce platform. There is no such solution that does everything. Every company specifies on their strong side. Wordpress provides the best content-management solution, BigCommerce covers your back in e-commerce and Salesforce CRM will manage your customers. That is why you have to build your website from different pieces like a puzzle.

Yes, this solution requires a development team and is needed for big companies only.

Discover the Magic Quadrant of enterprise e-commerce platforms players:

Things to consider while choosing an e-commerce platform

All the requirements you have

At the start, we have talked about requirements gathering. It’s important to have a personal checklist of features and choose a platform according to them. Below we will provide some additional and important aspects while choosing an e-commerce system.

Pricing and Payments

Whether your business is just getting started or is already up and running, you need to know how much you will be paying and what for.

The pricing will depend on the type of platform you choose and the size of the business you are going to run. If you will use a SaaS solution, there is a monthly fee that doesn’t vary much among competitors. But if you will use an open source CMS, which mostly are free, consider the pricing of hosting services.

You should also consider which forms of payments you will accept on your website. Some platforms don’t support third-party payment providers like PayPal. This can cause a huge inconvenience for customers, so keep that in mind while choosing an e-commerce platform.

Integrations

We have mentioned integrations in requirements gathering part. Now is the time to research if the platform is supporting them. Most of the e-commerce vendors have an immense base of apps. You have to search if there are apps for tools you exactly use or if there is an ability to paste a third-party code.

SEO Friendliness

SEO can bring you free traffic from search engines, that’s why it is so important to check potential platform on SEO friendliness.

Consider these, while choosing an e-commerce platform:

• Blog feature support
• User-friendly URLs
• Schema.org markup
• The ability to edit meta tags like title and description

Mobile Friendliness

In 2018 there was more traffic from mobile devices than from desktop. It is critical for your website to be mobile-friendly.

Consider if the themes the vendor provides are responsive and if there is an ability to add AMP version of pages. Moreover, the page load speed matters, so test this parameter too using tools like Pingdom.

Customer Service

There is a risk that your servers will be down, or there will be an error in the code, due to some update. You have to be sure that you can contact specialists to fix this sort of things. Check if the e-commerce platform vendor has support. Is it 24/7? What type of support do they provide (chat, forum, email, phone)?

In case, you have custom development of the website, be sure your development team is always ready to do urgent fixes.

Security

People will use their credit cards on your websites, so security is crucial. Most of SaaS solutions have strong security and you don’t have to worry about that. But when you host your website on your own, there can be some issues.

Consider these aspects:

• SSL certificate and HTTPS protocol
• PCI compliance

Scalability

You always should think ahead in business. Make sure that the platform you choose can scale with your business. If it’s a SaaS solution, check their plans to know how much products, memory, and bandwidth can you use for what price. If you will host an open-source CMS, check capabilities of hosting provider and how hard is it to scale.

Conclusion

Choosing the right platform for your ecommerce website can be challenging as requires a lot of parameters including business size, products types and budget. But you can always contact us to get a free consultation on what platforms will work best for you.