ShivaniThe recent Covid-19 pandemic that struck the whole world forced people to stay indoors. To break the infection chain, they stayed indoors. Online shopping helped them buy food, clothes, medicines, equipment, and more from the convenience of their home. According to e-commerce statistics, the trend has continued to stay even over the years after
So, many businesses are continually making their offerings available online. If your business is planning to do so, this blog is here to help. For, there are plenty of options to choose from regarding e-commerce platforms. We’ve picked some of the top, all-inclusive e-commerce platforms to run your e-store on
8+ Best e-commerce platforms to run your e-store on
The right e-commerce platform will be affordable and make it easy for you to build your e-store. It’ll also have all the functionalities and features needed to bring you site traffic, nurture leads, and generate sales. Here are eight such software picks for you.
1. Square Online
Square Online is an e-commerce platform used by various industries. It has features for multi-channel selling. It provides POS (Point Of Sale), which would benefit those businesses that would need it for in-person sales. It also has excellent inventory management to enable you to keep track of your stock, irrespective of the channel through which a sale occurs. It incorporates multiple delivery options including shipping, delivery, pickup, etc.
Features:
- Drag and drop interface
- Inventory management
- POS
- Abandoned cart (only available under their Performance plan)
- Basic reporting
Pricing: There are both free and priced plans available. The priced plans begin at $12 per month, which is billed annually. The free plan doesn’t allow you to have a custom domain name. Besides, you have to endure the vendor’s ads.
2. Shopify
Shopify is suitable for e-commerce businesses aiming at omnichannel sales. You can either import a domain or buy a custom one. Its most outstanding feature is its numerous dropshipping integrations. Its downside is that it has only a limited selection of free themes. However, many users report that even its basic plan is adequate to run its e-store.
Features:
- Drag and drop interface
- Dropshipping integrations
- Built-in selling features
- Omni-channel selling
- Abandoned cart recovery
- Shipping discounts
- POS access
Pricing: There is no free plan available. The priced plans start at $29 per month. You can try their 14-day free trial before buying any plan.
3. Yo!Kart
Yo!Kart is the ultimate self-hosted eCommerce platform for building and customizing your own online store. It is a user-friendly platform along with various features to simplify the process of building an eCommerce marketplace. The features like customizable design, advanced product management, and integrated payment gateways make it an ideal eCommerce platform.
Overall, Yo!Kart is a powerful and easy-to-use solution for building your own eCommerce marketplace. It can save you a lot of time, money, and effort to build a marketplace from scratch.
Features:
- Multi-vendor support for easy management of multiple sellers and their products
- Robust inventory management system
- Advanced shipping and tax options
- SEO optimization for better visibility in search engines
- Mobile-responsive design for optimal user experience on any device
Pricing:
Yo!Kart has 4 different pricing packages for different business requirements.
- GoQuick – $999
- GoQuick Boost – $2499
- GoCustom – $7499
- GoCustom Prime – RFQ
4. Ecwid
Ecwid is an e-commerce platform for those e-sellers who already have a blog or website. That is, it allows you to convert your existing website into an e-store. It is affordable and offers a free plan. It doesn’t charge any transaction fee on any plan. However, it restricts multi-channel selling and inventory to the priced plans alone. And it makes available POS functionality only on its Unlimited plan. Other downsides are its limited designs and lack of custom orders on the free as well as pro plans.
Features:
- Drag and drop interface
- Multichannel selling
- No transaction fees
Pricing: There is a free plan which allows selling only ten products. The priced plans start at $12.50 per month (billed annually).
5. eWorldTrade
A global e-commerce marketplace called eWorldTrade connects buyers and sellers from all around the world. It gives users many functionalities to ease global trade, such as supplier finding, order administration, payment processing, and product listings.
Features:
- Product Listings
- Supplier Discovery:
- Order Management
- Payment Processing
- Trade Assurance
Pricing:
eWorldTrade offers a range of membership plans to accommodate different kinds of businesses. While premium plans offer extra features and perks like priority customer service and increased visibility, basic membership is free.
6. Shift4Shop
Shift4Shop plan is a completely free e-commerce platform for users in the US, provided they use its credit card processor. If you want to use your own payment processor, a paid plan is essential. Its features are robust and allow unlimited staff accounts. It’s user-friendly and has more than 100 free themes. However, it has its own demerits including limited integration and customization options.
Features:
- No revenue caps
- Fraud protection
- Drag-and-drop interface
- Digital and physical products
- Unlimited product
Pricing: A robust free plan is available. The priced plans begin at $29 per month and go up to $229 per month.
7. Wix
Wix is a popular all-inclusive e-commerce AI website builder. It’s smart, beginner-friendly, and user-friendly, and offers many high-quality e-store templates for free. It’s feature-rich and allows selling unlimited products, making recurring payments, and recovering abandoned carts. However, it has limited storage of 50 GB. If you want unlimited storage, the cost of website design climbs to $59 per month.
Features:
- Free templates
- Unlimited products
- Drag and drop interface
- Limited dropshipping integrations
- All-inclusive plans
- Multi-lingual stores
- Abandoned cart recovery
Pricing: The plans start at $14 per month and go up to $39 per month. You can try Wix for free.
8. Zyro
Zyro is an affordable e-commerce builder for small businesses and beginners. It lets you create an aesthetically appealing and fully functional e-store effortlessly. It also allows you to sell your products both on your e-store and on sites like Instagram, Amazon, and Facebook.
Key Features:
- Drag and drop interface
- Variety of e-store templates
- Marketing tools
- Search engine optimization
- Order and inventory management
- Abandoned cart recovery
- Product upselling
- 70+ payment options
Pricing: There’s no free plan available. The priced plans begin at $2.61 per month and go up to $14.31 per month. You can try any of them for free.
9. Sellfy
Sellfy is a powerful and easy-to-use cloud-based e-commerce platform. You can sell physical goods, digital products, and subscriptions through it. It has built-in marketing tools and analytic reporting. You can create your site and get it running in minutes using its user-friendly dashboard.
Features:
- Integrations
- Easy-to-use interface
- Marketing tools
- Upselling features
- Design Customization
- Custom domain
- Mobile-optimized
- In-depth analytics
Pricing: A free plan is available. The priced plans start at $19 per month and go up to $99 per month. There is a 14-day free trial period offered.
10. ShopBase
ShopBase is an e-commerce platform that has been around only since June 2019. You can easily transfer your store and import your products from another platform to ShopBase. It has features to optimize everything on your product pages and checkout page automatically. However, it doesn’t integrate with many third-party platforms and tools.
Features:
- White-labelling
- Cross-border commerce
- Dropshipping
- Fully-customizable
- Mobile-optimized
- Abandoned cart recovery
- 99.98% Uptime
- 24/7 downtime monitoring
Pricing: There is no free version of this software available. Their plans start at $19/month. You can try its 14-day free trial before buying one of its plans.
Making the most of your e-commerce platform
We’ve listed and discussed eight of the best e-commerce platforms available out there. Depending on your need, feature set offered, and budget, you can choose the right solution from among them. We suggest that you engage in referral marketing apart from employing other marketing techniques. A tool like InviteReferrals can help you in this regard. You can try it for free!
FAQ
Q1. What is an e-commerce platform?
Ans: An e-commerce platform is a piece of software that enables e-commerce businesses to manage their website, operations, marketing, and sales online. These have features for order tracking, payments, replacements, and refunds.
Q2. Are there any more good e-commerce platforms?
Ans: Yes, apart from those mentioned in this blog, there are also other good e-commerce platforms. Some of these include BigCommerce, Nexcess, Big Cartel, FastSpring, Woo Commerce, Weebly, SquareSpace, and 2Checkout.
Q3. Why should you use an e-commerce platform?
Ans : Using an e-commerce platform gives you the following advantages-
1. An online catalog to display your products and their descriptions.
2. Gives you higher visibility on search engines.
3. Offers complete automation of payments, checkout, invoicing, and inventory management.
4. Helps in keeping track of your customer’s purchasing behavior.
5. Facilitates reaching out to a global consumer population.
