Online shopping is on the rise worldwide and touching new heights. Therefore, businesses now focus on selling their products or services online by setting up their own eCommerce stores. Moreover, a significant challenge for these businesses is to select the right eCommerce platform. As time moves forward swiftly, the technologies are also becoming constructive and user-friendly. Indeed, we can see many eCommerce builders today with an intuitive and easy way to create eCommerce stores.
Selecting the right website builder is crucial when creating an eCommerce website. All your investment can go in vain when the wrong platform is chosen. Hence, you have to consider various aspects before opting for a platform for successful eCommerce website development. In 2022, choices are huge, and finding the right option is essential. The below points can help to sort out a perfect eCommerce platform.
Determine your requirements
Every business is different from others, so they have additional requirements and objectives. You must determine your business objectives before looking for any eligible developer. Identify your business’s goals to decide what you want to focus on. Keep these things in mind and examine how an eCommerce platform can meet your requirements.
For example, you may want to build a B2B website or need a B2C website based on your target market. Apart from this, you might be planning to create an online store to sell physical products or software, or a service. So, find out your eCommerce requirements and hire eCommerce web developers as per your needs.
Consider the following factors for this:
Quick setup: If you want to launch your eCommerce store in the least possible time, you should look for a platform with a quick setup. On it, you can build a website more quickly.
Cost: Break down the cost of creating and managing an eCommerce website. Check if the cost matches your budget.
User interface: Modifying the user journeys based on the insight you get from your site offers excellent control over your site. It helps you build a more intuitive website for your customers.
Ease of use: You want to choose a platform that you can use and operate without hassle.
Scalability: As you grow, you need to scale up. Select the platform that helps you easily scale your business.
Development and customization
The first thing you will want in your eCommerce store is the convenience of setting up your online storefront. You can rely on a suitable SaaS-based eCommerce platform for the ease and comfort of setting up an eCommerce store quickly. These platforms offer a simple framework that allows the creation of websites in a few clicks. They have simple features and tools to build, run, and maintain websites without much technical hassle. Hence, whether big or small, SaaS-based platforms are a feasible choice for business owners.
Another advantage of SaaS-based platforms is that online store owners don’t need to spend on upkeep or maintenance because software vendors maintain them. These platforms let you sign up and set up your store without coding knowledge. You can also use CMS-based websites, but they aren’t easy to work with.
You need to hire a professional eCommerce web development service provider for CMS. But the true potential of these platforms resides in customization. The CMS-based platforms are very flexible. Hence, you can develop highly customized solutions to meet your specific business needs. CMSs are ideal for larger enterprises seeking custom eCommerce website development services. For instance, Magento web development can be your choice for creating customized websites as per your requirements.
Product management
One of the core functionalities of an eCommerce platform resides in product management. Hence, in an eCommerce platform, you should check out how many products an eCommerce website lets you list on your online store. Different platforms offer different limits for product listing. Some platforms provide unlimited product listing, while others impose a cap.
If you are beginning in eCommerce, you will have only limited products, so you can opt for a platform with a cap on product listings that are often affordable. An eCommerce platform allows you to create compelling product pages for your online store that increase the likelihood of conversion.
Features and performance
Without any doubt, you would like to choose an eCommerce platform with high-performance and great features. Hence, you can compare various options available to you based on the feature set, performance, and support service. An excellent platform allows seamless third-party integration such as payment gateways, ERP/CRM, accounting & marketing tools, analytics tools, etc.
Moreover, performance is one of the crucial aspects of a successful eCommerce website as no one would like to visit an online store that is not user-friendly or loads too slowly. You can check different eCommerce platforms based on the performance parameters to select the most suitable option for you. For instance, Shopify outperforms most eCommerce platforms in website loading speed.
Your eCommerce platform should allow you to add custom functionalities. Mainly, eCommerce platforms offer a way to add more functionalities to an online store with the help of extensions, add-ons, or plugins. Besides this, you can also approach a reliable eCommerce web development company to integrate additional features.
Hosting and security
A crucial factor in an online business's success is secure and optimized hosting. We can categorize different eCommerce platforms based on how they are hosted. So, these platforms can be self-hosted or cloud-hosted. Majorly all CMS-based eCommerce platforms are self-hosted, but many also have editions with hosting. Self-hosted platforms are those where you need to spend on hosting to deploy your eCommerce platform on the server.
Cloud-based eCommerce platforms offer both the ability to build and maintain websites and hosting capabilities like Shopify. Shopify web development is ideal if you go with a cloud-based or SaaS eCommerce platform. You can opt for a platform with either self-hosting or cloud-hosting capabilities based on your requirements, budget, and business size. Often large enterprises go with self-hosting because they have on-premise servers to run their websites.
The eCommerce platform you choose should also comply with standards like PCI-DSS and GDPR. Also, these platforms should allow creating websites with the latest eCommerce trends. Check the top eCommerce trends for 2022 to implement on your site.
Wrapping up!
Online shopping is increasing, and people enjoy it more than ever before. Many businesses are inspired by this trend and encouraged to invest in eCommerce development. Selecting the right eCommerce platform is vital to creating a perfect solution. Moreover, many choices make it challenging to pick the most suitable option. The points discussed in this blog can help you find an ideal platform. Furthermore, you can rely on an eCommerce website development company to pick the right platform for you and create a tailor-made website.
Emily White is a veteran web development expert at CSSChopper, a well-acclaimed web development company. She is a passionate web developer and loves writing blogs and articles in her spare time. She enjoys coffee and web series when away from her system.
