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E-commerce also referred to as E-Business has acquired a significant uptick in recent times, especially since non-essential businesses have also started adapting to this platform on a large scale.
It is the sale and purchase of products, solutions, and services online, according to the customer’s interest and preference. This way, the majority of businesses today have acquired a wide reach over global targeted audiences, increasing sales, conversion rate, and revenue through Custom E-commerce Development.
What is an E-Commerce Platform?
Emerging as one of the biggest drivers of business growth in the global marketplace today, experts have predicted that global e-commerce sales will rise 50% beyond $8 trillion by 2026. (Source)
This is a useful platform where sellers and customers get to interact with each other, purchasing online goods and products, after customization and integration with other functioning systems.
An e-commerce platform also provides multiple scopes to the users to take advantage of business optimization, personalized services, and enhanced consumer experience.
Some key features of all e-commerce platforms are as follows –
- Functioning on a unified, single platform
- Offering a customer view of 360 degree
- Intelligent management of orders
- Delivering unique experiences for customers
- Support expansion for unlimited services
Today, there are diverse kinds of E-commerce platforms and company services, readily designed to support both startups and running businesses to reach a level of sustenance in the industry. Let us look at some of the renowned and well-known e-commerce platforms.
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Magento
Magento is one of the leading and popular open-source E-Commerce platforms, innovatively designed and feature-rich to support businesses and industries across diverse industrial verticals.
It is built in PHP, built on the framework called Zend. Studies reveal that almost 26% of global e-commerce websites use this platform to execute their everyday functions. It is suitable for long-term usage, and is highly professional and customizable.
Reliable and ensured with tightened security measures, it allows multi-platform integration, has high speed, and is also SEO friendly. It is mobile responsive as well. The community edition of Magento is completely free. The enterprise edition starts from $22,000.
This tool is extremely powerful for B2B and B2C businesses, especially startups because of its responsive functioning, increased potential for cross-selling, and high capabilities.
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Shopify
An all-in-one solution for online businesses, Shopify is an E-commerce app that is integrated with a variety of new technological features. It supports seamless inventory management, integrated with supreme SEO features and functionality, thus upholding secure online transactional mediums too.
It allows professional management of inventory where you can track and monitor your stock and products. Shopify also provides 24*7 customer assistance and support. It functions with tremendous speed and is also greatly flexible.
There are beautiful themes that startup businesses can implement to increase their sale by reaching out to a wider reach audience. Shopify provides a free trial version, for 14 days of usage. The monthly pricing structure for the basic version is ~$25 and the advanced version costs ~$365/month.
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Woo-Commerce
Another open-source E-Commerce platform that is free, highly flexible, and customizable. Enriched with multiple features, the business retailers can obtain full membership of the data and store content without any hindrance.
Integrated with superior features, there’s enough room for growth which makes it ideal for usage by startup companies –
- Simplified setup, easy implementation/user-friendliness
- 400 extensions or more
- Built-in WordPress development
- Highly engaging content integration
- Supports modular system
- Security-enabled payment gateways
- Personalized checkout procedure/page
- Advanced themes
- Automatic taxes and geo-location targeting
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Wix
Wix is a free hosting website builder, which is enriched with features to help enhance your brand recognition and identity. Ideally suitable for use by startup businesses, you can choose from 500 different design templates, which are highly customizable, user friendly, and mobile-friendly.
You can get custom domains here that match your business requirements and objectives. You can set up your logo, and professionally analyze website performance while also building a powerful community of online users.
There are two separate versions available, one for web development and another for e-commerce. The E-Commerce version pricing starts from $3/month.
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Prestashop
An open-source E-Commerce platform, Prestashop has more than 300 dynamic features, innumerable themes to choose from, and 25000+ plugins for the benefit of businesses.
It supports 60 different languages, to help you enhance brand value and purpose, earn loyalty among customers, increase sales, revenue, etc. The features which are highly advantageous to startup businesses include the following –
- SEO Integration for E-Commerce functionality
- Powerful and seamless integrations
- Multiple themes for customization
- Configuration for shipping
- Supports almost 50 differing payment gateways
- Quick installation
- Professional designer guidelines
- Mobile Responsive
- Unhindered checkout page
- Intuitive interface for consumer usage
- Provides real-time E-commerce analytics
Free for utilization, there is no requirement of any monthly fees or any payment for sales commissions, etc.
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Opencart
Opencart is an advanced shopping cart solution, is open source and also free to use by startup businesses. The features integrated into this E-commerce Marketplace Solution will help you kickstart and grow your business, keeping in mind long-term sustenance.
It supports multiple numbers f product displays, restores, and backups all data, guarantees the security of information, etc. More than one store can be operated and managed from a single admin panel.
It is also consumer-friendly in that it supports 20+ payment gateways and approximately 8 or more methods for shipping. This platform is PCI-compliant, and offers a smooth checkout process, thus reducing cart abandonment issues.
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BigCommerce
This is another significant hosted E-Commerce platform, is not free and has to be paid for usage. This implies that this platform functions on its servers so that users do not have to separately buy web hosting or go for installations.
This is a SaaS product, also known as Software as a Service requiring a monthly fee. There are varying customizable templates to use, increasing brand engagement, especially with tech-savvy consumers.
The pricing is $29.95/month for the standard version. Hence startup businesses can begin by utilizing this platform without any hesitation.
Conclusion
For small enterprises and startup companies, there are several different E-Commerce platforms to leverage business sales and profit. It is now upon them to choose whichever platform will suit them the most, according to their workflow methodology, budget, and also their objectives, and goals.
One cannot deny the indisputable necessity of having an E-Commerce platform for their business. Get in touch with Travelights to get everything ready for you
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