Top 10 Best E-Commerce Platforms in 2020

An e-commerce platform is a website that allows businesses to launch, host, and manage an online store. While different e-commerce platforms offer different features, all of them give business owners a way to sell directly to customers. Over the years there has been a flourishing growth of these platforms. The facts show that if you own a business that sells products, there is enormous opportunity online.

According to studies by Statista, by 2021 there will be more than 2 billion people buying goods and services through e-commerce shops. E-commerce revenue is predicted to reach more than $6 trillion annually by 2022. Different businesses have different needs depending on their business model, sales volume, and a variety of other factors.  However, it is not easy to wade through hundreds of options and find the best one. 

According to G2, there are over 370 e-commerce platforms available for businesses. E-commerce giants like Amazon are swallowing up more than half of the market and thousands of more online stores gunning for their share. In the year 2020, the ones that have emerged to provide the best experience to their customers and toppled the e-commerce space include 

1. SHOPIFY      

It is a subscription to a software service that offers you to create a website and use their shopping cart solution to sell, ship, and manage your products. Using their service, you can get access to easy to use admin panel where you can add products, process orders, and enter the store data. It was introduced in 2004 by a group of snowboarding enthusiasts. It is now the leading e-commerce solution in the market with over 1 million businesses across 175 countries.

Shopify’s retailers cover a gamut of sizes and industries. It is one of the best e-commerce platforms for small to medium size businesses that need their hands held during the setup of their store and is also known to be the most beneficial for the beginners.

Features:

• It provides unlimited product listings which imply a vast variety and options for the customers.
• It also consists of a custom domains
• real-time sales statistics
• It is one of the most trustworthy platforms as it has the inventory tracking system which deters theft and loss
• AI/Personalization
• Online help center
• It is also listed with an A+ support rating due to its 24-hour chat support , phone support, community forums

 Pros and Cons:

• Over 70 themes/templates available is one of the most efficient platforms to create an e-commerce site, it provides information in an integrated form for the customer’s i.e. storefront design, content marketing or performance analytics. It provides an easy and basic set up which is really helpful for the beginners. It also gives pricing plans as well as a good and fast downloading speed for the data. 
• However, it is mostly criticized for a weak SEO. It also lacks efficiency in the transaction of money or fees and is also a costlier app.

With a beginner skill level, the process to get registered is quite simple. All you’ll need is to go on the website and complete the sign up by entering the required details. The store name needs to be unique or it will ask you to choose something else. After this initial screen, you’ll be asked for a few more details, including your name, address, country, and contact number. It would also ask for the products that you aim to sell. Afterward, all that would be left is customizing your store by adding a theme, adding the products in a categorized way, shipping, and payment details.

It also offers a 14-day free trial and then charges the owner according to the package selected i.e. Basic Shopify would cost ($29/month), Shopify ($79), Advanced Shopify ($299). 

SHOPIFY PLUS

It is an upgraded version of the base Shopify platform that is targeted towards enterprise-level businesses. In addition to the e-commerce platform itself, Shopify Plus offers additional services and benefits more suited to large, multinational companies.

It is outstanding amongst other internet business stages for big business organizations and enterprises because of its capacity to disentangle complex innovation while as yet permitting it to deal with huge item arrangements over various channels. It also offers more prominent degrees of specialized and onboarding support and automation tools to assist brands function at scale.

2. BIG CARTEL

Big cartel was made with creators, fashioners, performers, and different specialists at the top of the priority list. It is a perfect destination for small stores, this arrangement lets you set up your online store with a few pre-made themes. It also provides an option of additional customization by letting you tweak the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript directly.

Big Cartel is what many would consider a “light” E-commerce platform. The company keeps it simple. As per their site, they "give the perfect blend of ongoing details, search engine optimization, request the executives, order management, and promotional tools to get a small shop up and running with as little stress as possible.

The platform is somewhat small and offers only the essential, must-have things. On one hand, this can be viewed as an inconvenience contrasted with the opposition, yet on the other, it additionally makes things basic for learners who simply need a fundamental internet business that is anything but difficult to get a handle on.

 Features:

• Options to add 25, 100 and 300 products with the platinum, diamond and titanium plans respectively.
• It consists of a custom domain which offers businesses a better opportunity in terms of branding and professionalism.
• It provides basic built-in stats for understanding where your customers are coming from and what they’re looking at your store.
• It visits Google analytical integration for helping you derive actionable insights from customer behavior and sales.
• It allows you to post 5 pictures of each product in order to give customers a close-up look at your merchandise.
• It gives regular discount codes for rewarding loyal customers.
• It has a beautiful inventory management module for tracking items going in and out of your store as well as smart alerts about when items are about to go out of stock.
• It also provides the ability to upgrade or downgrade between plans at any time.
• Big Cartel never takes a transaction fee for sales processed on your site, which keeps more money in your pocket.
• It also permits you to advertise and sell your products on Facebook

 Pros:

• Easy to Use: Because Big Cartel wasn’t built with e-commerce experts in mind, it is as easy to use as you could really hope for. For some more experienced e-commerce developers, this may be to the point of frustration. But for those looking to start a simple e-commerce store quickly can be a great platform for delivering to that brief.
• Free for Small, Basic Stores: If you are just looking to sell a few products, there is a free service tier with Big Cartel, which means you can take advantage of the software and payment processing functionality without any monthly cost. This only covers up to 5 products per store and you must use a Big Cartel domain name, but for small E-commerce projects, this free-level can be a significant advantage.
• Time Sensitive Discounts and Other Marketing Tools: One cool element of Big Cartel is that there are several in-built marketing tools, perhaps more than you would expect given the feature-light approach of their design. These include time-sensitive discounts, pre-orders, and other functions that can help you maximize sales from the products you have to offer.

Cons:

• No Search Function: Being light on enterprise e-commerce features is one thing, but it does prove the main source of contention with Big Cartel as well as it's the main advantage. The lack of a search function is one example, but it’s indicative of a wider problem – if you are looking for any level of a particular feature, it is worth checking in advance whether Big Cartel allows your function before committing.
• Limited Payment Options: With a Big Cartel store, you have two options – Stripe or PayPal. For most purposes, this should be fine, providing your customers with enough flexibility to ensure you’re not sacrificing conversions for the sake of convenience. However, particularly with PayPal, there are some notable problems with these payment processors and it may be the case that your business could benefit from offering additional/alternative payment methods – something Big Cartel does not allow.
• Less Flexibility: Big Cartel is self-contained and more difficult to hack than other e-commerce platforms. This means you have less flexibility in terms of the customizations you can make, and that you are more tied to the out-the-box structure of your Big Cartel site.

Big Cartel offers setup assistance to ensure that you’re not wasting any undue time getting your store up and running. For the signup, it asks for the very basic details of the account holder i.e. email address, name, name of the store, etc. As soon as you are done with the signup, it guides you through the basic configurations in a step by step manner. In order to complete the process, you are asked to provide the products that you are willing to sell and their payment methods as well as their labels, categories, and images.

3. WOOCOMMERCE

WooCommerce is an open-source e-commerce plugin for word press and came to existence on September 27, 2011. It is designed for small to large-sized online businesses using word press. Word press is the website’s operating system which is turned into a fully-functioning e-commerce store by Woo Commerce. However, it quickly gained popularity for its simplicity to install and customize and free base product. Woocommerce powers over 28% of all online stores and is the e-commerce platform for the SEO king, WordPress.

Features:

• Woo Commerce is designed to mesh fluidly with the current trends of the default WordPress themes keeping your store design modern and in line with the current design trends.
• It provides an improved experience for store owners and has structured settings to be used easily on hand-held devices, offering you a superior user experience to update your store on the move. 
• It is built on WordPress which means you can integrate e-commerce seamlessly with the world’s favorite blogging platform
• It lets you offer a set of variations on a product with control over prices, stock, image, and more for each variation (i.e. for a product like a shirt, you can offer a large, small, etc.

Pros:

• It is cost-effective, as it features a ‘freemium’ business model. This means the core software is free, but you may have to pay for some of the new additions or features.
• It offers a lot of flexibility for adding product lists and accepting all types of payments.
• It is one of the most highly organized platforms which make it really easy to operate 
• It features secured and robust shopping cart and is regular updated to fix all the bugs

Cons:

• Hard to implement multi-currency
• Wish list functionality, which is hard to use in Woo Commerce
• The Graphical user interface functions a bit slow
• Image handling can be improved 

All you would need to do for registration is visit the site or download the app and then choose to host but you need to be running WordPress on a self-hosted site which means you will have to install WordPress. Now you have a space to start building your website. Pick a theme that you would prefer for your web page and then decide on the look of your website/store by selecting a theme. Activate Woo Commerce

4. MAGENTO

Magento is an open and one of the most flexible and customizable platform offering a vast amount of extensions and third-party integrations to give the consumer unique shopping experiences. It was originally established in 2009 but then later was replace by another version i.e. Magento 2.0 in 2015 with advanced features like improved code based stable features. 

Later in 2018, it was purchase by Adobe and today it is found with two different version -Magento Open Source and Magento Commerce. The platform is suitable for small to medium-sized business which are already settled and has an established demand with manpower and skills. It is seen to attract one of the most popular and famous e-commerce like Nike, Hp, etc. It required a higher budget and longer development time as compared to others but also contains a library of 5,000 extensions. 

Features:

• Magento comes with built-in SEO tools that help search engines crawl the website pages and automatically improve its ranking on the search result pages. The features are SEO-friendly URLs, generation of Google Sitemaps, automatic sorting of popular searches, easy meta-tagging of products and information, and more.
• Security is the major concern of all the businessman, Magento provides a number of security plugins that can be installed for extra protection and also keeps coming up with security patch releases from time to time. 
• People are usually in a hurry and desire faster checkouts, therefore it allows users to purchase multiple products simultaneously and proceed to check out quickly. Users do not have to buy each product individually and pay for them separately during checkout. 
• The Magento platform invariably integrates with the mobile app giving the shoppers the best experience for shopping anytime from anywhere and provides multiple theme options in order to provide a better experience.
• The platform also comes with the cross-browser support and can be used across multiple devices. This implies that users can access them on the go and also avail seamless experiences, irrespective of the browser and device being used

Pros:

• The flexibility it provides is the biggest plus point by offering multiple templates to choose from and third party integrations for importing purposes.
• With the in-built features, it supports multiple devices and locations to give a beneficial experience to the customers as well as the businessman as it allows you to vary your price of the specific product depending upon the group of customers. 
• At the beginning almost every platform is capable of handling the sales but Magento can approximately support up to five hundred thousands of products and thousands of transactions in the hour which implies no hindrances while your business is growing   
• It is also based on a large community network and is one of the most used e-commerce platform

Cons:

• The most difficult the task is to find authentic developers for the platform due to its complexity and therefore there are less number of developers as compared to users.
• It also consumes a lot of time in buffing or loading making the customizations a bit tough 
• It is also one of the most expensive platforms and has many versions. The community version of Magento is free, while the enterprise version of Magento costs you more than fifteen thousand dollars approximately. Furthermore, the Premium Enterprise version of Magento, targeted for large businesses costs you more than fifty thousand dollars approximately for a year.
• The official support forum of Magento is overrun with spam because of the lack of organized monitoring. This is one of the downsides of choosing Magento  

The process to get your store registered on the platform is quite similar to others and can easily be done. All that is needed to be done is visit the website and create an account by filling basic details of your company like its name, tax id, and therein after complete the legal address section by adding your address, email, etc. The final step is completed by providing the payment methods. Lastly, you can also add advanced settings that can provide a separate catalog for the employees and customers. 

5. WIX.COM

It is an Israeli software company, providing cloud-based web development services. It is one of the new e-commerce platforms. It is a cloud-based website builder that allows users to create online stores through drag-and-drop tools. It provides you a variety of templates in order to create a compelling website. It was found in 2006 by Avishai Abrahami, Nadav Abrahami, Giora Kaplan.

It is found to be is the best E-Commerce platform for small businesses that don’t have access to a dedicated web designer. The site builder itself is easy to use and the E-commerce functionality is robust enough to fulfill basic needs.  

Features:

• It provides hundreds of designer templates to build an attractive and seamlessly beautiful website.
• It is easy to use for the beginners with the drag and drop feature 
• It also consists of automatic blog styling which implies that they will create a professional and amazingly a personalized website just for you, and you can go live immediately based on some important questions asked by it. 
• It is SEO-optimized secure, reliable hosting services, manage and track the performance of your website all from a single dashboard.
• It is  SMB friendly and all it takes is to choose the elements you want to change and to drag and drop your items 

Pros:

• Wix takes care of your site security without compromising speed and is hosted on a six sever which defers any hacking or frauds.
• There’s no time consumed hunting down issues or trying to deal with plugins or widgets that may have malfunctioned due to its 24/7 available customer support.
• It is not necessary to take a long term plan to make it more affordable. You can upgrade from a free one to a 5 dollar plan per month in a quick go.
• There is a guide that helps you build ur site accordingly even in the free package 
• With the drag-and-drop design functions that Wix offers, you can have a modern website created in a few minutes. This allows you to get online with a commercial or personal site without a large investment. 

Cons:

• The drag-and-drop the option seems to be quite easy but it still can be a hassle to get a design to look and work the way intended. It takes much more time, in reality, to design a site on Wix than most people will think it does.
• It does not allow to have unlimited plans even for companies working on a large scale
• Even with the premium plan, it does not allow to remove advertisements and the plan which does remove them is costlier then most of the websites 

In order to get registered, you need to sign up to start creating your own stunning website and then choose a professional template for your business or portfolio, customize your text, images, videos and more, add professional web Apps and services to help your business grow. Picking your domain name is the most crucial part of the process as it helps enhance your brand recognition if it’s catchy, memorable and in tune with the rest of your company’s assets and makes the audience perceive you as a professional in your field. You will seem more credible, reliable and authoritative and lastly all that is needed is the lists of products and selection of the payment method and shipping procedures.

6. SQUARESPACE

It is a New York-based Software-as-a-Service a company that provides website and e-commerce store building and hosting to customers. It also provides software as a service for website building and hosting. It was established in January 2004 by Anthony Casalena. It offers an all-in-one a hosted platform, with drag-and-drop templates featuring some of the most creative, modern designs. It’s really easy for beginners to create a website effortlessly.

 Features:

• It’s most unique feature is abandon cart auto-recovery which makes it easy for the customer to start with a fresh set of products to buy.
• Personalized products
• Product import/export
• It consists of real-time shipping rates and tracking
• It has a variety of modern templates to choose from as well as the style editor
• It has built-in mobile websites
• The drop and drag management makes it more beneficial
• Other features include Responsive Image loader, gallery blocks, audio collections.

Pros:

• There is a rather large selection of templates available for use that will make your site look professional in no time at all and it also allows you to customize or upload your own design.
• The admin section is built in such a way where navigation is easy to figure out, even if you’ve never used the builder before. 
• Customer support is available 24/7
• The automatic backing up system is installed and hosting is also optimized making your site and template compatible 

Cons:

• The pricing is a lot more than the other platforms ie it’s 26 dollars per month for your site. Their plans are also limited to a single website and lower-tier plans may even cap the number of pages or products you’re allowed to have. Paying the annual fee upfront drops the cost to 18 dollars per month. Personal sites are as low as 12 dollars per month.
• The advance tools are found to work a bit slow and SEO is pretty lacking
• Adding new templates or designs are a bit time consuming
• There is no support for these parties

The process for registration is basic and simple. All you would need is to choose from one of Squarespace’s best-in-class website templates, and then use the website builder to customize pages, menus, and navigation and also change fonts, imagery, and margins with the built-in style kit according to your preference. Lastly, Preview your responsive web design on mobile devices. Create a logo for your brand with our free logo maker and add a custom domain to your website

7. VOLUSION:

Volusion was discovered in Simi Valley, California, by 16-year-old founder Kevin Sproles and came into existence in 1999. It is one of the longest-lasting e-commerce platforms in the market. It still remains popular and stable despite the entrance of recent competitors i.e. Wix and Shopify.  

Volusion is the most suitable platform for start-ups and small businesses. It is also called the cloud-based platform offering the most basic and the easiest setup. It has over 250 employees and has served more than 180,000 customers since its founding in 1999. It aims to provide a pre-packaged, all-in-one solution for E-commerce store hosting and design and also became the first industry to offer a free trial for customers in 2000.

 Features:

• Each package of the  app comes with free, responsive themes
• It provides powerful site editing tools which eases your task
• Drag and Drop Tools option is beneficial for the beginners 
• The in-built speed lets you add products in a flash
• It securely accepts payments
• easily manage inventory
• built-in SEO Tools
• social media integrations
• 24/7 expert support is available on site 

Pros:

• It allows simple 3rd party payments integration and bundles in the costs of SSL certificates regardless.
• It gives you more control over your security and checkout while making it easy to implement and giving support to ensure your security is always set correctly.
• The actual user interface is solid and easy enough for beginners to use, but with enough options for mid to large size e-commerce operations.
• It offers customer support 24/7 via email, phone, chat, etc.
• It consists of a built-in on-boarding materials and highly trained account specialists can easily justify the extra cost of using a platform, and that’s an area where it really excels.

Cons:

• It is seen to fall flat on easy analytics implementation
• It does not have the expansion capacity for third party app and extensions
• It has a very limited template store. Unlike other competitors, its templates are all hard-coded and set up in a hard to browse the file structure

• It also has pricing packages or plans that are not easily affordable for start-up businessmen.

One of the first decisions you’ll need to make is what business structure you want and then you’ll be asked to enter your entity name which means the name of your company and also registering your company as a legal entity by providing state tax id, license, and permits. You will also be asked to provide your basic information like address, email, etc. Lastly, you will have to add your product lists, their prices, and modes of payment available for the customers.

8. SALESFORCE COMMERCE CLOUD

It was earlier known as Demandware and was founded in 2004. It is a highly scalable, cloud-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) E-commerce solution. It offers best-in-class features and functionality developed and refined over many years to provide a highly optimized e-commerce experience. It also has a multi-tenant architecture that boosts the platform’s reliability and security. 

There are three categories of the services it offers: experience, operations, and intelligence, which work together to power every stage of cross-channel commerce. The experience feature provides users with tools for managing their products, promotions, pricing, and content, which enhances their business’ customer engagement.

 Features:

• Seamless upgrades. Since the platform is SaaS, Salesforce continuously rolls out many new features in the background. These are available through the administration panel, often with minimal or no technical intervention needed on your side.
• Scalability. As a cloud-based product, Salesforce Commerce Cloud can cope with huge demand and traffic spikes without you having to plan in advance. If there is a sudden spike in demand, the platform scales silently in the background with no intervention required.
• A suite of cloud services. Now part of the Salesforce family, there is a range of related CRM and marketing SaaS services that can integrate into your solution set.
• A product roadmap defined by Salesforce. If you find Salesforce Commerce Cloud a compelling proposition, chances are you’ll be content with adopting the Commerce Cloud roadmap provided by Salesforce. It’s another thing you won’t have to concern yourself with, freeing you to focus on using the solution’s features and functions to drive sales and growth for your site.

Pros:

• Salesforce Commerce Cloud gives users the ability to execute their ideas faster because the platform frees them from taking their time on considering the requirement constraints
• A common issue with other e-commerce solutions is the lack of seamless integration of innovations. Meaning that the operation is usually disrupted when innovations are being developed. Commerce Cloud offers a seamless approach to this matter
• The platform has a multi-tenant architecture, which means that all users run the software on one code base using the same version of the app. This empowers the users of the community to share ideas and innovations with each other

Cons:

• It is much expensive as compared to other platforms
• You have to pay for add-ons to get the most out of the software
• Configuration and setup is complex and time-consuming
• Cluttered interface makes navigation and simple tasks unnecessarily complex
• The learning curve never seems to end
• Customer support has a poor reputation

The Self-Registration component lets users set up their accounts so that you don’t have to add each one manually. Users put their information into the form fields, and when they click to sign up an account is created for them. This component has a basic set of fields that you can customize, and you can add more fields. The set up allows you to ask you the basic details including your name, the company’s name, email address, etc.

9. BIGCOMMERCE 

Big Commerce is a hosted SaaS E-commerce platform that allows business owners to set-up online stores using variously customizable templates for easy set-up. Easy Set-up and various payment plans offering a variety of features depending on one’s needs makes Big Commerce a good value for the money starting out. The company was founded in 2009 by Australians Eddie Machaalani and Mitchell Harper. It has 600 plus employees with headquarters in Austin, Texas. 

Features:

• Website Customization: BigCommerce is a highly customizable platform and offers a variety of templates, fonts, and designs to choose from
• SEO & Analytics Optimization: BigCommerce includes built-in SEO features to help businesses increase organic exposure.
• Payment & Inventory Management: BigCommerce supports a variety of third-party payment services.
• Application Integrations

Pros:

• Hosting is baked into a business subscription, which removes hardware costs and separate hosting fees. Big Commerce’s often-touted 99.9% uptime removes concern over lost sales due to server-side technical difficulties.
• Implementation of a site build is normally completed in 2-4 months. This is almost half of the time needed for many on premise e-commerce implementations.
• BigCommerce requires fewer in-house resources to operate and maintain the site. BigCommerce includes upgrades and updates in the monthly subscription cost, ultimately help businesses to eliminate technical debt and reduce cost.
• The pre-built responsive templates help you easily and quickly build an online store that resonates with your customers and showcases your products
• It supports a variety of third party payment services.

 Cons:

• The platform’s themes have style, but some are a little expensive and can affect the start-up costs for some. There are only seven free themes, and the most popular premium themes are either $170 or $195.
•  You can’t use BigCommerce to integrate an online store with your existing site nor can you integrate it with a more robust blogging platform, such as WordPress, at least not without getting technical.
• It takes extra fees for successful customers and it would be odd to ask the customers themselves to pay an extra amount 

For registration, you will need to visit the site and create an account by entering your email and BigCommerce will walk you through a few short steps to set up your account. You’ll create a password, provide your proposed or existing store’s name, and answer a few simple questions about your business. After answering these questions, you’ll be directed to your BigCommerce dashboard where you will learn how to build an e-commerce website and store.

10. OPENCART 

OpenCart is a highly customizable open-source E-commerce platform with no monthly fees. It has a robust administrator dashboard that gives you an at-a-glance view of important metrics like sales, customers, and more. It makes it easy to incorporate multiple languages into your storefront. You have deep customization options with this service, allowing you to note product names and service characteristics in different languages.

It is an out of the box pre-developed shopping cart the solution that can be utilized to produce a fully-featured e-commerce solution at the fraction of the price of a bespoke e-commerce website, allowing you to trade on-line simply and effectively. This solution, however, does not suit all as some businesses require functionality that may sit outside of the framework of an off the shelf package and do require a fully bespoke solution.

Features:

• It supports multiple locations
• It has an inbuilt automatic back up and image re-size set up
• It offers 8 plus shipping methods
• It accepts multi-currency
• Provides printable in-voices
• It has unlimited manufactures which imply a large variety of products

Pros:

• OpenCart makes it easy to know how healthy your business happens to be with its extensive set of reports and metrics. You can customize the reports to fit the needs of your business.
•  Adding new features is easy enough to do due to the varied modules and themes that are available in the marketplace to use. 
• Compatible with almost all current payment gateways.
• Once you dig deeper into the marketplace for the plugins and add-ons, you’ll find that several solutions are also free

Cons:

• Existence of several duplicate pages create a problem as the same page on your website may have several different URLs as you go through the design process.
• It does not permit, to update the information that is uploaded without a plugin. You must completely remove the old information to add new data to it.
• The flip side of that is a light system means your performance may suffer.

The process to register is quite simple. After visiting the home page of the site, you will have to accept the license agreement and complete the requirements for hosting. Lastly, on the configuration page, you’ll have to provide your database credentials. You will get these credentials from your hosting provider. Also, there’s a warning that recommends deleting the installation directory placed on the root of your server which can be removed.

In a nutshell, choosing an e-commerce platform can be challenging simply because there are so many different options at your disposal. There is no single overall “best” e-commerce platform. Every business has its own combination of needs, budget, and manpower that dictates which online retail application works best for them. There are many options when it comes to E-commerce platforms. Some may stand out as more popular choices, but others offer unique features that may be more suited for your business. 

Selecting the best platform for your business is a long term decision as rarely do companies shift platforms more than once every few years. This is why it’s extremely important to choose the right one before you commit time and resources to it.

Writer: Anisha Kapoor

Editor: Sonal Kamble