Today, we have smart devices like mobiles, tablets, and large devices, which are connecting us with the world of the Internet or the worldwide web. We used to buy things and services through websites or apps

What Is Ecommerce?

Selling and buying are commercial activities or a part of commerce. When such commercial activities are taking place on the web/internet, it becomes electronic commerce or E-commerce in short.

According to a study on ecommerce statistics, nearly two billion people have bought something from ecommerce websites in 2021. it is estimated that ecommerce selling/buying will reach more than the six trillion dollars mark in 2022.

What Is an Ecommerce Platform?

In a sense ecommerce is a concept and it needs a model to exist. That model gathers buyers and sellers by providing the required infrastructure made of software running on the smart devices connected with the internet. Thus, the model is a platform in other words.

Ideally, an ecommerce platform made of more than one software integrated seamlessly to accomplish different functions and offer different solutions at once. Thus, an ecommerce platform creates a value proposition for all stakeholders including customers and merchants.

In fact, dozens of ecommerce platforms are existing today on the web and meeting various needs of ecommerce merchants as well as their buyers.

Core Features and Functions of An Ecommerce Platform

Today, ecommerce platforms offer myriads of features and functionality. Out of those, there are four main core functions worth considering:

1. Attract and bring audience for merchants.
2. Help in getting the right matches for both ends: sellers and buyers.
3. Offering core tools to accomplish various business activities.
4. Establishing rules, regulations, and standards to do good quality business.

Now, it is time to see the core features of the ecommerce platform. Below are some winning ecommerce features, which we expect in almost all ecommerce platforms existing on the web.

It must be one and unified platform.

A unified platform means accounting, POS, order management, inventory management, marketing management, customer support, finance, and cloud services must be in one place. You need not switch the entire software frequently. Just front-end and back-end interfaces are enough to carry out all essential activities.

The platform must have a seamless experience.

We have seen that an ecommerce platform consists of myriads of activities and integration of various tools and third-party software. It doesn’t mean creating conflicts or a bad user experience. All tools and integration must work seamlessly by following determined rules, regulations, and standards by the platform.

The Ecommerce platform must have enough design options.

Assembling common features, functions, and tools on a web platform or a website is resulting in the creation of a template or theme. For the sake of design options, the platform offers a variety of templates and themes created to meet different needs, looks, and feel.

The Electronic Commerce platform must allow intensive customization.

Some businesses often require modifications in look-n-feel, features, and functionality to meet their bespoke requirements. You must consider the intensive customization capability of the platform to meet such bespoke needs. Moreover, a unique look-n-feel is the thing that everyone loves including humans and bots.

In due course, a platform must offer customization of the existing themes and templates as well as the capability of creating an ecommerce from the scratch too.

The Online Business platform must have a store management system.

The store management system differentiates the ecommerce storefront from other websites. It should have three frameworks:

• The product management system manages products and their various aspects, including product upload, product listing, product categorization, product mapping, and product filters.
• The order management system manages different facets of the ordering process, such as order taking, order tracking, and order shipping processes.
• The return management system to manage product return process encompassing formation of return rules, return approvals and return updates.

The platform must have a payment system.

Accepting online payment safely and securely is not a straightforward process. It demands offering various payment methods and establishing the payment systems accordingly. You need to integrate various payment systems using APIs and set your website’s standards as per their rules. Indeed, it is daunting!

The ecommerce platforms must focus on safety and security.

Ecommerce transactions involve money. It is obvious that ecommerce always remains on the radar of online attackers, hackers, and other malicious elements.

You must make your data storage and data transactions completely safe and secure.

It demands various security measures as per international standards.

• Advanced data security technologies like SSL certification can help you in making your data transactions secure.
• Strong authentication and authorization system can make your data storage safe.
• Cloud computing is another technology to help you in secure data storage.
• Advanced database management systems can boost your security morale further.

The online store platform must offer an extensive support system.

Like other software systems, online business platforms also face technical and general hurdles while operating. So, your ecommerce platform should have enough documentation, training, and direct technical assistance to help ecommerce merchants.

Today, we have an online chat system powered by AI or artificial intelligence to manage conversations automatically. Audio, video, and image-like multimedia content can help you a lot through direct or social conversations.

The online storefront platform must allow product promotions.

SEO, SMO, SMM, PPC, Social Ads, and other similar promotional media are highly effective in doing digital marketing. Thereby, your choice of the platform must have friendly traits to support such organic and paid promotions.

Besides these, various incentives like discounts, gifts, commissions, and similar formats are working better in the ecommerce space. So, you have to choose a promotion-friendly platform to win the marketing battle.

The ecommerce platform must allow measuring performance through data consolidation.

Doing marketing without measuring various aspects like performance, you are doing marketing with blind eyes. Your platform must have capabilities to integrate with analytic and analysis tools. Such tools will help you measure various metrics of performance and accomplish data consolidation tasks.

It allows you to track your growth and make meaningful decisions to form various strategies that eventually lead to success.

Top 10 Best Ecommerce Platform To Develop Ecommerce Website in 2022

Now, it is time to check the top ten ecommerce platforms to develop your ecommerce store in 2022. Here, I would like to give its list first then details.

1. WooCommerce
2. Magento
3. Shopify
4. BigCommerce
5. OpenCart
6. OsCommerce
7. Volusion
8. Wix
9. Squarespace
10. Prestashop

Note: The image Source for images below is https://www.ecommerceceo.com/ecommerce-platforms/

No. 1: WooCommerce as an Ecommerce Platform

WordPress is the king on the web as nearly 30% of all websites run with WordPress at the core. WooCommerce is a set of plugins to make an ecommerce store using the capabilities and benefits of WordPress.

Pros of WooCommerce to Create Ecommerce Website

• Ease of Use: If merchants are familiar with the WordPress platform, WooCommerce is a breeze for them.
• SEO-friendly: WordPress is an extremity of SEO-friendliness. So, WooCommerce has all features and functionality that make the SEO journey a smooth ride.
• Payment-friendly: WooCommerce is based on WordPress plugins, you can integrate any payment gateway of your choice using their plugins. Of course, you have to pay for their services as per their rules.
• Mobile-friendly: Almost all WooCommerce themes are mobile-friendly and responsive. It lets you reach a wide audience using different devices to access your online storefront.
• A Vast Community: By a number of users, WooCommerce is the biggest ecommerce platform. Therefore, it has a vast community of WooCommerce developers to address your issue either voluntarily or with compensation.
• High Degree Customization: Thanks to myriads of WooCommerce plugin availability, this ecommerce platform offers high degree customization to developers to address bespoke requirements of any business.

Cons of WooCommerce as Ecommerce Development Platform

• It is a plugin-dependent ecommerce platform and plugins always hasten the performance of the storefront by slowing down it. Even you need extensions for doing simple and common stuff on the ecommerce platform.
• You need to bear hosting and other burdens to publish and run the online storefront.
• Official support is almost nil and you are at the mercy of WooCommerce developers.

No. 2: Magento as an Ecommerce Platform

If WordPress is the king of all CMS, Magento is king in the Ecommerce platform space.

Pros of Magento as an Ecommerce Development Platform

• It is extremely customizable. The platform offers numerous plugins, software, and components to add, modify, and delete myriads of features and bring the desired functionality.
• It is completely SEO-friendly in a sense.
• It has a powerful CMS to enable content upload by any category of users.
• It offers free to paid versions for B2C & B2B types of eCommerce stores to create websites as per your needs.
• It has a huge developer community to address any level of complexities for free or some fees.
• It lets you make choice for hosting service at your end.

Cons of Magento as Ecommerce Development Platform

• Without an experienced developer, you cannot create a website on the Magento eCommerce platform. Be it free or paid edition. And experienced developers always come with a price tag!
• Its paid editions are costly and only enterprise levels of organizations or businesses can afford them.
• Periodically, it releases major updates and you need to redo almost everything from the scratch during the migration process. So migration is also costly.

No. 3: Shopify as an Ecommerce Platform

Today, Shopify becomes the most popular among the existing eCommerce platforms. Without any technical skills or abilities, you can create a website for your online business and run it with confidence.

Pros of Shopify as an Ecommerce Development Platform

• It offers high performance, particularly in the area of page loading speed.
• It has tons of certified partners to help you in complexities or challenges.
• It has enough themes and templates to make your selection and modify them.
• It offers built-in hosting services on a subscription basis so it is a great eCommerce solution for startups with a budget.
• It offers one-click sales features, social selling, and Omnichannel selling support to maximize your marketing and selling.

Cons of Shopify as an Ecommerce Development Platform

• Doing perfect SEO is tough on this eCommerce platform.
• You cannot modify the checkout process so give good UX.
• The expense of the app adds up in the cost that makes it costly in the end.
• Without a developer’s help, you cannot go for advanced features and functionality.
• When you use non-Shopify payment methods, you have to pay for them.

No. 4: BigCommerce as an Ecommerce Platform

BigCommerce is a SaaS-based eCommerce platform like Shopify is, but with some additional features and functionality. 

Pros of BigCommerce as an Ecommerce Development Platform

• For startups, it is a flexible and scalable eCommerce development platform.
• It lets you do sales on multiple channels.
• Its rating is high, thanks to its SEO-friendly features and tools.
• There are fantastic themes available on the platform.
• Along with the abandon cart feature, it provides you with more opportunities for conversion.

Cons of BigCommerce as Ecommerce Development Platform

• There are two separate areas to manage the store from the back-end that causes some inferior user experience.
• The learning curve is a bit hard and you won’t find one-click selling or up-sells.
• It’s a bit expensive for high-volume stores.
• You won’t find a cart abandonment feature on the entry-level plan.
• You will miss a dedicated app for the storefront.

No. 5: OpenCart as an Ecommerce Platform

It’s an open-source ecommerce platform. It boasts 13K+ extensions. It supports 36+ payment methods. In sum, it’s a strong contender of Magento and WooCommerce in a sense.

Pros of OpenCart as an Ecommerce Development Platform

• Being an open-source ecommerce platform, source code is free to download and customize.
• Any PHP developer with adequate ecommerce experience can design simple to complex ecommerce websites for you.

Cons of OpenCart as Ecommerce Development Platform

• Without the developer, you cannot create an ecommerce website on the OpenCart ecommerce development platform.
• The community is growing but small so finding a suitable developer on a budget is daunting.
• It demands a lot of plugins and some come at a price.
• The rates are varying on the OpenCart Cloud platform.

No. 6: OsCommerce as an Ecommerce Platform

Once upon a time, it was king in open source ecommerce platforms, but other rivals have pushed it back due to its inability to match with time and demands. However, numerous ecommerce stores still run with OsCommerce source code and keep it alive.

Pros of OsCommerce as an Ecommerce Development Platform

• It is an excellent choice for startups and mid-size businesses.
• Being an open-source ecommerce platform, it is free to download.
• It’s quite easy for developers to tweak and extensively customize.
• You can find adequate add-ons and components to achieve your customization goals.

Cons of OsCommerce as Ecommerce Development Platform

• It is tough to scale once you customize it.
• Its hosting proves a costly affair.
• Without a developer, you cannot create an ecommerce website on this platform.
• It’s prone to bugs.

No. 7: Volusion as an Ecommerce Platform

This ecommerce development platform is thriving for more than two decades and holds a sizable developer community.

Pros of Volusion as an Ecommerce Development Platform

• It offers powerful SEO tools to achieve a good ranking for your storefront pages.
• It is a great ecommerce solution for selling physical products.
• It gives an excellent onboard experience.
• Its support system is strong.
• It also supports built-in subscription and recurring payment
• It has a decent dashboard and a clear inventory management system.
• It is SMB friendly.

Cons of Volusion as Ecommerce Development Platform

• Its poor URL structure hastens the SEO prospects in ranking and UX.
• It misses up-selling and cross-selling features.
• It also misses built-in blogging functionality.

No. 8: Wix as an Ecommerce Platform

Wix is a rapidly evolving ecommerce design and development platform. You can create an ecommerce website without any coding experience using Wix.

Pros of Wix as an Ecommerce Development Platform

• You can find tons of free and amazing themes on this ecommerce development platform.
• Its drag-n-drop website building interface lets anyone create a fully functional online store without prior knowledge of coding.
• It offers easy integration of multiple channels at once.
• It has abandoned cart recovery features to enhance conversion.
• It supports drop-shipping and print-on-demand-like advanced activities on your ecommerce storefront.

Cons of Wix as Ecommerce Development Platform

• It proved weak in SEO support.
• Similarly, site security proved weak on this ecommerce platform.
• It hardly supports automation and up-selling like advanced functionality.
• It’s a bit tough to customize templates.

No. 9: SquareSpace as an Ecommerce Platform

Squarespace is known for its design templates for a long. It has featured the most creative designs on the web.

Pros of Squarespace as an Ecommerce Development Platform

• It is easy to set up with a drag-n-drop interface to create an ecommerce website.
• You can get all-in-one hosting.
• It’s a cheaper alternative for startups and mid-sized businesses.
• It’s SEO-friendly.

Cons of Squarespace as Ecommerce Development Platform

• It has a poor support system.
• It offers limited payment and third-party software integration.
• You may miss multi-channel selling features and other such features.

No. 10: PrestaShop as an Ecommerce Platform

It’s a SaaS-based ecommerce development platform. Today, it boasts more than three million merchants.

Pros of PrestaShop as an Ecommerce Development Platform

• It uses the Symphony framework.
• You can create 600+ features with PrestaShop.
• It offers more than 5K modules and tons of themes to make your selection and options while customizing.
• Myriads of extension and apps or integration are available on this ecommerce development platform.
• It has a vast open-source developer community to support you whenever you need it.

Cons of PrestaShop as Ecommerce Development Platform

• If you prefer hosted version, it misses multi-channel functionality.
• It offers limited third-party integration for marketing.
• It’s a bit slower to build an ecommerce website.
• It has most of the paid add-ons, which add in overall costs.

Who Will Be Your Ecommerce Developer to Help You in the Selection of the Right Ecommerce Development Platform?

Your business is unique so, its requirements. It is true that we cannot take a significant decision just by looking at the pros and cons of a platform. The most important thing is the practical experience of the developer with different platforms.

Now, think how many developers are seasoned developers and have got opportunities to work with different platforms in their careers. I would say a very few. Now, think of a team of seasoned developers that is rich in experiences and expertise as well.

Conclusively, I say it is the team at Ridge Infosoft that doing ecommerce development for years and accumulated enough experience in dealing with different ecommerce platforms. Their seasoned ecommerce programmers or ecommerce developers know inside-out of each ecommerce platform listed here and more.

So, you should make a wise decision by being a wise client. You can take the help of our free consulting services to fix your online storefront development platform using our in-depth expertise and prolonged experience.