Choosing the right e-commerce platform to sell the product will be a tough task. From meeting the expectations of secure payment and easy store management. The best e-commerce platform will do your job easily and meet your goals.

Before the rise of the internet starting a business was costly you needed a physical store and building costs but after the rise of the internet you can easily sell the products and even you can digital products which require no physical store.

Of course, you need technical skills to build this store online and no doubt the best e-commerce platform to sell the products online. I know there are a lot of e-commerce platforms out there which are claiming as best but are they really worth the hype?

The e-commerce market is expected to reach USD 16,215.6 billion by 2027, at a CAGR of 22.9% during the forecast period of 2020-2027. Internet is Taking Over our lives with convenience and faster services.

Therefore deciding which e-commerce website to choose becomes tough as there are a lot of options available in the market but if you want to make an easier decision by choosing one platform which you choose.

I will be listing some of the best e-commerce platforms which will be ranked according to the features, pricing, and secure and reliable payment options.

These e-commerce platforms are based on

• Reliable for small businesses.

• Secure payment options.

• Pricing of the plans and open source options.

• Best e-commerce platforms for SEO.

• Features they are providing to large brands.

• Themes they are providing to businesses.

The e-commerce websites I will list below are based on reliability, features, and scalability the entire user experience and user interface experience will be in mind.

Along with that light will be shed on technical support, shipping, and payment options. Let’s get into what are the best e-commerce platforms you should try this year.

What Are The Best E-commerce Platforms?

E-commerce platforms make our lives much easier and along with buying and selling products online is just simpler and easy. E-commerce platforms are full-featured platforms for selling products online.

When you’re choosing the best e-commerce platform there are many options available and you can choose according to that as each platform provides different features.

To get started with selling products you need to set up your store online and list your products. The goal is to sell your products online with secure payment options and reliable product catalogs.

Whichever e-commerce platform you choose it should allow you to enhance the store and update it from time to time with the most advanced features. It should help you easily allow you to add discounts, and coupons and track inventory.

E-commerce platforms should help you manage to ship and easily allow you to navigate through the product catalog.

Here are the best e-commerce platforms which you should try if you’re starting with selling products online.

1. BigCommerce

BigCommerce is an e-commerce platform that is used by Camelback, and Toyota. It’s a full-featured software that manages everything from web hosting, web design, shipping, and tracking analytics.

It’s the best e-commerce platform that is built to scale large businesses. Small businesses enter e-commerce with Shopify because of their brand name and their pricing.

After a few months they hit the growth and realize they were paying only for the product listing and for add ons they have to pay extra bucks and no SEO tools are there for the products listed.

They are lacking SEO and outgrowing their site from the search engine result pages SERPs. If you’re a business owner who’s struggling with the SEO of the business then BigCommerce is the platform for you to enter.

They are accessible platforms for small business owners because of their features and built-in functionality.

Brands like Toyota, Ford, camelback, and others in the Fortune 1000 use BigCommerce which are easily bringing in over $100 million in annual sales without much hassle.

They launched BigCommerce for WordPress in December 2018 which allows users to manage the front-end content on wordpress without much hassle and backend e-commerce with BigCommerce.

This allows you to have a faster website speed than you find with other e-commerce options like WooCommerce which installs multiple plugins to work and make your website speed performance.

Key Features

• It allows you to integrate anything on your website.

• Expand your reach with multi storefronts so that you can sell your products on multiple platforms

• Outrank the competitors using the most advanced technology.

• Analytics will help you understand sales and understand technology.

• You won’t have to go through the hassle of buying a domain if you don’t have one then BigCommerce can set up that for you when you sign up for the service.

• All plans come with free SSL, so your website will be secure and protect the payment information. Using the integration features you can sell on eBay, Amazon, Pinterest, and Facebook.

• With BigCommerce you can accept payments from Paypal, stripe, and digital wallets like amazon pay and apple pay.

Pros

• Free SSL

• Easy to use interface.

• Easy to list the products and catalogs.

• Helpful to switch to large brands.

• Technical support can help you with every problem that you might have.

Cons

• Complete setup takes a bit of time.

• Few add-ons are available.

• More expensive than the self-hosted site.

• Templates are a bit difficult to understand for non-techy.

Pricing

• Standard Plan($29.95/Month) Maximum of $50k sales per year. It includes important features like a website builder, zero transaction fees, unlimited storage, and free SSL.

• Plus Plan($79.95/Month) Maximum of $150k sales per year. Comes with features like customer groups and an abandoned cart saver.

• Pro Plan ( $249.95/month) Maximum of $400k sales per year. Adds more features like custom SSL, product filtering, and customer reviews.

2. Shopify

If you’re looking for one of the best and most trusted e-commerce platforms then Shopify is included. There are over 400000 online retailers hosted on Shopify. No doubt how easy it is to set up a store on Shopify and its number platform recommended for e-commerce.

You don’t need many web development skills to sell on Shopify it’s easy to set up a store and run in minutes. Whenever you think of e-commerce then you land right on Shopify.

This is one of the best open-source web applications and also one of the fastest-growing SAAS companies. With just a few clicks your store will be set up and ready to supply to the customers.

It’s effortless to design a website and add products. But just with a few clicks, your website will not get the sales you need to market your store and one of the drawbacks of Shopify is its SEO.

They don’t have the best SEO rules when it comes to the SEO of the store. They have a structured URL

For example, the page soundproof panels will be available in soundproofinghome.com/soundproof materials Shopify forces you to use their format soundproofinghome.com/collections/soundproof materials which is not a short SEO optimized.

This structure is not ideal for search engine rankings and secondly, they have fewer product options which will not allow you to add more variants.

For example, if your selling shoes of different colors you can add up to 100 variants. If you have more then you cannot add to the list. If you have many combinations, and materials then that becomes a barrier.

Key Features

• Professional themes are available which means you can give a professional look to your website.

• Editing HTML and CSS will customize your website easily with just a few clicks and changes in the code.

• Automatic taxes doesn’t bother you to calculate the taxes for your products.

• It’s a full blogging platform that will help you to share valuable content and share your story with your audience.

• The fulfillment centers help in managing inventory and fulfilling orders quickly and hassle-free.

• A domain name helps in creating a unique website for your business.

• Easily list all the products on your website and start running the store in a few clicks.

Pros

• It’s very easy to use and integrate.

• Secure payment methods.

• Can easily list the products with a catalog which allows customers to easily buy from the website.

• Easily customizable according to your brand look and stand out uniquely in the market.

Cons

• They don’t have the best SEO rules

• It can be expensive if you want to use multiple apps.

• Navigation can take time.

• You cannot add more than 100 products.

Pricing

• Basic Shopify ($13/month) This plan will give you a website, and blog including unlimited products. Two staff accounts. Free SSL certificate.

• Shopify ($54/month) This plan increases the staff accounts to five and all basic features. It also allows abandoned card recovery and fraud reports.

• Advanced Shopify ($107) Includes 15 staff accounts and all the basic Shopify features including and advanced report builder and third-party calculated shipping rates.

3. Zyro

Zyro is one of the best e-commerce builders and small businesses. Zyro has all the features that a store needs to succeed. Start building your e-commerce store right away with their easy-to-use drag-and-drop builder.

You can easily sell your products online through sites like Facebook, Instagram, and Amazon you can ensure that your products are seen by the millions of potential customers looking for the products.

Zyro makes social media integration easy. It has multiple payment options so that your customers can easily purchase the products easily.

If you’re a small business or a large enterprise worries come to an end zyro has all the features you need to succeed. With the easy drag-and-drop page builder designing the website can be easy and quick.

You don’t need to have coding knowledge to set up a store on Zyro as it makes you the perfect store with just a few clicks and the site can be live and running. You don’t need to spend money on web development services.

Key Features

• You can choose a variety of templates and start creating your online store. Whether you’re looking for simple or complex design zyro does the job for you.

• To promote products they have many marketing tools which will help in creating campaigns on social media and email campaigns.

• Zyro helps in SEO so that your product reaches potential customers when they are searching for the products you’re selling.

• It comes with 70+ payment options to make payments secure and hassle-free for customers.

• Shipping and tax management to ensure that your charging the right taxes and that products are delivered on time to the customers.

• Discount codes and gift cards to help you promote your products easily without much hassle.

• Send email messages to keep your customers updated on the new launch and their order status.

• As your business grows zyro helps in scaling your business with upsells and abandoned cart recovery and continues to grow with massive customers.

• Creating your online store is simple and easy you don’t need to spend on web development services as they have templates that are easily customizable.

• It makes adding products and integrating with social media and sites easy and quick to get the audience on your store and make sales.

Pros

• If you’re not familiar with web design then drag and drop page builder will make your task much easier and design your store with few clicks.

• It’s SEO friendly which will make the ranking easy without much hassle.

• The website loads faster which will make it easier to rank on Google without much effort.

• The support is very helpful which will make the task easier and quicker.

Cons

• Some of the features are still in progress and not rolled out completely and not ready to use.

• It provides limited customization options.

• There’s still room for improving built-in tools and customization features.

Pricing

• Website: $2.61/month This plan will help in creating a professional blog and website.

• Business: $4.41/month This plan helps in start selling instantly with e-commerce essentials.

• Advanced store: $14.31/month this plan helps in growing your business with advanced marketing tools.

4. Nexcess

Nexcess is a hosting platform for hosting providers for hosting all of your needs including the managed wordpress website, woocommerce hosting, and more.

They provide hosting services for e-commerce platforms like Drupal and Bigcommerce. They provide 24/7 support for any of the queries not just hosting they also helping in creating your store with their store builder.

Just answer a few of the relevant questions and the tool will build a store for you. They have top-notch customer support and they don’t compromise on the support they provide to customers.

If you opt for Magento hosting then you will get support from the Magento professionals similar to wordpress if you get wordpress hosting then wordpress professional wordpress experts will provide support.

If you want to migrate your website from one host to another then they don’t charge for the migration. Woocommerce hosting comes with abandoned card plugins, page builders, and plugins. Affiliate WP and a lot of integrations for tracking analytics.

The best part about Nexcess is you will get all the features in every plan even the basic plan has all the features which makes it unique and standouts among all the e-commerce platforms.

Key Features

• They provide PCI compliance.

• Cloud accelerator to speed up load time.

• Customizable technology.

• Built-in CDN with 22 Locations.

• Store builder builds the store with a few clicks.

Pros

• Simple interface that makes it easy to use.

• Support is very knowledgeable which is always a plus point.

• A lot of free and premium plugins that make it easy to add features and integration.

• Provides different hostings like wordpress and Magento and easy set up with store builder.

Cons

• Significantly more expensive than standard hosting plans.

• The dashboard doesn’t show some of the useful tools like in the browser file manager.

• It’s hard to retrieve old tickets raised.

Pricing

• WordPress Hosting is $13/month and includes automatic plugins and platform updates.

• Woocommerce hosting is $13/month and includes built-in image compression, an abandoned cart, and a page builder plugin.

• Magento $34/month includes PCI compliance add-ons server clusters plus a Magento master on staff.

5. Wix

Wix is the best e-commerce platform for small businesses. It is one of the fastest growing e-commerce platforms that allows you to start a full fledge e-commerce store with $20/month.

They have hundreds of pre-made templates and promotions and gift cards. Amazing product gallery that will make your website designing easy and hassle-free without coding.

They will customize your site for mobile devices which will help in SEO. The best part about this e-commerce platform is you can customize your e-commerce mobile site with their easy-to-use store builder.

You don’t HTML and CSS to design a professional and stunning website on Wix.

The product gallery layout is adaptive in size and looks great on mobile devices too. Wix is one of the easiest tools to use for creating websites and for e-commerce stores.

Wix has multiple secure payment options and 24/7 support. They provide global tax and shipping and discounts and coupon codes to help you drive more sales.

If you’re a beginner and thinking to start an e-commerce store then wix is the ideal platform for you. They provide a lot of features that help in creating a stunning website and products can be sold with ease.

They provide hundreds of free templates which will make the website look professional and guess what? You don’t need to worry about coding just drags and drop the element with the page builder.

With the drag-and-drop page builder, you can easily add and remove elements from the website.

Key Features

• They provide stunning templates which create the website easily without much effort and time.

• Design freedom you can play around with the different design templates and elements and decide which goes best for your brand.

• Advanced SEO tools help in rankings or visibility of the products when it’s searched by potential customers.

• Unlimited fonts help in taking complete control over the website fonts and go with the best fonts as fonts play a major role in website designing.

• It is easy to add all of your products and showcase them on the website.

• Mobile optimization helps make your website look stunning on mobile and tablet devices.

• Drag and drop page builder will let you completely control the design and turn it into whatever design you want.

Pros

• Easy and reliable website builder to design the website with few clicks.

• A variety of templates makes your work a lot easier.

• Mobile optimization helps in making your website stunning on mobile devices.

• Reliable and affordable plans help in saving money.

• Unlimited fonts are available for the website.

Cons

• The website takes time to load compared to other websites.

• It’s limited compared to wordpress.

• Wix lacks some SEO features.

Pricing

• VIP: $38/month this plan provides first-priority support.

• Pro: $23/month this plan comes with complete online branding.

• Unlimited $18/month is best for entrepreneurs and freelancers.

• Combo $14/month best for personal use.

6. Woocommerce

Woocommerce is one of the popular e-commerce platforms among wordpress users. If you have a domain and hosting then using woo commerce is completely free.

Some of the woo commerce extensions require a purchase. Among all the online store woocommerce powers 25% of the online stores.

This is a simple open-source plugin that is best for e-commerce and has grown massively and is one of the most popular e-commerce solutions in the market today.

Among all the platforms listed here, woo commerce is one of the affordable platforms with ease of use and scalability. It provides all the features that you need to run your online store and set up your store with ease.

If you’re a beginner who just started with an online store then you can go with woo commerce to get started and see how your online store turns out.

Woocommerce supports unlimited products and images. So you can add as many images and products as you want. Customization is very simple and easy. It helps in Adding product variations quickly and easily.

Payments can be made via digital payments like PayPal and more ways like bank transfer and cash on delivery. Woocommerce provides product shipping locally and internationally.

WordPress is one of the best SEO platforms in the market and integrating wordpress with woocommerce means much easier SEO of the site.  It provides endless SEO features which will help in taking complete control of Site SEO and appearing in search results.

Key features

• The free platform is great for beginners who are setting up an e-commerce store.

• Easy to use with end number of templates customization can be really easy and quick.

• SEO customizations help in appearing search results that will reach your potential customers.

• Multiple and secure payment options are available for customers.

• You can add unlimited products and images with ease through the media library.

• If you don’t know to code then it will not be tough to create an e-commerce website with the help of woocommerce.

Pros

• Free platform with ease of use.

• Extensions for added features.

• The great and knowledgeable customer support is a plus point.

• Unlimited products can be added.

Cons

• Some of the extensions are expensive.

• It will not include domain and hosting.

• It cannot be used on sites that wordpress doesn’t host.

• All the plugins site will take a timer to load.

Pricing

• Woocommerce is free to install on wordpress but some extensions require purchase and themes are available in the woocommerce marketplace. There are free and premium plugins.

7. Bigcartel

All of the e-commerce platforms on the list are different when compared to big cartels has a minimalist approach when it comes to selling products online.

As mentioned on its website this platform is for small businesses in the creative niche. Bigcartel provides a free plan which will help you to sell five products with a website name for example- stytlishshoes.bigcartel.com

If you want to have your own URL then you need to upgrade to their paid plans which are available at three different prices. The paid plan will increase the product limit to 300 products.

This is one of the simplest and most minimalist e-commerce platforms with not many vast options and features available. If you’re a beginner who is starting with an e-commerce site then big cartel is the ideal choice.

Adding your products, and categories and setting up payment options with the easy-to-use elements you’re pretty much done with setting up your e-commerce site and the next thing will be to look for the overall appearance.

There’s a website builder similar to wordpress themes which will help you in customizing your logo, fonts, and colors. With the premade themes you can change the overall appearance of the site.

Key Features

• Suitable for small businesses.

• Adding products and setting up payment options is very easy and simple.

• You can start with the free plan which provides adding five products.

• The paid plan will increase the product limit to a maximum of 300 products plus offers other advanced features which will the e-commerce store to succeed.

• The store builder will build the website with a variety of templates and themes which will make your site look stunning.

Pros

• Simple and easy to use.

• Affordable plans.

• Page builder helps in setting up a store in no time.

• IPhone app is available for IOS users.

Cons

• The free plan is too limited.

• You cannot add unlimited products with variations.

• It lacks the inventory feature.

Pricing

• Free plan: allows to add up to 5 products and Facebook integration along with order management.

• Paid Plan $9.95/month: allows up to 25 products And features including custom domain and google analytics integration.

• Diamond Plan $19.99/month allows up to 100 products.

• Titanium Plan $29.99/month allows up to 300 products.

8. Volusion

Volusion is one of the best and most stable e-commerce platforms with a lot of functionality and content builder which is the best competitor of elementor in ease of use.

The primary advantage of using volusion is they have an SEO and marketing team which will help you to market your business online. This will help you to get more visibility and exposure on search engines.

If you’re a business owner who wants the best marketing and SEO for your business then volusion could be the right pick for you as it helps to rank on search engines and drives more traffic to your store.

The higher tier plan comes with $100 of quick wins monthly. If you’re a business owner, this will include web design fixes, SEO, and other assistance to improve the website’s performance.

Key Features

• The theme is mobile-friendly which will be great for businesses to make it easy for customers to shop on their phones and tablets.

• A lot of customizable layouts will create a unique look for the store that will stand out unique among others.

• The categories pages will allow businesses to put the products in categories which will help customers to shop from the categories.

• A logo can be added to the store when the customer visits the store they can see the logo and favicon.

• The product display option will help businesses to display products in the most stunning way to the customers.

Pros

• The theme is mobile-friendly which will be great for businesses.

• A lot of customizable layouts will create a unique look.

• Categories pages will help to add categories.

Cons

• Fewer themes compared to others.

• It doesn’t have a dedicated app store.

Pricing

• The $29/Month personal plan comes with unlimited products, online support, and zero transaction fees.

• Professional plan of $79/Month

• Their $299/Month business plan comes with SEO support.

9. Squarespace

Squarespace is one of the well-known e-commerce platforms with basic e-commerce features. If you’re an absolute beginner then you can start your blog with Squarespace as they have various pre-made templates.

Squarespace is one of the best options for people who’re just starting off without any technical knowledge it makes it easy to get started by building a website and uploading content.

But Squarespace doesn’t provide functionality and SEO benefits which a wordpress website provides with thousands of e-commerce templates and plugins to enhance your website for the end user.

It’s not so good at providing SEO benefits which will affect the ranking of the website. Have you heard anyone say that they have set up their online store on Squarespace and got a bundle of advantages? No right, so for a fast and SEO-friendly online store, Squarespace is not the best option to go.

However, if you’re just starting off then this is the better option for you as it provides some benefits.

It’s super easy to set up an online store with Squarespace you get great-looking mobile-friendly templates and product management and product integration with shipping solutions like ShipBob and ship station.

Third-party logistics providers help you ship your product with various shipping providers like FedEx, USPS, etc. This way you don’t need to worry about the shipment of the product.

Key Features

• Customizable templates help to make your site look great and stand out as unique among others.

• Using customizable page and content layouts you can arrange your site’s content and new and exciting ways.

• The universal asset uploading method will help you update Images, PDFs, videos, audio files, and other documents on the website.

• Asset selector allows you to quickly select images and media from pre-existing files and drag and drop new ones into the page without leaving the editor.

• Duplicate pages and content save time when creating a new site or making changes to an existing site.

Pros

• Customizable templates help to make your site look great

• Using customizable page and content layouts you can arrange your site’s content

• Asset selector allows you to quickly select images and media from pre-existing files

Cons

• Not many functionality and SEO benefits.

• Navigation for editing the site can be difficult and frustrating.

Pricing

• Personal plan $14/Month

• Business plan $23/Month

• Basic plan $27/Month

• Advanced Online Store $49/Month

What Are The Best Free E-commerce Platforms

There are various free e-commerce platforms available if you’re looking for a free platform but there are a few things you need to focus on before starting with the free e-commerce platform.

Do you want to scale your business? If yes then using a free platform will be not beneficial in the long term along with the free platform you will get a lot of limitations which will be difficult for you moving forward to customize.

I don’t recommend going with the free e-commerce platform as it’s not beneficial in long term and a lot of control will be limited which will not help to play around with features and see the response from the audience.

Always prefer going with the paid platform. One of the major advantages of the paid platform is getting complete control and support which will help your online store to grow and reach out to potential customers.

However, if you’re someone who wants to start with a free platform then I’ll be listing some of the free platforms below.

Squarespace

Wix

Weebly

Shopify

Bigcartel

These are some of the best free e-commerce platforms to start your online store with but remember if you want to scale and grow your brand then it’s better to go with paid platform.

Tips For Using An E-commerce Platform

Here are some of the tips for using an e-commerce platform for your marketing strategy which will grow your business and reach your potential audience.

1. Focus On Mobile Friendly Site

Mobile friendly website is the new update of Google as it will index the mobile version of the site predominately because the mobile users are Growing and 59% of the searches are run through mobile and others are through desktop and tablet.

Focusing on the mobile website will help in indexing your site quicker without any issues and optimizes the speed of the website. This ensures that your website is mobile friendly as one of the major criteria of Google indexing is a mobile-friendly site.

Shopify provides mobile optimization themes that will help to create a mobile-friendly site with just a few clicks. Many other e-commerce platforms provide similar benefits which will help you offer your audience a better mobile browsing experience.

2. Site Speed

Site speed is also one of the criteria of Google when it comes to indexing and ranking site. If the website speed is not good then it might be ignored by Google in rankings.

As the span of user attention is decreasing day by day nobody waits for a longer time if your content is taking time to load they will go back and open the other site which will increase the bounce rate.

That means your ranking will be highly impacted. No matter if your ranking on the first page of Google and still site speed is slow it will be outranked by Google.

Ensure that your site speed is good in order to increase your ranking and provide users with the best navigation and less loading time as the images will be more in an e-commerce store make sure they are optimized.

3. Easy Navigation

It is essential for an e-commerce website to provide ease of navigation as the user may switch from one page to other which will help them to make the final decision on whether to product.

For easy navigation on your site, you can add numerous plugins with the help of the e-commerce platforms you’re using. Woocommerce allows you to add a plugin that can let your user go back to the items they recently viewed.

When you integrate your site with these tools it will make your navigation comfortable the user will be experiencing better navigation which will help you to get more sales.

Additionally adding a recently viewed and suggested product navigation can increase the e-commerce conversion rate.

4. Customer Support

Customer support is one of the most important things which will make your website interactive and more users engage with it as the customer support will be backed by the solutions to customers.

If they have any doubts while purchasing the product then customers will be contacting the support to know more about the product and any specific query they have regarding the product.

A website with customer support boosts the website and revenue and drives customer satisfaction. The e-commerce service should include live chat support and efficient customer support.

The platform will provide an excellent easy way to add live customer support, a live chat software in just a few steps.

5. Use Great Images

Product images are one of the essential factors when it comes to e-commerce websites. Most of the buying decisions will be based on images and reviews as the customer doesn’t have the physical product.

Ensure that your e-commerce images are designed in a great way with a professional look as they are the key to sales if they are not good customers might end up dropping the buying decision.

Images portray your brand and it can appeal to the customer which will boost the sales and revenue of your e-commerce business.

Tips For Using An E-commerce Platform (Infographics)

Our Top Picks

Here are some of the best free e-commerce platforms which will help you scale your business if you’re just starting off and don’t want to switch to a paid platform.

1. Bigcommerce

BigCommerce is an e-commerce platform that is used by Camelback, and Toyota. It’s a full-featured software that manages everything from web hosting, web design, shipping, and tracking analytics.

It’s the best e-commerce platform that is built to scale large businesses. Small businesses enter e-commerce with Shopify because of their brand name and their pricing.

After a few months they hit the growth and realize they were paying only for the product listing and for add ons they have to pay extra bucks and no SEO tools are there for the products listed.

They are lacking SEO and outgrowing their site from the search engine result pages SERPs. If you’re a business owner who’s struggling with the SEO of the business then BigCommerce is the platform for you to enter.

They are accessible platforms for small business owners because of their features and built-in functionality.

Brands like Toyota, Ford, camelback, and others in the Fortune 1000 use BigCommerce which are easily bringing in over $100 million in annual sales without much hassle.

They launched BigCommerce for WordPress in December 2018 which allows users to manage the front-end content on wordpress without much hassle and backend e-commerce with BigCommerce.

This allows you to have a faster website speed than you find with other e-commerce options like WooCommerce which installs multiple plugins to work and make your website speed performance.

2. Shopify

If you’re looking for one of the best and most trusted e-commerce platforms then Shopify is included. There are over 400000 online retailers hosted on Shopify. No doubt how easy it is to set up a store on Shopify and its number platform recommended for e-commerce.

You don’t need many web development skills to sell on Shopify it’s easy to set up a store and run in minutes. Whenever you think of e-commerce then you land right on Shopify.

This is one of the best open-source web applications and also one of the fastest-growing SAAS companies. With just a few clicks your store will be set up and ready to supply to the customers.

It’s very easy to design a website and add products. But just with a few clicks, your website will not get the sales you need to market your store and one of the drawbacks of Shopify is its SEO.

They don’t have the best SEO rules when it comes to the SEO of the store. They have a structured URL

For example, the page soundproof panels will be available in soundproofinghome.com/soundproof materials shopify forces you to use their format soundproofinghome.com/collections/soundproof materials which is not a short SEO optimized.

This structure is not ideal for search engine rankings and secondly, they have fewer product options which will not allow you to add more variants.

For example, if your selling shoes of different colors you can add up to 100 variants. If you have more then you cannot add to the list. If you have many combinations, and materials then that becomes a barrier.

3. Woocommerce

Woocommerce is one of the popular e-commerce platforms among wordpress users. If you have a domain and hosting then using woo commerce is completely free.

Some of the woo commerce extensions require a purchase. Among all the online store woocommerce powers 25% of the online stores.

This is a simple open-source plugin that is best for e-commerce and has grown massively and is one of the most popular e-commerce solutions in the market today.

Among all the platforms listed here, woo commerce is one of the affordable platforms with ease of use and scalability. It provides all the features that you need to run your online store and set up your store with ease.

If you’re a beginner who just started with an online store then you can go with woo-commerce to get started and see how your online store turns out.

Woocommerce supports unlimited products and images. So you can add as many images and products as you want. Customization is very simple and easy. It helps in Adding product variations quickly and easily.

Payments can be made via digital payments like PayPal and more ways like bank transfer and cash on delivery. Woocommerce provides product shipping locally and internationally.

WordPress is one of the best SEO platforms in the market and integrating wordpress with woocommerce means much easier SEO of the site.  It provides endless SEO features which will help in taking complete control of Site SEO and appearing in search results.

4. Bigcartel

All of the e-commerce platforms on the list are different when compared to big cartels has a minimalist approach when it comes to selling products online.

As mentioned on its website this platform is for small businesses in the creative niche. Bigcartel provides a free plan which will help you to sell five products with a website name for example- stytlishshoes.bigcartel.com

If you want to have your own URL then you need to upgrade to their paid plans which are available at three different prices. The paid plan will increase the product limit to 300 products.

This is one of the simplest and most minimalist e-commerce platforms with not many vast options and features available. If you’re a beginner who is starting with an e-commerce site then big cartel is the ideal choice.

Adding your products, and categories and setting up payment options with the easy-to-use elements you’re pretty much done with setting up your e-commerce site and the next thing will be to look for the overall appearance.

There’s a website builder similar to wordpress themes which will help you in customizing your logo, fonts, and colors. With the premade themes you can change the overall appearance of the site.

Final Thoughts On E-commerce Platforms

There is a variety of e-commerce platforms that are good for you but it depends on the business you’re starting. If you want complete freedom then woocommerce will be the best platform for you.

I have stated some of the free e-commerce platforms that will help you to get started if your beginner and don’t want to start with the paid platform but free platforms come with limitations.

I would suggest starting with a paid platform as there are many advantages that come along with the paid platform when compared to a free platform you can start with the basic plan and upgrade as your business grows.

If you want to start an online store for free but if you’re happy to pay for something that’s good for your business then Shopify and bigcommerce are the best options on the list.

If you’re a beginner and don’t have any clue about e-commerce platforms then read the key features, pros, and cons of e-commerce platforms that will help you to understand which one to choose and start building your store on that specific platform.

If you got any value from this article let us know we would love to hear from you and share it with friends and family who are starting off an online business, Check out our guide on the 7 best profitable blogging niches.