Best Platforms for Ecommerce in 2019

Choosing the right online platform for your eCommerce store can be a tough decision and might have a long-term impact on your business. There are many factors to consider before taking your pick, such as:

• What kind of tools and features you’re looking for? 
• Is the platform user-friendly enough?
• How scalable is the platform? Will you be able to use it in the future?
• Is the platform too expensive for your budget?

There’s plenty of ecommerce platforms to choose from. However, no matter your preference, we’re here to provide you with a list of some of the best options currently available.

What is an Ecommerce Platform?

Using an ecommerce platform allows businesses and individuals to easily create, host, and manage an online store.

Today, there are hundreds of ecommerce platforms to choose from. However, in order to help you narrow down your choices, we’ve chosen some of the best ecommerce platforms in 2019.

1. Shopify

Nowadays, Shopify is perhaps one of the most popular ecommerce platforms. It allows you to easily start an online store in a matter of minutes. 

This platform is particularly useful for low volume eCommerce brands. There’s also a multitude of templates to choose from. Other than that, you can design and customize the look of your store yourself.

Shopify accepts numerous credit card options and provides users with a complete CMS for their online store needs. They can even manage the layout and functionality of their eCommerce stores on the go using their mobile device.

Shopify costs between $29 to $299 per month, depending on the order volume and selected features.

2. BigCommerce

With a comprehensive shopping search engine, this ecommerce platform is mainly aimed at larger retail brands. It is also a great choice for small businesses whose annual sales don’t exceed $50.000. Brick-and-mortar store owners who are interested in expanding their operations online can also consider using this well-known platform. 

The wide range of tools makes BigCommerce suitable for almost any industry or niche. No matter what business you’re in, you can launch an online shop without coding experience thanks to the intuitive interface. Just about anyone can start, design and manage an ecommerce store using a variety of simple-to-use templates. However, there are only 7 free themes.

The pricing starts at $29.95 per month. With the Standard plan, you can get a lot of goodies, including the ability to create gift cards, checkout codes, and unlimited bandwidth for your site. However, you won’t get some perks that come with Plus and Pro plans, such as an abandoned cart notices or a custom SSL. 

3. Magento

Magento is primarily intended for larger enterprise companies. It’s not the best choice for midsize or small businesses. Opening a store on this platform involves developers and will require technical knowledge, which can be a big barrier for many ecommerce businesses. Magento, in turn, offers discounts to enterprise sellers along with a lot of useful features. 

In addition to managing subscriptions and recurring payments, you can pick a server environment and change nearly anything you want in the design. If you want to launch a shop with this self-hosted CMS, be ready to take care of security, updates, and everything in between to keep it running properly.

While the basic Magento version is free, the annual cost of enterprise plans can reach up to $20,000. 

4. Volusion

As a cloud-based platform, Volusion is a hosted solution aimed at building an ecommerce store. It is comprised of plenty of product listings and customizable themes. In addition, it comes with numerous product management and ecommerce tools, such as native fulfillment, rich text, loyalty programs, etc.

Volusion supports marketplace integration for both eBay and Amazon while offering a variety of marketing options. However, some of these options are only included in more expensive plans. You get additional features alongside more bandwidth and product slots with higher plans. 

The pricing structure is quite confusing too. Running a store on this platform would cost you anywhere from $29 to $299 monthly. 

5. WooCommerce

WooCommerce is an open-source e-commerce plugin for WordPress. WordPress e-commerce platform powers more than 30% of all online stores.

WooCommerce has become very popular because there are no arbitrary limits on products, variations, orders, or anything else. We are able to sell anything from physical products and digital downloads to services, tickets, memberships.

The platform offers multiple shipping options and rates, all highly customizable you can offer pickup or local delivery based on location. Taxes can be automatically calculated based on your base address. Payment isn’t just restricted to cards and PayPal, WooCommerce can handle multiple payment gateways, bank transfers, checks and cash on delivery.

If you find that WooCommerce plugin by itself isn’t quite enough, you can customize it with more than 200 official WooCommerce extensions. You can find out more on the official WooCommerce extensions page.