Reading Time: 6 minutes 
In the present competitive digital marketing time, eCommerce owners should select the best and most promising platform for their running their business online. This decision to work with a platform is a big one, and therefore you must spend a good amount of time in analyzing and finalizing the eCommerce platform to run your store on.
Most of the retailers often make the mistake of collaborating with the wrong eCommerce platforms and then suffer a lot because of this. This article will discuss in detail eCommerce platforms and will list the platforms that will be topping the charts in the year 2020. So, let us delve into this:
What is an eCommerce platform?
An eCommerce platform is a software where various business propagandas launch, host, and manage their online activity with regards to their retail store. While multiple eCommerce platforms provide different features, the central concept is to give the merchants a strong base for building up their brand’s online store to sell their products.
What are eCommerce platforms so important to merchants?
An eCommerce platform is meant to generalize the overviews, which will ultimately help a brand set down a rigid path for their business ventures.
We will be going over through some of the best eCommerce platforms which you can consider to boost your business from day one! These eCommerce platforms are entirely based on the price of items, functionality, user experience, and overall value.
What is meant by “the best eCommerce platform”?
The range of possibilities with a good eCommerce platform is endless.
However, there are various factors that you need to consider before starting with the same. These are as follows:
1. Where should you sell your products, the marketplace, or over on an eCommerce platform
or both?
2. What tools and features will you require to pass up safely?
3. The technology you have chosen, can it support your present sales volume along with
your growth on the business scale?
4. What is your overall technology budget?
There is no specific eCommerce platform that suits all. Therefore, all merchants should consider the budget and needs before choosing an eCommerce platform.
Top eCommerce platforms in 2020
We have reviewed some of the best eCommerce platforms for you to consider. Each one has its own set of unique features and costs. Make sure that you choose accordingly, depending on what your business requires at the moment.
1. Shopify
Shopify is at the top of this list since this eCommerce platform is quite easy to learn, and anyone can cope up with its functionality with ease to launch their new store. This platform is quite popular among smaller eCommerce brands whose order volume ranges from low to moderate.
Depending on your needs and the features it provides, Shopify can have a monthly price ranging from $29 to $299. Although it has some limited customization options, Shopify is the best option for SMB eCommerce merchants.
Pros:
• Quite simple to use
• Wide variety of themes to choose from
• Shopify App store and 24*7 customer support
Cons:
• The single disadvantage which this platform has is that payments are limited to a few
countries only and merchants of the leftover countries have to pay the payment fees
to the third-party payment companies.
2. Shopify Plus
Shopify Plus is the eCommerce platform for merchants who have significantly outgrown their original Shopify setup and, thus, are in need of more advanced features and customizations. Unlike Shopify, Shopify Plus allows merchants to create a more customized and responsive checkout experience.
The monthly pricing depends on various factors, such as order volume, technology, design, and customizable features. It has the function of dedicated account managers, which provides to be quite a huge plus point when it comes to merchants who tend to have a more complicated setup.
This is a great option that can be considered by merchants for scaling up their business enterprise.
Pros
• With so many features, Shopify Plus comes with a comparatively low total cost of
ownership among all the listed apps.
• It has the highest number of dedicated third-party integration partners as compared
to all the competitors.
• Quite simple to be used by merchandisers and admins. One can easily learn by own self
how to use and manage all the features.
Cons
• The main disadvantage of using Shopify Plus is the lack of multi-store architecture
which limits the efficient setup of multi-brands unlike Magento and a few other
platforms.
3. Magento
This is another enterprise-level eCommerce platform that has quite a lot of unique features that any merchant would like to consider. It is an open-source eCommerce platform that needs programming and developer resources, thus creating a higher barrier in its entry than other simple plug-and-play platforms like Shopify.
This eCommerce platform does offer discounts, supports recurring payments, product listings, and much more.
There are two versions of this platform, namely the basic version, which is free, and the other one being the enterprise version, which has an approximate cost of $20,000 annually. It is recommended for big online stores and shouldn’t be considered by small or average businesses.
Pros
• Magento has a simple interface with multiple customization options available for the
customers to choose from.
• Extremely SEO friendly to give better ranking to your eCommerce store.
• It provides optimal scalability to the eCommerce stores.
Cons
• The one disadvantage of Magento is that external hosting is required from the users end
unlike all the competitor platforms.
4. BigCommerce
This eCommerce platform has a wide variety of features built into its system, along with various other customizable options. This platform is very much suitable for enterprise-level e-commerce merchants such as Toyota and Natori.
Some of the unique features of this platform are industry-leading time, advanced security, secure payment, and order fulfillment partnerships, and lots of built-in integration with some of the leading e-commerce applications.
BigCommerce is a lot expensive; however, its unique set of advanced features is what makes it so accessible. It offers the merchants with full-fledged store without any complex obstacles, thus making it an excellent choice amongst most popular merchants.
Pros
• There is no setup and transaction fee while using the platform.
• Users get multi-channel selling options for increasing their sales.
• From the options of themes available, users can edit the theme files offline as well
after downloading them.
Cons
• A few free themes are available for the users.
• If the user exceeds the annual sales threshold associated with the plan, then he/ she
has to upgrade to the more expensive plan.
• A few advertised features are just limited to the U.S. and not in any other country.
5. WooCommerce
WooCommerce is a free WordPress plugin that allows various merchants to convert their WordPress sites into an online store.
The platform has its secure payment procedure in addition to a shopping cart. This open-source platform is quite an excellent choice for smaller brands who have mastered the development resources of WordPress completely.
To completely integrate the shopping cart, it costs extra money. However, the basic features are free of cost.
WooCommerce does tend to slow down if additional customers and products are added onto your online store. Thus, if you are looking forward to up-scale your business, try considering any of the above eCommerce platforms.
Pros
• The software is completely free and open source.
• It comes with one and a thousand plugins.
• It has a thousand themes to select from and can be customized as per the requirements.
Cons
• Installation of a few plugins is paid and you have to check for the costs associated
with the payment gateways, subscription services and a few more services.
• WooCommerce cannot be utilized with the sites that don’t use WordPress for content
management.
• In order to make most out of the products, it is important for the user to have
complete knowledge of WordPress and WooCommerce and even may require professional help
in order to use all its features completely.
Conclusion
There are many eCommerce platforms worth considering when it comes to exploring for one. Some platforms appear to be more popular than others, but eventually, they have a higher costing.
Make sure that you choose the right platform for your business in the very beginning since companies seldom shift from one e-commerce platform to another more than once every few years.
We do hope that the above guide will help you to choose from among the potential top eCommerce platforms for the year 2020 with ease, thus supporting your business and making it grow likewise!
