But as such, I might as well now compare to other platforms. So, in your evaluation of Volusion, were you basing the performance and SEO ratings on a newer, responsive site or everything on their platform?
I know I need to move to response. Any hints in that regard as we lean into migrating forward? Your performance metrics are much appreciated. One in particular is a standout, that being actual SEO performance.
We have a tiny and ancient little niche business of selling genuine — unworn — vintage shoes from the 30s — 70s aVintageSole. Counting the features seems boring, yet easier to do that speed tests, since to get reliable results you need to place the compared platforms into exactly the same conditions.
Were all the platforms placed in equal conditions from the point of view of servers? If yes, what server was used? What was the PHP versions etc? What pages pf the websites were tested? What versions of the software were used?
That is going to be a must for customers on mobile devices, and will definitely give a sales boost. Outstanding use of images showing all the ecommerce platforms. I am torn between using a free ecommerce platform which involves too many tweaking or just go for a hosted one.
I think you just saved me a week of research, and the results are much clearer than if I did it myself. For my money though, comparing SaaS and deployed platforms is a bit too big of an ask. Comparing Apples with Apples is a good ambition but by their nature you have two very different types of fruit there. Magento site performance, for example, is almost entirely dependent on how well set up the store is. A good Magento developer can make it sing — but it takes time and expertise….
As a SasS solution the variance between Shopify sites should be much smaller. This post is impressive! Great content!
Really cool infographic. I actually sell a product just using paypal since I thought it might be the easiest for me to set up and it is what I am most familiar with. I guess really lots of ecommerce solutions even integrate with paypal however I do not run the sales of my products as a store just individual sales pages for a pay per product approach.
Cost and feature set tend to take away the focus from these foundational elements. And although some parts can be corrected after, starting out well is a lot easier. Very thorough! And good-looking, too! Thanks, Henneke — I wanted to do something no one else has done before. Site performance is so critical with ecommerce.
Hopefully this data helps some folks. Excellent post Darren, lots of great insight. I am glad to see a comparison like this. I recently launched a business on the side on Shopify. I wonder how the tests were done, especially that I work on Magento and have own thoughts comparing Shopify and other platforms. Magento is a big thing, packed into community version, Yes, its slow, but it can be tweaked.
Btw its no. So your guides is a bit skewed I think……. An explanation on testing methods can be read here : below the infographic.
Scoring for magento — I treated it like all other platforms. So the scoring for magento is based on averaging the community and enterprise version. Its my best thought on making an apples to apples comparison. By no stretch is magento cheap for the average start up. I totally agree with Darren here. Also its super slow if you have a technology based UX, for eg. Why do you think it is crucial to decide if you want to open source vs SaaS? I agree with you — but I want to understand your reasoning.
In no scenario, do you actually own the platform. Ive worked with people that have run sites on their own servers using open source and you need additional resources to manage it like IT. Might not be worth it for some folks. For a start up I think its more critical to match your business model. Are you a drop shipper? Selling handmade products in short run?
Como estas? Awesome job on this, Darren. And as you know, choosing the wrong one can be a huge pain. Awesome post, Darren! Thanks Shabbir! As you know its super hard to get a apples to apples comparison with all the platforms.
With endless options I decided it was most fair to compare out of the box solutions of well known and lesser known platforms. The review looks at both magento community and enterprise. I did not distinguish between Magento 1 and 2 when pulling sites running on Magento — so I cant tell if there was improvement in speed from 1 to 2. Epic post, Darren. Really appreciate it, Chris! I think entrepreneur that own mobile commerce and performance will win big.
Wow, Darren. An amazing post, infographic AND buyers guide. It was interesting to see where some of the platforms we use stack up. Great job!
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Uses WooCommerce. About the author. Follow him on Twitter , LinkedIn. Or take his course to learn ecommerce. Definitely, not Reply. Thank you in advance! If you are a developer and you know how to build using OpenCart, feel free to do so. Avoid godaddy hosting and website builders. Hi Darren, Really enjoyed your analysis of e-commerce platforms. Hi Darren, I need a site that enables short i. It depends on your business model, and how you want to grow the site.
Make sure you have a niche where you can compete and a definable target market Reply. Dear Darren You did a wonderful job. Excellent Guide! Anyways, excellent guide! I have 2 comments: When I was looking for a new shopping cart I found it daunting, because there were so many products out there it was overwhelming. I personally like Shopify the most due to following reasons — — Its affordable — Hosting is included in the plan — We can customize the storefronts without having much knowledge about web designing and development — Shopify has a great support — They have one of the biggest community on the web to help each others Reply.
Toch — watch Discover Shop Reply. Sounds cool. Thank you Darren. Thanks for all the research. I appreciate the detail in this article. Well written and too the point! Hi Darren, Great post -extremely helpful for someone just starting out so thanks very much for sharing. Called tech support. Crossed them off my list.
Caveat emptor. Hi Darren — Great post. Your analysis and infographics are amazing. Thanks again! Im going to update this list and include Wix Reply. When is the new report due out Darren?
Hey Darren, can you please share the full report? Thanks, Cesar Reply. I emailed it to you Reply. Hello, This post is impressive… I am using Shopify and believe me I am very happy with it.
Again, many thanks for your insightful and most useful reviews. Thank you for your overview. Impressive job! Please shed more light on the speed tests methodology. Great article, thanks! Excellent article, well researched. Look forward to reading more from you Darren Reply. Great post Darren! How about doing a similar report for selling digital products?
Thanks Chris! Very impressive work Darren! Well done. Thanks, Andy! This is the best comparison of platforms for entrepreneurs I have seen! Yup — Reply. Thanks for reading, Tomek. If you know how to do it yourself, more power to you! No hablo espanol. Hola Nahuel! Is the Magento review based on Magento 1 or Magento 2?
Good and detailed one. Keep it up. Thanks, Brenda! Hi Darren Could you please make proposal for me? E-commerce platform and dropship Reply.
Are you looking for a platform recommendation or a build out? Subscribe to Newsletter. Exclusive Member of Mediavine Finance. Share via. When it comes to art, your website needs to capture the essence of your craft. Selling digital copies of your work is a vital feature, as is having a variety of shipping options. Dropshipping is becoming an ever more popular way to sell products. Not all platforms allow dropshipping, but, lucky for you, some of the best ones on the market do.
Powerful features and tools like multi-channel selling, shipping and invoice management, and analytics are all important here. For credibility and authority as much as anything, your own online store for digital products is essential. It can be complex to build a site for digital downloads and eye-wateringly expensive to pay a developer to do so! Things like digital downloads, preview snippets, and amendable shipping rates are all features that will make your online store far more than just a pretty cover.
Whether you need a fully-fledged ecommerce solution, or just a bookings and payments system, all bases are covered. Selling toys or tech? Phones or gadgets? An online store can help pull all your products together. Manage everything with one controller — an ecommerce website builder. In order to supercharge your sales, build a site with any of the below platforms. Simple to navigate, simple to edit, and simple to manage.
To make it fair, we used a wide range of people. Some with a decent level of computer knowledge, who had used different ecommerce website builders before. Everyone was asked to fill in a task sheet while they created their online store and score how easy, or difficult, they found certain tasks.
Category winner: Squarespace. Read our detailed review of Squarespace. Sales Features Why it matters. Website features refers to things like image galleries, contact forms and calendars. Sales features are things like abandoned cart recovery or the amount of payment gateways that are provided — things that have a direct impact on your revenue. Sales features can ultimately be the difference between a customer completing a transaction, or leaving your site.
Multi-channel integration is a feature that lets you sell away from your website. In other words, can you sell directly on marketplaces and social media, like Facebook and Amazon. First we checked if the platform had a multi-channel feature, then, if so, how many different websites you could sell on. We also took into consideration if the feature came at an added cost, if it was in-built, or if you had to add it through an app.
Category winner: BigCommerce. BigCommerce is one of the most powerful ecommerce platforms on the market today. On top of that, BigCommerce also supports 12 different languages and will automatically translate any text pre-embed on its themes.
Read our detailed BigCommerce review. Or, check out our Shopify review. Website Features Why it matters. Things like blogging, email marketing and SEO can help, not only take your online store to the next level, but transform it from a house to a home.
Much like sales features, we wanted to see what was offered and the quality of each feature. First we wanted to know whether you could buy a domain directly from the platform. After that, we looked at the cost and if a 1-year free domain was provided. We also made note of how many variations you could have i. All of this gave us an overall domain score, which formed just one part of the total website feature score. Still with us? Category Winner: Wix.
On each platform, you can edit meta titles and descriptions, URL slugs, header code, image alt text and more. They also offer keyword support, best practice prompts, and SEO specific apps.
Head over to our BigCommerce review for further details. Or check out our article on BigCommerce pricing to find the perfect plan for you. Read our full Wix Ecommerce review for more information.
People use ecommerce website builders so they can be in control. Design looks at the themes offered by each platform and how customizable they are. This was an area that posed a lot of questions. Obviously, we wanted to know which website builder had the best-looking themes, but also how functional they were. We spoke to branding, design and UX user experience experts to get a feel of what they thought was vital to great web design. Category Winner: Squarespace.
Squarespace oozes class. Its sophisticated and elegant templates will make your products pop and jaws drop. If you work in a creative field — like an artist who sells their paintings — Squarespace is the obvious choice. See our in-depth Squarespace ecommerce review. Cheap quality is something everyone wants. Pricing plans across platforms ranged from free to in the hundreds, so what makes an ecommerce website builder worth the money?
Next up we checked for freebies — a free trial, a free plan? Finally, we brought the value aspect into our testing. We looked at the scores taken from our features testing and worked out how much you had to pay to get certain key features.
These scores were then all calculated to give us a final value for money rating. We have a three-way tie! Squarespace, Wix, and Square Online all scored identical marks.
They all offer free plans, low average pricing, and a healthy amount of features at affordable rates to boot. See what we think of Squarespace ecommerce. See our expert analysis of Wix eCommerce. Read our Square Online review. Or, have a look at our article on the best free ecommerce platforms. Help and Support Why it matters. Having support is important, whether it comes from reading helpful guides, or picking up the phone and talking over your problem with someone.
We started by exploring how many different types of support were available phone, email, live chat etc. To avoid crashing websites and smashed keyboards, we also checked for restore options and if there was an autosave feature. To round off, we looked for the minimum price you can get at least three types of support, and tested how good the help center was at answering common queries.
Category Winner: Square Online. Square provides phone, live chat, forum, email, and social media support. Its guides are detailed and clear. Combine that with being really easy to use in the first place, and you can be sure that Square is pretty great for beginners.
See our expert opinion on Square Online. We may have ranked these ecommerce platforms, but the truth is the right one for you will depend on a number of different factors. For example, Wix and Shopify both have comprehensive marketplaces where you can pick and choose free and paid apps to add more functionality to your business. They are such powerful ecommerce platforms because they have the tools to meet different needs.
This is where ecommerce platforms can give you the right tools for success. Remember, every platform on this list comes with a free trial or a free plan , so you can try any of them risk-free before making your decision. An ecommerce platform is an online program that helps you to build your own online store. Everything from hosting, your custom domain, and help and support is available.
You start by picking a theme from a selection of choices. This acts as the layout of your website. After that, you can populate the theme with your own products and content. You will manage your store from a dashboard where you can view things like shipping, analytics, invoices, and marketing. Shopify tops the bill as the most popular ecommerce platform, powering over half a million online stores.
Wix and Weebly are the biggest non-ecommerce specific platforms with Wix helping to build around , stores and Weebly, , Other heavily used platforms include BigCommerce and Volusion , which both power over , stores. These are some of the biggest platforms but there are more. Other site builders that are designed for online stores include Big Cartel and 3dcart.
While Amazon dominates much of the western world, Mercadolibre is the most used marketplace across much of South America. Similarly, Naspers dominates the east, and is the the most popular platform in Russia.
Schibsted is another big marketplace which is used heavily by Scandinavian countries. Ecommerce platforms give you a base to start from. Building from scratch requires a lot of technical knowledge and coding.
Shopify and BigCommerce lead the way with impressive bulk import features. You can export and import your products via CSV spreadsheet or database. Non-ecommerce specific website builders like Weebly and Squarespace also have bulk product import features.
Ultimately it depends on your needs, technical knowledge and time. Kart or Magento. Both allow you to manage multiple merchants while still maintaining control over the website itself. An ecommerce marketplace is a complex site to build, but there are options out there that have all the necessary features. Square Online offers a free plan that still allows you to sell online.
Similarly, Big Cartel is an ecommerce platform that allows you to sell online totally free of charge. This means that you only pay the processor, like PayPal, per transaction. That said, site builders like Wix, Weebly and Squarespace are great options if you just have a few products to sell on the side.
Date: Nov 26, Date: Oct 31, Written and researched by. Natasha Willett Researcher. Lucy Carney Author. Updated: Dec 09, Comments: 2. Our methodology We talked to store owners to tailor our research process , adding weight to important areas such as sales tools, website features, and ease of use.
On this page 1. Wix 2. Shopify 3. Squarespace 4. This is good news for sellers because, with the right tools, it's easy for any small business to quickly start selling online and join the gold rush. With a decent eCommerce website builder, you can list your products, take payments, and handle shipping—all without leaving the comfort of your home office.
In researching this list, we looked at more than 50 different options for building eCommerce websites. There are solutions for every kind of business, from indie creatives to multinational corporations, but for this list, we focused on platforms that best fit the needs of small and medium businesses, especially those newly exploring selling online or selling physical products.
How we evaluate and test apps. All of our best apps roundups are written by humans who've spent much of their careers using, testing, and writing about software.
We spend dozens of hours researching and testing apps, using each app as it's intended to be used and evaluating it against the criteria we set for the category. We're never paid for placement in our articles from any app or for links to any site—we value the trust readers put in us to offer authentic evaluations of the categories and apps we review.
For more details on our process, read the full rundown of how we select apps to feature on the Zapier blog. For small businesses looking to sell online, we identified five key features that every platform had to offer. There are other good platforms out there, but if they don't offer a feature on the list, they didn't make the cut. A hypothetical average person had to be able to build a good-looking, responsive, modern online store with the tools and themes offered—without needing a computer science or graphic design degree.
They also had to be able to make it fit with their existing brand reasonably well by being able to use their own brand assets and color schemes. This one criterion actually eliminated quite a few platforms from consideration for being either too limited with boring, super similar, or outdated themes, or requiring too much technical know-how to make the most of.
The platform had to enable you to sell whatever you want, wherever you want, however you want. This meant it had to be able to handle both digital and physical products and offer some way to manage sales taxes and international shipping. This last point is particularly important for small businesses: if you have physical premises or plan to sell internationally, you may be liable for collecting and filing various kinds of taxes. We only considered full-service eCommerce platforms. You need to be able to sell your product through a consumer-facing website, but also manage orders, ship goods, track inventory, and otherwise deal with the backend running and admin of your store without using some other service or please no a giant spreadsheet.
Whatever platform you choose, it has to play nice with any other apps and services you rely on for your business. For this reason, we required the apps on this list to have a range of integrations, either through a plugin and extension marketplace or built-in features.
All of this had to be available for a clear and affordable monthly price. Opaque fees were a big no, and while done-for-you solutions are wonderful, they cost thousands of dollars per month—far more than any SMB needs or has to spend on setting up an online store. While we're talking about pricing, it can get a little complicated with eCommerce platforms as they charge a little differently from other services.
There are three kinds of fees you may have to pay for an eCommerce website builder:. Monthly fee. This is anything from free to a few hundred dollars and goes straight to the platform.
Payment gateway fees. These are the fees you pay when you process a credit card charge. The normal fee is around 2. Some platforms, like Wix and Shopify, operate their own payment gateways that you can choose to use, while others rely on Stripe, PayPal, and similar services. Transaction fees. These are another percentage-based fee that's on top of any gateway fees. Let's give this a quick example using Shopify's current pricing. On top of that, you pay 2. As you can see, your monthly costs will vary based on what options you choose and how you run your business.
We'd recommend doing a few back-of-the-envelope calculations when you're selecting your plan and payment gateway, just to see what will work out best for you. We've avoided services with unreasonably high fees and transaction charges, or ridiculous volume expectations, but run some numbers to be sure.
Shopify Web, iOS, Android. Shopify has been around for more than 15 years—with more than two million stores built using the platform—and it's hard to find a better option for most small businesses looking to get an online store up and running quickly. Sign up for a credit card-free day trial, and within a few minutes, you can have a first build of your store ready to go. The onboarding wizard walks you through adding your products, customizing the look of your store, connecting your own domain, and getting set up to take those all-important payments.
Even if you've never built a website before, you're unlikely to get lost in Shopify's intuitive web app. Adding a product, for example, is as simple as clicking Products in the sidebar and then the Add Products button. Fill in the name, price, quantity you have on hand, and any other relevant details, change its status to Active , and it's straight in your online store and ready to be sold.
While Shopify ticks most boxes right out of the gate, its extensibility and app store are what really make it such a powerful option. Not a bad selection, right? But because Shopify is so popular, you can also find more than 1, themes available on ThemeForest or get a professional designer who is already experienced with the platform to make you a custom one.
It's the same with almost any feature you could want. If it's not built in to Shopify, you can find an extension, plugin, or service that does it in the app store. Just go to apps. Head back to your Shopify dashboard and click Apps in the sidebar to manage all the ones you've installed. It should be no surprise that Shopify integrates with Zapier , so if you want to automatically add new customers to your email marketing list, track orders with a project management tool, or connect Shopify to any of the other apps you use, you can do it easily.
Square Web, iOS, Android. If you want the option to sell in-person, like at a farmer's market or craft fair, as well as through your online store, Square is the best choice. Your online and offline orders are all organized under a single dashboard, so there's no jumping between apps, trying to track down customer details using random spreadsheets, or having to enter things manually after the fact. Square bought the website builder app Weebly in , so when you set up your store, that's what's running under the hood.
If you occasionally see a URL direct to weebly. Note: we noticed fewer Weebly URLs popping up in the most recent review. Square has some of the best onboarding around.
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