Which Ecommerce Platform Should I Use to Build My Online Store?

Three of the most popular E-commerce platforms – Shopify, BigCommerce, and WooCommerce – each offer unique advantages, and contain possible drawbacks. In this article, we’ll take a look at basic features of each and the pros and cons to help you decide which E-commerce solution is best for your needs.

Shopify (Free 3-day Trial)

Shopify offers a range of features that make it an ideal solution for both beginning and experienced E-commerce businesses. It’s very easy to set up a Shopify store, and the platform’s huge selection of tools and features provide a straight-forward way to handle the various aspects of running your business, such as order management, customer communication, and inventory management.

Shopify’s app store gives access to thousands of third-party themes, plugins, and apps which can help you customize your store to fit your new store's unique needs. It also comes with a built-in payment gateway to help customers easily purchase products from your store right away! It's mobile app is also very slick and adds a lot to overall ease-of-use.

Shopify's payment gateway feature could be a down side if you're needing to use an alternate 3rd party payment gateway such as Stripe, PayPal, Global Payments, or others. Shopify will charge you an extra processing fee for using a payment gateway other than the one they provide to you. This is a huge portion of their revenue as they make money on each transaction that gets processed!

Shopify can also be expensive to use, based on your subscription plan and any apps that you add to your store.

BigCommerce (Free 15-day Trial)

BigCommerce is a popular all-in-one E-commerce platform that offers merchants a range of features, including built-in payment processing and shipping options and excellent customer service. Unlike Shopify, it allows you to use 3rd party payment processors with no extra charge! This is because BigCommerce makes it's revenue completely from it's customer subscription plans.

It offers lots of template choices and an easy-to-use web-page building interface that helps merchants quickly get their stores up and running. BigCommerce is designed to cater to medium to large sized business and has incredible product customization's, useful built-in features like abandoned cart saver, email marketing and some very slick SEO tools. And, like Shopify, BigCommerce has a variety of apps and integrations available to customize your store.

One drawback of BigCommerce is that it’s a little more complex than the other E-commerce platforms and may take a little longer to figure out. It doesn't have quite as extensive of an app marketplace as Shopify and BigCommerce, but here's the good news: you may not have to add as many apps to make your new storefront complete.

WooCommerce (Free Wordpress App)

WooCommerce is an open-source platform that enables merchants to easily set up an online store. It's a Word-Press plug-in that you can use with an existing Wordpress Website.

The main benefit of using WooCommerce is that it is a powerful and flexible (essentially free) platform for creating an online store. It is easy to use and has a wide range of features, including customizable product pages, product sorting and filtering, the ability to add and manage multiple shipping rates, and a built-in payment processing system. Additionally, it can also be easily integrated with other platforms, such as WordPress and Shopify.

The main drawback of using WooCommerce is that it can be resource-intensive and may require coding expertise in configuring and maintaining alongside a Wordpress site. Additionally, it lacks built-in features that the other platforms have out-of-the-box. It can also be difficult to troubleshoot and develop complex features without the help of a coding expert.

Final Thoughts

These are all wildly popular and relatively easy to use E-commerce software solutions that ultimately give anyone the ability to create their own online store for their business in a very short period of time with essentially no software coding experience.

If you're a technologically savvy kind of person you could get an online store up and running quite fast using any of these tools. Unfortunately it'll still take some of your precious time and effort to learn how to get your website setup and configured.

Then there's the Search Engine Optimization you'll need to do. Oh, and don't forget about adding products, and writing copy for your website. Then there's the marketing and........ (You see where I'm going with this?)

You may want to use Shopify because it's exceptionally easy to use., Or you may choose BigCommerce because you need a little more functionality and flexibility. Or you may want WooCommerce because you already have a Wordpress site. (Those are all very good reasons!)

Last time I checked us humans have very finite resources, limited energy and even less precious time. So why not get some help in getting your online store off the ground? This is where I come in!

I love helping people get their dreams put on the world wide internet. I can help you decide which E-commerce platform is right for you, then build, write copy and even add products to your website!

Contact me today and let's start building your dreams!