Online shopping has become a staple and symbol of the 21st century, with millions of people comfortably choosing goods from their smart devices, instead of going to overcrowded shopping malls. The reason people became so affectionate towards e-shopping is the overall simplicity and efficiency of ordering online, provided by great website layouts, user-friendly interfaces and lightning-fast service.
It’s also usually cheaper to shop online and you get a wider selection of goods to choose from. All in all, for an online shop to succeed, it’s important to work out all of the technical difficulties that come with starting such a project, and understand that there are no cookie-cutter solutions in this business – what works for a small boutique, doesn’t necessarily cut it for million dollar corporations.
That’s why knowing some basics on e-commerce development tools will make your quest a lot easier. Check out these popular platforms for e-commerce development.
WooCommerce
WooCommerce is a plugin that integrates with your existing WordPress site, turning it into a fully functional WordPress e-commerce solution. When the plugin was launched in 2011, it quickly became the primary solution for users looking to launch their own stores online, and with over 27 million downloads, and millions of active installations, it’s definitely one of the leaders in the industry.
There is a great variety of things you can do with WooCommerce. You can accept checks, cash on delivery, bank transfers or use PayPal to accept major credit cards and other PayPal payments. WooCommerce also gives you the option to turn on geolocation and automatic taxes, so your shop will display the correct price, including taxes to your customers, no matter where they are located.
If you have any issues with services, submit a help ticket describing your problem and contact information, and a representative will get back to you. The biggest benefit of using WooCommerce is that it offers almost endless customization options through themes and extensions to make your website look unique and special.
Magento
Magento isn’t the easiest tool to work with, but it’s great if you are looking to boost sales and optimize operations. Magento provides businesses with lots of flexibility when it comes to taking control of their own stores. It is one of the most flexible tools you’ll ever work with. It has multiple plug-ins and extensions available, thanks to Magento’s community presence worldwide.
You can customize the back-end handling of your media content and inventory or create a branded website for mobile devices and desktops. Add the unlimited number of extensions built by the Magento community, offer vouchers, discounts, and recommendations, integrate your shopping cart with payment gateways, manage returns and stock levels and automate the sending of newsletters, emails and reminders.
Shopify
Shopify has a simple interface and plenty of features that make it a highly desired solution on the market. You get to choose from over 100 ready-made online store designs and get access to an app store that offers hundreds of tools for improving and developing your store.
This is a dream come true for lazy people who can’t design or hate the idea of hiring a professional. Some of its key features include SSL security, a custom mobile template, a personal app store, and unlimited server bandwidth.
You can organize your products, customize the way your store looks, accept payments, track and respond to orders, and you can do it all within Shopify’s interface. Shopify has the capacity to be feature-heavy out of the box, but that doesn’t drag load times or the slickness of using a Shopify site.
OpenCart
OpenCart is a free e-commerce development solution that offers lots of great features. It’s user-friendly, intuitive and has a very well-designed interface as well as a high selection of extensions.
OpenCart is a great choice because it greatly enhances website speed and functionality, and proves to be a reliable solution for small and medium-sized e-commerce stores. Using AJAX evokes its efficiency to speed up the website performance by reducing the site load time. It is also an SEO-friendly platform that effectively boosts your online store presence and builds a loyal customer base for your business.
To make things even more interesting, OpenCart offers more than 7000 add-on extensions, enabling businesses with lots of unique features like taxation modules and various shipping, payment plugins. Online support is always present 24/7. Furthermore, you can watch expert videos and read guidelines on the portal that will help you in communicating with the management system.
OpenCart is an astonishing e-commerce development platform with endless customization abilities, great flexibility, modules and tools that will help you build a dream e-commerce website.
Weebly
Weebly is a website builder that allows anybody to make their own websites quickly and with ease. It is a very popular platform, and has more than 12 million registered users for one simple reason – it’s free and very simple to use.
This tool even gives amateurs the chance to build stunning websites, whereas professionals will be surprised to see how much creative freedom Weebly offers. Tech-savvy developers get full control of Weebly HTML and CSS access. That means you can pretty much create any design you want that suits your website.
If you seek to build business websites, e-commerce websites, blogs or just general interest websites, Weebly is an ideal option for you. Besides, with Weebly, you can still set up a store with a fully integrated shopping cart using PayPal, Stripe or Authorize.net.
BigCommerce
BigCommerce is a very popular tool for e-commerce development because lots of things can be done without the help of professionals. It is mainly aimed towards people that lack web design skills, but also suitable for advanced users and developers to tweak the HTML and CSS of their online stores too.
It’s known for offering an excellent arsenal of features, including a variety of professional and customizable templates to help you design your store. You can use BigCommerce to sell either physical or digital goods, and there are also some good tools to help you market your store.
Squarespace
Squarespace is a great website builder with features that will immediately stand out for its user-friendly interface. The website doesn’t present you with a long list of features and comparisons – it rather takes you by the hand and shows you around, presenting an impressive collection of templates and design ideas.
There are free template options available as well as paid ones. You can customize a website however you like with an excellent choice of colors, fonts, and layouts. Squarespace commerce will give you complete control over key factors of your store such as product variants, shipping costs, taxes, a customer email database, managing inventories.
However, experts do stress that Squarespace is only suitable for a smaller business, so if you’re planning to grow or already have lots going on in the company, you should consider something more advanced and powerful.
YoKart
YoKart has an easy merchant management system that allows website owners to keep track of all sales credited to accounts of each vendor. Being a relatively new player in the industry, there are no third-party extensions currently available for YoKart. But the system offers a built-in analytics tool, over a dozen supported payment gateways, rewards, and discount coupon management features.
Stores built using the YoKart system also rank highly in search results, meaning they are more visible than most stores created by other store builders. YoKart offers SEO automation that helps stores get a higher ranking in search engines such as Google. The most obvious benefit of YoKart is its user-friendly interface.
You don’t have to learn much, whether you are working at the front end, buyer side, admin side, or supplier side. They are all easy to work with.
Big Cartel
Designed mainly for artists and small businesses, Big Cartel is a web-based, fully hosted solution, sporting simplicity of design and ease of use with zero transaction fees. Functions are simple, and the process of adding products, creating discounts, and managing orders and inventory is as smooth as it gets. Unfortunately, that ease of use comes with a limited feature set.
If you’re selling mass quantities, Big Cartel likely won’t be able to fill your needs. This platform is ideal for individual artists and creative people. With its simplistic stores and economical pricing, Big Cartel allows artists to easily sell things on a good-looking website, thereby allowing the artist to focus on creating things instead of managing their online store.
Big Cartel is an all-in-one solution, which means they either handle everything for you or make sure you have the tools to run your own e-commerce store.
Summary
E-commerce development is crucial in expanding your business and making it more accessible to your customers. Companies invest lots of money and time to build user-friendly online stores because they know it pays off and opens new opportunities to earn a profit. You could think that success is rooted in vision and ideas, not some kind of website builder – but the truth is that a carefully chosen e-commerce development solution can speed up your business growth by offering the right features for your particular case. It’s the case of utilizing practical measures to reach great accomplishments.
