The 4 Best eCommerce Solutions For Small Businesses

Since every business irrespective of the size and niche is after shaping their online presence, e-commerce platforms are increasingly becoming versatile and equipped to cater to the small business needs. This created a really level playing field for small and big businesses to share the immaculate advantages of mobile online sales and business conversion. So, if you are a small business, you no longer need to consider e-commerce to be a monopoly of big businesses. Several e-commerce platforms are built and equipped to cater to meet the online sales aspirations of small businesses. 

There are a multitude of feature-rich and well-equipped e-commerce platforms that small businesses and startups find particularly helpful. Before you hire an eCommerce development company for your online store, having a brief idea about these e-commerce platforms is important. Let us showcase here some of the best e-commerce solutions for small businesses and startups here. 

Shopify

Let’s make one thing clear. Shopify is a great e-commerce platform if you have a primary objective of making online sales. It is equipped with all kinds of features that pushing online sales requires. This is a fully managed platform with a hosting provider and comes with multiple plans. The pricing of Shopify varies from $29 to $299 per month. 

Shopify comes well loaded with a range of powerful sales-specific tools and offers a gigantic app market. Shoplift offers a great inventory management system to help any small business manage its store effectively. Whenever a product is going to be out of stock you will get timely alerts well in advance. 

The best part is Shopify is a fully dedicated and managed eCommerce platform for allowing businesses to make online sales. Most customers also praise a ton on the ease of use and the exceptional ease the website builder of Shopify provides them to create their online store and manage it. Shopify offers several inbuilt dropshipping tools that also helps businesses to manage the storage of their products. 

Moreover, Shopify also allows you to sync your existing inventories and this would allow small brick and mortar stores to manage all their online and offline sales from just one interface. The platform is awesome for multichannel sales options and allows easy integration with various social commerce and other major online sales platforms including Amazon, Facebook, eBay, and others. 

A pitched high pricing is the only negative factor for the Shopify ecommerce platform. With all the features included in your scalable and robust online store, the top line Shopify plans are quite expensive and the steep pricing plans can be a little daunting for the small businesses. 

Wix

Do you want to go for a great ecommerce builder that besides coming with sales features also appears to be a content platform? Yes, for this you need an e-commerce platform that helps running a business website besides allowing you to make sales from the same platform. Wix in this case is the best e-commerce platform befitting to your purpose.  

Thanks to its popularity among websites for content marketing and publication and typical sales-oriented features, it is widely regarded to be the best overall e-commerce platform. The important thing that goes in favor of the Wix platform is the exceptional ease of use. Without any tech skill or development experience, one can just build its business website or store using the Wix. Another great thing about the Wix is that you enjoy a great control in customizing the look and feel of your web store.  

With fairly affordable pricing, Wix also comes as a real value for money e-commerce platforms providing great design, features, and exceptional ease of use. Wix offers a bounty of helpful features while remaining cheaper in price. Wix offers a great template engine with awesome creative control to build your online store simply by drag and drop actions. 

The only downside of Wix is that it doesn’t offer robust online sales tools to help you run a web store that easily integrates with social commerce and other third-party e-commerce channels and it doesn’t allow you to run your offline and online business through the same interface.

Weebly

Weebly is one of the leading e-commerce platforms for small eCommerce businesses with a low price range. Just like Wix it is extremely easy to use and allows one to build the online store without any development experience and tech skills. On top of everything, Weebly is easy for your pocket and the pricing plans are cheaper compared to most other e-commerce platforms meant for small businesses. 

Wix after being taken over by Squarespace has come with a bounty of great online sales features that most small business stores require from time to time. With more value additions in every once in a while Weebly is fast emerging as one of the most promising online sales platforms, especially at a low price range. 

The only big downsides of Weebly is the absence of great creative control and its incapability to integrate other social and third-party ecommerce tools for allowing multi-channel sales. Weebly doesn’t offer many options to customize the checkout page and comes with very few options to shape the look and feel of your store as per your design aspirations. On the other hand, Weebly cannot be the option if you want an e-commerce platform that allows you to manage sales across all channels including Facebook, Amazon, eBay or your existing brick and mortar store. 

BigCommerce

If as a budding business with a really big ecommerce dream you want to prosper with increasing sales across multiple channels. It typically suits small and medium businesses with increasing online footprints. The biggest value proposition of the channel is that it allows you to sell across several online and offline platforms using the same platform. 

BigCommerce is a great platform as far as scalability is concerned and allows an e-commerce store to scale up the business with ease. On the other hand, BigCommerce provides many advanced features but to manage and use them to your advantage you need to go through a learning curve.

One of the important aspects that go in favor of BigCommerce is that it offers the greatest range of inbuilt features and the store owners need to rely less on third-party extensions and plugins compared to any other major platforms. This further helps your e-commerce website to reduce the cost of development and maintain the website easily. All the small businesses with the ambition to grow big will find this platform most suitable. 

BigCommerce allows easy integration with multiple social commerce and other online platforms ranging from eBay, Amazon, Facebook, Square, Instagram, and others. BigCommerce also allows you to maintain your offline store through the same interface. When it comes to performance, scalability, and popularity among successful e-commerce players, BigCommerce comes as second to none of its competitors. 

The only downside of the platform is the little steep learning curve that the businesses need to manage over time. 

Conclusion 

Did we miss anything? Probably one or two platforms still can make up to this list. Anyway, all these platforms equivocally showcase the promise of e-commerce and online sales for small businesses across niches. Thanks to these e-commerce platforms small businesses will enjoy a more level playing field with big brands in the online retail space.