Which eCommerce Platform is Best for Small Businesses?

As a small business, you might be wondering which eCommerce platform is best for you. Which platform will be easiest use and maintain? Which platform has the capabilities that you need? Which platform will be easiest for your customers to use? What eCommerce platform will offer you the most value for your money?

The five most popular eCommerce platforms for small businesses are:

• Shopify

• Wix

• Squarespace

• Magento

• WooCommerce

Each eCommerce platform offers distinct advantages and disadvantages. What works for one business might not work for another, and there is no single platform that will work best in all instances. That’s why it’s important for businesses to pick the eCommerce platform that works best for them. This guide is intended to give businesses a quick overview of the pros and cons of popular eCommerce platforms to help you select the right platform for your business.

 

Shopify

First up is Shopify. It’s a subscription-based platform that businesses can use to set up an online store. For businesses with both an online store and physical locations, Shopify also offers Shopify POS, a point-of-sale app and the accompanying hardware. it supports more than one million businesses worldwide.

What are the Advantages of Shopify?

Shopify advantages include:

• Easy to Use. Shopify is easy to use. It has a clear, simple interface that is easy to navigate. For the less-technology-savvy among us, Shopify also helps businesses owners manage their store’s technological needs.

• Multiple Payment Options. Shopify offers multiple inbuilt services, including Amazon, Apple Pay, PayPal, and credit cards.

• Faster Load Times. Compared to some other website providers, Shopify offers faster load times. This is important because a slow website can cost you sales. Annually, Amazon reports that a one-second delay could cost them up to $1.6 billion in sales.

• Abandoned Cart Recovery. Shopify offers inbuilt features, including shopping cart abandonment. According to Forrester, shopping cart abandonment can cost businesses up to $18 billion a year in revenue.

• Multiple Themes & Designs. For a business, offering an aesthetically pleasing, well-designed site is a must. Shopify offers businesses multiple free themes and designs, and an even wider variety for paying clients.

What are the Disadvantages of Shopify?

Shopify disadvantages include:

• Harder Customization. While Shopify offers a wide variety of themes, customization is difficult. Shopify themes use a PHP language called Liquid, as opposed to one of the more standard programming languages like HTML, CSS, or Java. Customizing a Shopify theme therefore requires a professional developer who knows Liquid or for someone within the business to learn it.

• No Email Hosting. While Shopify offers web hosting, it does not offer email hosting. What does that mean? It means that Shopify won’t allow you to set up an email address with your store name as the domain (lastname@yourstore.com) Businesses can use a third-party service for email hosting, or you could set up email forwarding.

 

Wix

Next up is Wix. Wix is a free and premium cloud-based website building platform. In Feb. 2021, the company announced that it had reached 200 million users worldwide.

What are the Advantages of Wix?

• Easy to Use. Wix is easy to use, even for non-programmers. It offers an easy drag-and-drop functionality. Wix offers predesigned templates designed by graphic designers. Best of all for the novice web designer, they also provide a step-by-step wizard to help guide you through the process of building a website.

• Responsive Web Designs. Wix templates automatically include responsive design. That means that your web pages will be optimized for desktop, tables, and mobile. Your website pages will automatically adapt based on the device being used to access it.

• Domain & Web Hosting. Unlike Shopify, Wix offers both domain and email hosting.

• Enhanced Features. Wix has enhanced features such as photo filters and animated text to make designing easy.

What are the Disadvantages of Wix?

• Limited Navigation. Wix’s navigation menu cannot handle complex substructures. That makes Wix a bad fit for large websites with thirty webpages or more.
• Limited Customization Options. While Wix offers a wide variety of designs and simple drag-and-drop functionality, the downside is that it is difficult to customize templates beyond what Wix already offers. Making major changes on your site can also be difficult after your site had been launched.
• Cannot Export Data. At present, Wix doesn’t offer a way for companies to export data. So before you get started with Wix, be aware that it will be difficult to switch if you decide that another eCommerce platform will be a better fit for your needs. Given the limitation in navigation, any business that suspects it will need thirty web pages or more in the future should probably go with a platform other than Wix.
• Not SEO Friendly. While many web platforms offer some form of built-in search engine optimization (SEO) functionality, Wix has been slow to adopt SEO features that will help companies gain organic (meaning unpaid) visibility.

Squarespace

Squarespace is an all-in-one content management platform. It’s a website builder and a web hosting platform combined. It’s a popular choice for small-to-medium sized businesses.

What are the Advantages of Squarespace?

• No Programming Necessary. Squarespace requires no knowledge of programming whatsoever to get your website up and running. They offer a variety of beautiful, professionally designed website templates.

• Website Security. Squarespace handles security for its websites. This means that business owners don’t have to buy or configure security software for their websites. They also take care of website backups and redundancy.

• Customer Support. Squarespace offers 24/7 customer support for its customers.

What are the Disadvantages of Squarespace?

• Limited Template Designs. While Squarespace offers beautiful website templates, it doesn’t offer as many different template options as some other eCommerce platforms.

• Lack of Advanced Marketing Tools. While Squarespace offers basic marketing and SEO tools, some more advanced marketing options are absent or require workarounds. That said, with the correct guide, businesses can implement even the most advanced SEO tactics with Squarespace.

• Lack of eCommerce Options. While Squarespace now offers unlimited products even on their basic eCommerce plan, it limits some eCommerce features to its advanced commerce plan. In a feature-to-feature comparison with other major eCommerce platforms, Squarespace doesn’t match up. It’s great for lead generation or informational purposes, but if your primary purpose is eCommerce, businesses are best advised to look elsewhere.

 

Magento

Recently acquired by Adobe, Magento is one of the largest and most diverse eCommerce platforms in the world. Magento powers more than 250,000 active sites worldwide. Collectively, Magento webstores house $155 billion in gross merchandise value. In addition to the support provided by Adobe, with Magento, businesses can also benefit from the vast ecosystem of Magento partners and developers.  

What are the Advantages of Magento?  

• Flexibility. Magento has an open-source code, which makes it easy to customize. The downside to this level of possible customization is that almost everything needs to be coded from scratch. There are a few design themes available on Magento’s site, but most business owners hire a developer to create them a unique and customized site. The advantage is that, because of its open-source code, many developers have created plugins that likely offer the functionality you want, including payment processing, accounting, and shipping solutions. As an added bonus, many of these plugins are free.

• Powerful. Magento can handle any size website, no matter how many products your business offers or how many orders you receive. Your website will be limited only by the size of your server. With Magento, you won’t have to worry about switching providers as your business grows.

• SEO Friendly. Put simply, Magento was designed for eCommerce. Magento’s Enterprise Edition was designed to be SEO-friendly with automatic SEO-friendly URLS and responsive webpage design.

• Built for eCommerce Sales. While many other eCommerce platforms offer eCommerce functionality, few were designed specifically with eCommerce in mind. Magento is one of the best platforms when it comes to driving conversions. Magento offers segmentation options that allow businesses to target customers based on their cart and buying history, and to provide personalized content.

• Easy Editing. While creating a Magento site can be work-intensive due to the coding and customization, once the site is up and running, adding new products is simple. Magento’s straightforward content management interface makes it easy to track website performance.

What are the Disadvantages of Magento?  

• Complexity & Cost of Development. Magento’s flexibility can be asset, but it also makes Magento more complex than other eCommerce platforms. That also means that both the upfront development costs for implementing a Magento site may be higher as well. If your business is looking for a cheap and easy option, Magento may not be the right platform for you.

• Hosting. While Magento is powerful and can handle any size site or product/order volume, it also takes up a great deal of hosting space. That means that if your business is relying on shared servers, Magento’s large size could lead to slow website loading times. Having a dedicated hosting server for Magento could solve this problem, but also requires additional spending for the added server space.

 

WooCommerce

WooCommerce is an open-source eCommerce plugin for WordPress, a popular website platform. WooCommerce reports that there are more than 5 million active installs worldwide, although it’s impossible to know if all those installs are still being used.

What are the Advantages of WooCommerce?

• Flexibility. Like Magento, WooCommerce is open-source. This means that it’s easy to customize. eCommerce businesses can add as many product lists as they want. More than 400 official WooCommerce extensions are available, offering functionality including accounting, analytics, payments, and shipping.

• Easy Customization. WooCommerce sites are easy to customize using through the use of different themes. Many free and paid WooCommerce themes are available for users.

• SEO-Friendly. WooCommerce has been designed to comply with many of Google’s SEO guidelines. Even out of the box, WooCommerce makes SEO optimization for your products easy. In addition, there are also third-party SEO plugins that can help business owners with SEO.

• Built-In Analytics. WooCommerce includes intuitive and built-in analytics. Particularly for business owners with little online experience, built-in analytics can make tracking website performance easier. It’s also easy to activate Google Analytics in WooCommerce for more in-depth analysis.

What are the Disadvantages of WooCommerce?

• Hidden Costs. While WooCommerce is free, many of the add-ons or more advanced features aren’t. If a business is only looking at the base cost of implementing the basic eCommerce package, they could easily overlook the costs of add-ons that mean they may end up paying more for their WooCommerce site than for a similar site from a different eCommerce platform.

• Add-Ons May Harm Site Performance. On the one hand, it’s great that so many plug-ins, tools, and extensions are available in WooCommerce. On the other, the use of too many of these additional tools to create a functioning website can hinder site performance. If plug-ins are not properly optimized, they can reduce site speed. Unless your company is working with an experienced WordPress developer on an ongoing basis, your business might be better off going with a different eCommerce platform.

• May be Overwhelming. WooCommerce may be overwhelming for a business that isn’t well-versed in WordPress. This is particularly true when you consider that, in order to get all the website functionality they want, a business may have to use a large number of additional plug-ins or enhancements.

Which eCommerce Platform is Best for Me?

The answer, unfortunately, is that “it depends.” The best eCommerce platform for your business is the one that offers the functionality you need without breaking your budget. For a business that’s new to the eCommerce game, it can seem impossible to know which platform is right for you. Even if you’re a business with an established eCommerce site that you’ve outgrown, the process of switching from one platform to another can seem daunting.

Fortunately, this isn’t a journey that any business has to undertake alone. Many web developers or web design companies are available to help businesses select the eCommerce platform that will work best for them. These developers can also help with the implementation process, or the process of switching from one platform to another, and even do the heavy lifting for you when it comes to web design.

With the right partner, every business should be able to build exactly the website they need.

About Us

CertiPro is a full-service business technology partner. We specialize in Sage ERP and Magento eCommerce. Our team of Sage-certified consultants and Magento-certified developers work with businesses to provide technological solutions to resolve their problems. Contact us today to see what we can do for your business.