What is an e-commerce platform?
The top e-commerce platforms:
Amazon
Amazon sells everything online, but not all its stores are e-commerce stores.
This is a good thing. If you're an Amazon shopper, or if you're a business that sells physical products on Amazon, you're in good shape.
Amazon also has its own internal payment system, Amazon Pay. While this doesn't directly affect an e-commerce store, it does make shopping with Amazon a hassle-free experience.
Shopify: Shopify is one of the biggest e-commerce platforms, and it supports most types of e-commerce stores.
WooCommerce: WooCommerce is a fully-featured, incredibly flexible e-commerce platform that has become an incredibly popular choice for e-commerce businesses.
While it doesn't have nearly as many features as Shopify, WooCommerce has a user interface that is very easy to use and customize.
Shopify
Shopify was launched in 2004, but it got a huge boost in 2015 when Twitter began selling on its site. Twitter users also tweet links to shops they like and want to support.
In 2016, Shopify was acquired by the Canadian-based Square for a cool $880 million.
According to its website, Shopify is a "fully featured" e-commerce platform that enables "business owners to sell online"
It offers many features, such as sales pages, shopping carts, inventory management, payment processing, shipping and inventory management, promotions, catalogs, and more.
Shopify also offers a mobile app and access to tools such as a helpdesk, an e-commerce marketplace, and financial management.
Shopify offers a 30-day trial, and you can get a fully functioning store up and running in just a few minutes.
What is Shopify?
Shopify is an award-winning e-commerce platform that can help you turn your great ideas into real-world successes.
It's one of the easiest and most powerful online storefronts you can set up. Shopify is loaded with a wide range of features that allow you to build your store from scratch.
You can make your store entirely mobile-friendly and track orders right in your browser.
It's like a Swiss army knife of an e-commerce platform. It has everything you need to run a successful online store, with or without help from a developer.
Pros of Shopify
Pros of Shopify include: An affordable, cloud-based platform, which is great for start-ups or even companies that are just getting started Shopify is compatible with any website type Easy for beginners to get started with Sell different kinds of products, including clothes, jewelry, and shoe Services that allow you to build your own store Free-to-use A mobile-friendly interface Customize and scale your store Enterprise-level features Free phone and chat support The ability to sell on multiple online stores, including Amazon Flexible features to set up your store as you see fit Cons of Shopify Shopify offers free versions of their platform. It includes some basic features for Shopify Plus users.
Cons of Shopify
You don't control customer data, which puts your business at the mercy of companies that can sell ads, malicious content, or take your data and use it against you. Shopify doesn't offer a dedicated system for inventory management, which means you need to run your inventory with other third parties like Amazon. You need to be on the platform 24/7, which can be expensive. Disadvantages Price: Shopify is the most expensive e-commerce platform, coming in at about $8,000 per month, per merchant. Shopify is the most expensive e-commerce platform, coming in at about $8,000 per month, per merchant. Updates: The Shopify platform is often updated at irregular intervals, meaning that you have to stay on top of any major updates and keep all of your customer's information updated
WooCommerce
WooCommerce is one of the most popular and the largest e-commerce platforms.
That's no surprise since WooCommerce is developed and owned by Amazon, which makes it a great choice for Amazon sellers.
WooCommerce offers access to Amazon's robust online store-building tools, such as buy buttons, drag-and-drop marketplaces, product catalogs, shipping labels, and more. But WooCommerce isn't limited to selling products on Amazon.
You can use WooCommerce to start your own online store or to run your store on a single platform. You can also buy WooCommerce plug-ins so that you can use the platform's benefits on other platforms. Magento Magento is also owned by Amazon.
In addition to selling products on Amazon, Magento also sells them on its own website.
What is WooCommerce?
WooCommerce is an easy-to-use store platform that's specifically built to meet the needs of WordPress users, WooCommerce is an open-source, cloud-based platform that offers a built-in back-office and e-commerce toolset. With WooCommerce, you can sell through a mobile app, over an API, and on the web.
WooCommerce also allows you to connect with third-party services, such as Facebook to sell virtual items while keeping your inventory in sync and helping your customers create customized order forms.
One of the key features WooCommerce offers is a large selection of ready-made themes and templates that are so user-friendly, you'll never have to build your own website again.
Do I need to know HTML? WooCommerce is a drag-and-drop design platform, so you don't need to know any HTML.
Pros of WooCommerce
WooCommerce Is An Independent E-Commerce Platform It's one of the largest and fastest-growing e-commerce platforms. WooCommerce was acquired by Amazon in 2015 and is now Amazon Web Services (AWS)- and Amazon Marketplace-compatible.
This means that it has both infrastructures to help you run your store and the infrastructure to enable your customers to access it from Amazon and other platforms.
You can download the free version, or use their Professional version, which is geared toward bigger businesses, which costs $19 per month for up to 200,000 items and $30 per month for each additional 1 million items.
WooCommerce also offers an add-on service that will connect you to over 250 different other e-commerce platforms, such as BigCommerce, Volusion, PrestaShop, and Magento.
Cons of WooCommerce
Cons It's single-feature only. The largest drawback with WooCommerce is that it is mostly for individual sellers.
They don't offer a lot of support outside of their company forums. The likelihood of a WooCommerce store getting hacked is much higher than that of other platforms.
It doesn't offer a lot of integrations. However, WooCommerce does offer many plugins to extend the functionality of WooCommerce.
Some of the most popular plugins include BigCommerce Magento WooCommerce (shameless plug) Shopify If you're looking to build a business-to-business store, then this might not be the platform for you.
BigCommerce is well known for its robust integrations, allowing customers to create integrated solutions.
Magento Vs WooCommerce & Volusion Vs Bigcommerce
In the e-commerce platform realm, there are Magento, WooCommerce, Volusion, and Bigcommerce. But which one is best for you?
To get the lowdown on the differences between these three e-commerce platforms, read our full Magento vs WooCommerce vs Volusion guide.
WooCommerce WooCommerce is an open-source e-commerce platform that can handle a variety of different product types. With it, you can create one-of-a-kind product experiences.
It's not just a design tool, though. With it, you can track orders, promote products, set up newsletters, and much more. It even has a mobile app.
WooCommerce is free to download. In fact, you can build your store with WooCommerce for free for six months.
That's an unbeatable deal for a powerful e-commerce platform.