Believe it or not! eCommerce has shaped the future of the commercial world. It has been evaluated, by the year 2020, the brick and mortar stores will be reduced to a few number.
Today, online presence has become the huge sign in the commercial world. And, therefore, retail business owners are moving online to create strong visibility among the potential users who are spending their quality time in browsing branded products rather than simply surfing the internet.
Amazon, eBay, Etsy and few in the list are the top ranking marketplaces from where consumers love to shop;
Reason:
-Strong Online Presence
-Easy Navigation
-Availability Of Wide Range Of Products
-Strong Customer Support
-Shop From Multiple Vendors
-Provide Fascinating Shipping & Payment Services
Moreover, to build a huge marketplace like above-stated is not easy. Managing and maintenance require a huge investment of time and money. Don’t you agree? But did you ever think, which technology is used to build a comprehensive marketplace?
Earlier, when eCommerce just stepped in, Magento was the only technology comprising of the features to develop a huge gigantic marketplace. But today, with the advances in technology, you will find the list of most popular eCommerce platforms that are providing features and plugins you can integrate your own. So, it's a Do it Yourself kind of a thing. Plus, getting explored to a wide audience doubles your opportunity and profit earning scope.
However, the dilemma still lies which platform to choose to develop an alluring and easy-to-access eCommerce marketplace that will help you in uplifting your business performance.
Being a writer, I researched on the leading platforms and drew a conclusion. Hope this helps!
Let’s begin:
-Magento is an open source technology best suited for big enterprises which have vast product variants to show in the marketplace supporting the multi-vendor functionality.
This platform requires a team of engineers to build a customised store tailored according to your requirement. Magento provides a simple infrastructure, rest you have to build the entire marketplace on your own seeking the help of a reliable developing partner. Furthermore, hosting your marketplace domain is also your responsibility. As a consequence, the maintenance cost of the server also adds into your pocket which is apparently high-priced.
Best suited for big enterprise owners who are ready to invest a good amount of time and money for implementing a gigantic marketplace with multi-vendor functionality.
-Shopify is a paid platform wrapped with all the resources, a kind of Do It Yourself. You get the structure, themes, plugins, and add-ons ready once you register your store with Shopify. There are the plethora of themes giving you an ease to pick the aesthetic one that fits your business nature. Registration requires your store name, email address, and company name and you are ready to start selling your first product with Shopify.
The interesting thing to note here is, you need not take the pains of hosting your Shopify domain, server and google rankings. Shopify will look after these focal parameters. Besides, product promotion is also not your responsibility. Shopify, itself will promote your products and increase your profit margin with 2X.
P.S: As it’s freemium, a 15-day trial account is provided to let you acquaint with the working of the platform. Plus, you are open to tweak the code of plugins or add-ons if required.
Best suited for small owners who like to customize their storefronts picking their choice of themes, plugins, and add-ons. For pricing, you can visit the website.
-Woocommerce is an open source plugin powered by WordPress. Being a hard core WordPress extensible plugin, you need to connect with WordPress first and get a full access to Woocommerce. It’s similar to Magento in various aspects.
-Domain Hosting
-Theme Purchase
-Server Maintenance Cost
WooCommerce & Magento are both open source technologies. But the above-stated factors reduces the possibility of choosing them the suitable platform for future.
Best Suited for big enterprise/ small business owners who are ready to invest a good amount of time and money in implementing a well-defined storefront.
-BigCommerce is similar to Shopify. But compared to BigCommerce, Shopify proffer alluring themes and easy configurable plugins/extensions.
P.S: Shopify and BigCommerce have one unique feature, i.e You can link your business domain with the Shopify or BigCommerce store and increase your audience reach. Plus, the URL generated is routed with SSL (Secured Socket Layer).
Best suited for small owners who like to customize their storefronts picking their choice of themes, plugins, and add-ons. For pricing, you can visit the website.
Yes, it’s true! Having a strong online presence is the huge sign in the commercial world. And, therefore it becomes the priority of entrepreneurs to choose the eCommerce technology that best fits business requisite.
Below is the perfect example of choosing the best eCommerce platform based on the three major constraints: Time, Budget and Engineering Efforts;
