eCommerce hosting platforms are catapulting the world of business to this age’s paradigm of entailing by expanding their retail footprints on the internet.
This includes building the payment gateways on the site, holistically presenting the products under the domain, shaping up great looking web portals, doing the arrangements for delivery, meticulously controlling the B2B dealings, scaling the business by leveraging the internet and so on.
Significance Of eCommerce Platforms
E-commerce hosting platforms are game-changers in today’s business world with thousands of firms creating the online retail shops and making big amounts of moolahs by harnessing the synergies of facets of digital marketing and getting the results in increasing returns to scale.
Today, Flipkart and Snapdeal are great eCommerce development firms with multi-crore valuations and are popular household names and that unlike their own online platforms, hundreds of others have taken succor to eCommerce platforms.
To see how the eCommerce hosting platforms are economically maximizing the profit numbers and spawning their big names in due time we study the top ten eCommerce hosting platforms and how they impact the online businesses.
Top Best Performing eCommerce Hosting Platforms
1. Shopify
Benefits: The success factors of this entailing firm are that it offers a lot of nice, useful apps and gives many professional themes. It also has a neglected and unused cart recovery in its offing which comes at a price. There are unlimited products & bandwidth present.
Features:
- A proper mobile app to accept payments and to manage the eCommerce firm.
- Easily merge the end to end needs of the businesses
- POS to handle all transactions
- Help to carry on business
Shopify aims to cater to the needs of small businesses on the internet.
This is considered as one of the most popular platforms as it can easily set up, faster internet speed and safe payment gateways and what is more there are customizable templates for the landing page. In relevance to SEO, it provides customer support for the store owners and meta tags.
2. BigCommerce:
This one is a popular eCommerce hosting platform and is an online shopping space with offing more than any of its peers.
Benefits: The features are a cut above the rest with gift cards, 24/7 customer care support, real-time shipping quotes all coming at a cool price. There is an array of unlimited products, bandwidth, and storage, all within the $80 plan.
Features:
- Easily merge with E Bay, Google Shopping and more.
- 24/7 round the clock assistance
- Google trusted store certification assurance
BigCommerce is directed to cater to small and medium retailers. BigCommerce is identical to Shopify, but with many other additive features and all this and what is more is that bandwidth & storage is unlimited.
This also has important eCommerce features that offer reviews & ratings to customers and to give your store a distinct look, various marketing tools are present.
3. Volusion:
This is the 2nd biggest e-store after the Yahoo store. It is voluminous as its range spans large numbers transcending it to the leading site among the top 10000 sites.
Benefits: It is the cheapest online space in terms of abandoned recovery cart and can be found at $15 monthly charges. It is the best site for beginners as it offers all the features that peers offer but is restricted to about one hundred products as well as 1GB data usage. Compared to BigCommerce, it’s Pro plan comes at $75/month.
Features:
- Rewards or in-built loyalty program
- In-built Day Deal option
- E Bay and Amazon integration
4. Wix:
Benefits: It has a brilliant visual design interface and all facilities that keep the store running. The sales pages are visually attractive and one can design the pages in any color he wants.
Features:
- The visual editor provided with live examples including template reference
- Reasonable pricing structure and simple interface, perfect for beginners
- No transaction charges, only monthly fees
- Annual charges are as high as 120 dollars only.
5. 3dCart:
It is also a popular site on the web and is quite rich. It boasts of a facility for research of clients by web designers.
Benefits: No transaction fees are charged which are regarded to be a big boon. It also boasts of having a mobile back end and front end. It also has been provided with a comprehensive range of related services such as Facebook or SEO marketing available in web stores.
Features:
- The option is present to sell off the rebranded stores including an extensive range of permission systems.
- Plenty of shipping choices compared to any of its competitors.
- A plethora of other services included.
6 Big Cartel:
This is a smaller company than Shoplift and caters to the needs of indie brands and artists and is “built for makers”.
Benefits: The price points of Big cartels are known to be less and can be compared with Wix and Shoplift. There is a free plan, offering unlimited features in five products. It is just about $9.99/monthly that the paid plans start.
Features:
- Caters to small merchants, makers, and artists.
- Quick installation as well as integration to sell in-person
- Every plan has been included with wonderful integrations and features.
7. Squarespace:
Established in 2004, this fully integrated eCommerce solutions provider boasts of one million users that speak of the durability of this platform and to focus on providing customer satisfaction.
Benefits: It has a rich visual appealing platform that is just perfect for stores requiring rich, beautiful imagery and designer templates with the product listing. Unlimited products are offered by both of the plans, indeed a big advantage for any sized merchant.
Features:
- Advanced and Basic plans have unlimited products.
- Unlimited blogs, galleries, and pages along with unlimited storage, bandwidth, and contributors.
- Site builder offering drag & drop facilities.
8. LemonStand:
This is relatively a newer platform, but comparable to the best options available like BigCommerce and Shopify. It is highly customizable and lets retailers modify the store’s every aspect, for creating that unique and new shopping environment online.
Benefits: A big advantage is the usage of off-page and on-page SEO, giving insights into those things which can help to improve the social media perceptions. Moreover, the capability to include SSL encryption to each and every page present in the site is a boon.
Features:
- Customized check out without any redirection to provide a better shopping cart facility.
- In-built support provided for digitized products and offers recurring subscriptions.
- Full design flexibility especially over the presentation of contents.
Plans are available from $99/ monthly to about $399/ monthly in premium plans.
9. X-Cart Cloud:
It offers the users a bundle of services to include VPS Hosting from X Cart that is fully managed including X-Cart license. It is the hosted feature belonging to X-Cart Downloadable.
Benefits: It is also considered to be an open-source product, while the XCart team works continuously to upgrade the hosted version, albeit on a lesser side in terms of uploading the updates. The Cloud Search facility was launched recently and plans are available at about $99.95/monthly.
Features:
- Cloud Search, with products appearing instantly after being keyed within the search box.
- Transaction fees are not charged, with well-known alternatives ranging from 0.5% – 2.5% per transaction.
- The POS modules are provided with the Standard Edition.
10. Etsy:
Etsy is completely different. In case, the desire is to shop vintage goods, handicrafts and craft supplies, then Etsy is the place to be in.
Benefits: Enlisting of products is done in a good looking manner to woo the audience. It is a good and safe way to start and happy selling following the guidelines.
Features:
- It offers immense opportunities to help establish the brand.
- Currently, Etsy boasts of having more than 30 million users to be accessed to sell your products
- Plenty of social interactions along with professional design.
Only 3.5% / transaction is to be paid along with $0.20 one time charges for each every listed item.
Conclusion:
So, what makes an eCommerce hosting platform a success?
The solution lies in a common feature that keeps resonating in the ears like for e.g. reasonable and justified charges and fees for a safe and attractive portal that counts big sales and is a leader in all the useful functionalities again that drives up the market shares.
Entrepreneurs look for the right mix of all the marketing parameters that make a cocktail of earning big profits in the web portals hosted by the eCommerce platforms.
Technology is a great lever and digital marketing, web designing, SEO, application of technology are the key features that define the rules of the game and creating waves in the world of eCommerce.
The eCommerce boom of the post 2010s have seen the growth of eCommerce hosting platforms which are ubiquitous in this fast-moving age although many newspapers are hinting that eCommerce bubble may have been bust and at this juncture, it is to be seen whether the firms related to this space gains or losses and B2C and B2B businesses of this kind finally makes it big or not.
Awesome!