In today’s modern world, an eCommerce store remains one of the most lucrative businesses. With more and more people shopping online, being an eCommerce business owner can help you earn more profit over time. However, venturing into the eCommerce industry can be tough without the right tools and resources, including a great eCommerce platform. It refers to software that’s designed to facilitate the commercial process of selling and buying goods over the web. Without this application, you may be unable to build a successful eCommerce business. That being said, you need to find the platform that suits your needs. 

Generally, the number of best eCommerce platforms has been on the rise and this makes it quite hard to get the best eCommerce website. However, you need to be keen as you choose one because what may be very effective in my case may be irrelevant to yours. You need to evaluate your needs and compare them with what each site has to offer. Therefore, you need to put the features, pros, and cons of each site into consideration before you make a choice. Otherwise, you may end up choosing an eCommerce platform that doesn’t suit your business needs.

If you are an entrepreneur looking to maximize the potential of your eCommerce site, you should pay attention to the article. Individuals who are into drop shipping can get a lot of inspiration from the volume of revenue generated in sales from the below-mentioned sites. If you are looking for more direct information and education, regarding the same, you should check out the best dropshipping course.

Below is a list of the 8 best eCommerce sites that can serve as a guide to your decision.

Top 8 Best eCommerce Platforms:

1. Shopify

Shopify is an e-commerce solution that is based in Canada. This site has been of great assistance to online businesses all over the world with a close focus on the trending mobile shopping and social commerce sites. Shopify was founded in 2004 and has been up to date with the speed at which technologies and e-commerce trends have been evolving. It has broken its ground with its powerful additions that don’t allow your customers to leave the platform for them to buy from you. There are several features that make Shopify one of the best eCommerce platforms. Some of its advantages include recovery of an abandoned cart, a plethora of extensions, plugins, and themes, integration of Shopify directly into our Facebook account at only $9, mobile-friendly seller mobile apps, and shopping cart among other available mobile-based features. Shopify has 24/7 live chat technical support together with tutorials and a phone. Shopify also has a very powerful community forum. The main undoing of Shopify is the addition of transaction fees if you don’t make use of their payment system. Other practical and useful extensions also require the user to pay an additional investment.

2. Magento

Magento is one of the sites you need to think about when looking for the best e-commerce website. The platform was launched in March 2008 as an open-source e-commerce platform. Some of the factors that make Magento stand out in the market to include its scalability and reliability. Some of the prominent brands that have built their names on Magento include Liverpool F.C, Pepe Jeans, Huawei, and Burger King just to name a few. The pros of Magento include unlimited open-source options of customization, manageability, and usability, over 9000 extensions and plugins to create some room for scalability, exclusively free extensions on social media, extensive library resources for store management, new plugins, demos, and all things that revolve around e-commerce stores. However, you cannot use Magento unless you have some programming knowledge. The basic version is a free eCommerce platform but you have to pay close to $20,000 for the premium version on an annual basis. This platform is the right choice for enterprise-level online stores.

On the other hand, as technology continues to evolve, the Magento eCommerce platform has also improved to provide its users with a better user experience and additional amazing features. The latest version, commonly known as Magento 2, offers new capabilities to fill the gaps in the older version. In fact, Magento 2 uses cutting-edge innovations to enhance performance, security, and functionality. 

Hence, if you think Magento 2 is the right eCommerce platform to grow your business and online presence, then start looking for professionals specializing in Magento 2 development in Melbourne or wherever you may be located. With them at your side, you can migrate your old site to the latest version or develop a new one from scratch. 

3.  YoKart

This e-commerce platform is specially designed for SMBs and startups. It is the ideal option for building multi-vendor stores like Etsy, eBay, and Amazon. Even though other sites of the multi-vendor version as an option, YoKart exclusively specializes in this especially its latest upgrade of the V8 version. It has multi-currency and multilingual features that will enable you to expand your reach to a global level. It also comes with a plethora of payment gateways, discount and reward features for coupon management, and built-in analytics tools. This mobile-friendly multi-vendor market solution is ready-made and has dedicated apps for both Apple and Android devices.

4. BigCommerce

BigCommerce boasts of over 55,000 online stores since its inception making it one of the most popular e-commerce sites. The site has been helping both small and big brands such as Toyota, and Marth Stewart among other SMEs to launch their storefronts. BigCommerce has inbuilt features that are very helpful to eCommerce store owners who don’t have basic coding skills. Some of its built-in features include analytics, tax, shipping, coupons, and newsletters. The platform has highly responsive themes, no transaction fee, is easy to integrate with eBay, Facebook, and Google shopping, tutorial videos, an Easy setup wizard, and detailed guides that come with the required demos and illustrations.

5. WooCommerce

This platform is a free eCommerce platform or WordPress Plugin this is very popular in the e-commerce world. However, you must put in some investment if you want to integrate the shopping cart fully into this system.  It’s an easy-to-use and open source for WordPress Aficionados and comes with a secure shopping cart and payment gateway. These two features work so well even though you require an additional plugin to set up a multi-vendor e-commerce store. The advantages of WooCommerce include an excellent shopping cart, secure payment gateway, a broad range of extensions and plugins, unlimited product categories, and an admin panel that is easy to manage. Some of the Challenges of WooCommerce is the lack of scalability.

6. OpenCart

This tool was launched in 1998 as a Perl-based eCommerce tool before its domain expired in 2005. A UK developer under the name Daniel Kerr decided to take over the project and used it to lay the foundation of his PHP-written e-commerce solution. The developer is currently using a tight team that works out of Hong Kong to run this project and boasts of an ever-increasing community of developers. It’s well-known for its intuitive user interface and easy setup. Currently, OpenCart is powering close to 342,000 online stores. It’s one of the high-performing free eCommerce websites. Some of its advantages include a fast and lightweight, simple user interface, and free, and loads of extensions. However, it’s not SEO-friendly and a bit hard to customize.

7. Zen Cart

Zen cart is an absolutely free open-source online shopping cart solution for the web-savvy. This is a fully customized software that is based on MySQL/PHP and you can download it at no cost. The ancestry of the Zen Cart can be traced back to the famous osCommerce because it actually used to be part of osCommerce. The source code of Zen Cart is fully customizable and this allows all users to modify, tailor, and develop the site depending on the unique needs of the business. There are huge web developers, programmers, designers, and business owners who have volunteered to develop and maintain Zen Cart. It can seamlessly integrate with the most popular gateways and has video-based training to help you start off. It is one of the best eCommerce platforms that are available for your use.

8. PrestaShop

PrestaShop is the best option if you are looking for a free eCommerce platform. The website began in 2005 as a student project. Currently, more than 250,000 online stores are using it and command a market ration of 0.5 percent. PrestaShop has two free options including one that is fully-hosted in the cloud but you can also self-host and this gives you full technical control of your e-commerce store. It is easy to configure and install, available in sixty languages, has hundreds of add-ons, support, and community, and is exclusively free. However, its add-ons are expensive, are not highly scalable, have to pay for expert support, and aren’t as slick as the other competing eCommerce platforms.

Conclusion

One thing you need to understand is that no single eCommerce platform is a ‘one size fits all’ for all people. Each e-commerce platform is built to meet unique customer needs. All you need to do is look at the features, pros, and cons of each platform and match it to your needs. You will be able to get a solution that meets your unique needs with a high level of precision. The most important thing is to get the best eCommerce website for your needs.

Read also: 

• How to Use Social Media for E-Commerce Marketing

• Does Your eCommerce Site Need a Major Overhaul? Tips to Help You Form a Plan