The Best eCommerce Platforms for Small Businesses in 2022
By 2023, eCommerce is projected to encompass about 22% of all retail sales. This amounts to about $6.5 trillion!
If you’re a small business looking to make a name for yourself in online shopping, selecting an eCommerce platform is a critical first step. Read on to learn about the best eCommerce platforms for small businesses and how to invest in bang-up website design.
Shopify
Shopify is the single most popular option for new eCommerce sellers. It’s ideal for new shops that want to make their first million dollars worth of revenue ASAP. However, its simple yet elegant interface makes it popular among more seasoned online sellers as well.
One of the best things about Shopify is its user-friendly interface. You need no knowledge of coding, computers, or other technologies to run your store. It also clearly alerts you to things that you should do on the website such as updates or inventory alerts.
Shopify isn’t just easy to use but also easy to scale. You can add staff user accounts, multiple inventory locations, various currencies, and short-to-long-term business plans. It also has a deep knowledge base and extensive customer support to get you set up.
Shopify also has over 6700 unique plugins so that you can best customize your shop. You can also link it to social media to expand your online presence. It can alert you to problems that may come up with the shop as well so that you can troubleshoot issues in a timely manner.
Wix
Wix is another platform that’s made for small and growing eCommerce businesses. The setup times are extremely short for new users and are exceedingly user-friendly. They’re also diverse, so you’re sure to find something that’s specific to your industry before building on the design with the pros.
The design is awesome because you’re free to drag and drop images, text, and other elements anywhere on the page. This lack of complexity makes Wix a top choice for those with specialized and niche design needs. Professionals can help you to figure out where elements on your website will best engage customers so that you can maximize your impact.
Wix is just as easy to maintain as it is to set up. You can change the way that your site looks quickly and easily to evolve along with your market. Adding new pages or interactive content takes nothing more than the click of a button.
BigCommerce
BigCommerce is ideal for larger eCommerce shops with inventories that quickly shift and move. While Shopify and Wix are likely the best platforms for most smaller businesses, BigCommerce has an edge for those that are more developed and make a lot of sales.
Channel management is a core reason that BigCommerce helps larger online businesses to thrive. Organization can be a challenge when you have hundreds of customers, thousands of dollars worth of earnings, and nearly unlimited merchandise. BigCommerce keeps track of these things for you and will also adjust the channels of all social media platforms that you use.
You also can create unlimited user accounts with BigCommerce, which is something you can’t do with Shopify. While Shopify lets you set up a limited number of accounts that is sufficient for small businesses, it doesn’t work well for those with many different departments or offices. BigCommerce lets you make accounts for everyone to ensure that all authorized users have access.
Unlimited users allow for more site complexities, which is a great thing for a larger eCommerce business. The platform lets you tie 600 variants to one SKU so that you can have a well-organized color-coded inventory management system. Shopify only allows 100 variants, which makes inventory management challenging for larger businesses.
Squarespace
While Shopify and BigCommerce are great choices for those reaching out to a wider audience, Squarespace is the ideal platform for niche businesses. You can easily customize a Squarespace website because it’s very templatic. If you aren’t too invested in a fully-custom website, web design experts can create something awesome for you from a pre-existing template.
One of the best things about Squarespace is its low-maintenance interface.
WordPress is an amazing and immensely popular option for setting up eCommerce sites- and we’ll talk about why it’s awesome later! But it doesn’t have an automatically-updating theme and therefore will become outdated without regular maintenance. Squarespace auto-updates themes and has key built-in features like analytics tracking, which WordPress would require a plugin for.
Since Squarespace also has no storage or data limits, it also is ideal for those who want to incorporate a lot of visual content onto their site.
WooCommerce
WooCommerce is a WordPress option for eCommerce businesses. It isn’t its own platform but rather a plugin that you can install on existing WordPress sites. This makes it ideal for users that want versatile WordPress design options.
One of the biggest benefits of WooCommerce is that it has a plethora of built-in features. There are not many options for customization and extensions, but the features that it already has are more than sufficient for many users.
Like many other platforms, you can use WooCommerce to sell across channels. If you sell on Facebook, Amazon, or Etsy, you can link your WooCommerce shop to these sites. While the editing interface can be a challenge to work with, you can smoothly adapt the WooCommerce platform to multiple channels once you get the hang of it.
Beyond the Best eCommerce Platforms for Small Businesses
There are many different options for budding eCommerce sellers, and you’ll need professional web design assistance regardless of which one you choose. Now that you know the best eCommerce platforms for small businesses, it’s time to get started.
We’re committed to providing you with web design and development services regardless of the eCommerce platform that you choose. That’s why we’re excited to answer any questions that you have about current internet trends, user engagement, site mechanics, and more. Get a free quote for your web design project to begin creating a site that engages and entices consumers.