Thinking opening a store online? Where you host your website is integral to overall function. It’s the backbone of your e-commerce venture. An e-commerce website can be defined as a web hosting platform that accommodates several functions required to operate a commercial website.
These features include payment processing services, security initiatives, SSL, shopping cart software, and anything else you may need to effectively and efficiently run an online business.
The problem?
Today, 47 percent of consumers expect web pages to load in two seconds or less.
A slow website affects the user experience, causing visitors to lose their patience and click off the page. Did you know that Google uses site speed as a ranking factor in the results page? Search engines that take longer to produce results can’t crawl websites quickly, resulting in lower rankings in the results page. If your site is slow, it will be outranked by faster ones — and your potential customers will value their on-site experience over yours.
The best e-commerce hosting company will make sure that it can manage the volume that you expect. In today’s blog, we’re taking a look at some of the most popular e-commerce companies out there today and analyzing them to help you decide which is the best fit for your business.
Let’s dive right in!
1. Shopify
E-commerce merchandising is the planning and promotion of sales by presenting a product to the right market at the proper time. Shopify offers three tier options for payment with different features on each plan. Depending on your preferences and the size and scale of your business, you can choose from these three options that range from basic to advanced.
Some of the most notable features of Spotify, included in all three plans, are:
- Unlimited products
- Unlimited bandwidth and online storage
- Shopify point of sale
- Gift cards
- Online sales channels
- Fraud analysis
- Manual order creation
- Discount codes
- Staff accounts
- Overview dashboard
- Finance reports
- Customer support
Shopify also has over 70 professional themes, an analytics dashboard, and mobile compatibility.
2. Magento
Magento is a feature-rich eCommerce platform solution that offers merchants complete flexibility and control over the functionality of their online channel. The e-commerce platform offers search engine optimization across all pages of your website to ensure your company is competitive amongst the others in the search engine results page.
Magento also engages in catalog management and wield powerful marketing tools to give merchants the ability to create innovative, user-friendly sites.
The biggest takeaway from Magento is that it is an open-source platform like WordPress, meaning it is free to use. The platform also is community-based, meaning it has a forum of hundreds of users helping each other out. Consulting other Magento users is a great way to solve your problem as they’ve been in the same position as you before. This means they know what you want to do and how to do it – and can explain it in an easy way!
3. WooCommerce
Next up is WooCommerce, an e-commerce hosting site that calls itself the world’s most customizable platform.
Why?
As an open-source platform, users can access their website’s code and make edits on the backend. This means the customization possibilities with a platform like WooCommerce are inexhaustible. You can create a store with a real personality. In addition, WooCommerce is cross-compatible with WordPress, giving you access to a limitless supply of mobile-friendly, responsive themes and designs.
Another strength of WooCommerce is flexibility. Because it’s an open-source platform, developers add custom-built plugins to the store. Add-ons are up-to-date, but to get the most out of the service you need to invest time (and money) to develop your store. This also means the store owner is responsible for the technical aspects of the website, such as setting up hosting.
4. BigCommerce
Founded in 2009, BigCommerce is a major competitor in the e-commerce platform game. The platform shares a lot less in common with big names such as WordPress or Magento but the overall workflow is streamlined and generally superior.
BigCommerce is considered highly user-friendly, with an intuitive backend and simple interface. Users can control more specific elements of their online store for free.
The platform also includes a range of fully responsive premium and free themes designed to make your online store look better than the others.
Bigcommerce also includes a range of features designed to improve the look and functionality of your online store, including:
- Mobile-friendly themes
- SEO tools
- Shipping options
- Analytics tools
With these tools on your belt, you’ll have a highly functional and attractive website to help bring customers and convert sales.
