Starting an E-Commerce business can be a daunting task when you know what to look for! And most importantly, what products do you sell in your business?
To answer this question, we scoured the web and compared the different e-commerce business concepts that have proven to be successful in the online market based on their disruption, current trends, and success rates.
So, here we come up with a list of the Best E-Commerce Platforms in 2022to save your time and investment in (and beyond!) With great opportunities.
The best E-Commerce platform for small business
Choosing the right E-Commerce platform is a lot like selecting an actual address for your brick-and-mortar store. There are several things to consider regarding the kind of support you can expect from the site’s reputation to your business.
The right platform will allow some companies to create something genuinely creative for their E-Commerce store. For example, you might want an open-source website builder with a user-friendly back-end where you can experiment with inventory management, discarded cart recovery, and various web hosting.
On the other hand, if you are a beginner in E-Commerce business management, you may want to switch to an open-source commerce platform for a hosted solution. These user-friendly tools are often less problematic for beginners, as they come with a variety of built-in tools, such as free themes, drag-and-drop customization, and support for unlimited products. To help you sort through some of the top performers listed below, here are some important ones to consider.
Key features of an E-Commerce platform for starting a business
Inventory management
Does the tool simplify complex inventory management tasks? Does it have features like stock level tracking? Does it allow you to add multiple variants to each product? It gives you right-time data about stock levels?
Inventory management is one of the most critical aspects of an E-Commerce platform and one of the most complex aspects. It has correctly solved a significant hurdle E-Commerce business owners face when competing with large retail giants.
Analysis
Does the tool provide helpful insights and data about your store’s performance? Are our digital analytics strategically designed to assist in optimization?
Customization
What level of customization could you reach with the product? As a small business owner, you need to design and customize your E-Commerce platform according to the brand’s design language and the tonality of your business.
You need to balance the look and feel of your online store with your website. So, we need to customize headers, footers, brand colours, fonts and much more.
Support
How good is the support feature of the platform? What are the different modes of support? Is support available 24/7 or only on weekends? Is there a knowledge base available? Is there an active group of customers and developers at the back of the product?
Support is an essential aspect of using any new product. This becomes even more important for E-Commerce platforms that deal directly with revenue generation.
Top 10 E-Commerce platforms to start your business 2022
Here is a shortlist of the best E-Commerce platforms for small businesses
Elavon – The best payment processing solution
Elavon is a merchant service provider that sells various financial products such as payment processors, point-of-sale hardware, and payment gateways.
Elavon lets you take both online and in-app payments. The tool’s end-to-end payment solution helps reduce the risk of E-Commerce store owners by protecting cardholders’ credit card data through EVM authentication, encryption, and tokenization.
Elavon Payments Insider offers a customer portal with customizable reporting, providing critical insights into all your payment activity.
The product provides 24/7 multilingual customer support via phone and email.
2. Wix – The best E-Commerce platform for design customization
Wix is known for its beautiful design templates. Wix’s drag-and-drop website maker comes with 800 above free themes that you can customize based on your brand tonality.
Artificial Design Intelligence Tool helps you automate the website design process based on insightful queries about your product. The dashboard seems to be well organized; you need to organize it correctly.
The product comes with a help store, but a live chat option seems to be missing.
Wix’s e-commerce and business plans start at $ 23 per month.
3. Shopify – The best E-Commerce platform business in terms of reliability
From storefront to inventory management to marketing tools, Shopify equips an e-commerce site with all the tools it needs to launch and scale an online store in 2022. The product features SEO tools, email marketing, search optimized product pages, shopping carts, and much more.
Shopify SaaS is known in the industry for its stability and everlasting availability.
Shopify lets you perform necessary inventory management tasks, such as tracking and adjusting inventory, exporting or importing merchandise through CSV files, and more.
Shopify’s analytics gives you important e-commerce insights, such as store visits, transaction data, site speed, and more.
The product works with other commonly used e-commerce business apps such as Oberto, Facebook Messenger, Amazon, Stocky, Apple Business Chat, and 3k other apps, including marketing, reporting, shipping, and customer support.
The Shopify mobile phone software lets you sell products and manage your E-Commerce store on the go.
Shopify has direct support via chat and email. Also, it is supported by one of the largest active communities of e-commerce entrepreneurs. You can engage with the community through the Shopify Community Forum or the social media groups dedicated to the product.
Shopify plans start at $ 29 per month with a free trial option.
4. Lightspeed eCom – The best cloud-based retail POS system
Lightspeed eCom is an original quality of Lightspeed HQ, a cloud-based retail POS system.
Lightspeed eCom lets you import stock from your physical store to your E-Commerce platform via a one-click system. It gives buyers a live update of the amount at their hands level. In addition, the tool allows you to make extensive updates to your inventory data, including spreadsheet imports and exports.
The Analytics Dashboard gives you daily, weekly, and monthly performance data. The tool also provides a special conversion report to determine where your shop needs optimization to increase sales.
Assistance is available by phone with different time lists based on various offices. Alternatively, support can be reached via email.
Integrates with apps like Lightspeed Melchimp. Restock, Stripe, and other retail e-commerce apps.
5. BigCommerce – The best full-service E-Commerce platform for ease of use
As one of the most popular e-commerce platforms, BigCommerce plans are built based on how much you can sell on their platform.
The inventory management feature lets you track orders and get order trends over time. After that, it gives you an accurate stock level and price adjustment report.
The back-end dashboard is the easiest to use compared to other platforms in this list.
Analytics makes it relatively easy to track insights like Average Order Value (AOV), identify your biggest customers, and view other marketing data that will help you scale your product faster.
Site Editor lets you easily edit the look and feel of your site according to your brand’s design language.
BigCommerce works excellent with popular apps like Web agility, Active Campaign, Avalara Tax, Stripe, and 100s other essential integrations. You can also integrate with marketplaces like eBay and Amazon and list your products directly on these sites using the BigCommerce control panel.
The support team is available 24/7 days via email or phone.
The BigCommerce Standard plan starts at 29.95 per month with a 1-month free trial option. The bandwidth of the BigCommerce plan depends on how much you can sell on the platform.
6. Square online – Sell anything with a free online shop
Square Online is the result of Square, the payment processing giant, buying Weebly and creating Square Online Creator. It allows you to sync inventory with other channels and Square Point of Sale solutions. The product has a free e-commerce plan, suitable for a small business just starting.
The dashboard is simple and lets you track product sales, customer travel, and discarded cart recovery. In terms of customization, the product lags with limited editing availability.
The product integrates seamlessly with WooCommerce, WordPress, Magento, BigCommerce, and many more.
Customer support is available via mobile phone, email, and live chat. Also, there is a broad knowledge base filled with more than 180 articles.
The professional plan starts at $ 16 per month with a free perpetual plan that lets you get a small business off the ground.
7. Swoll – The best headless E-Commerce app
Facilitates headless e-commerce technology to create a customized customer experience for your online store.
Swell offers E-Commerce features like unlimited pages, real-time shipping quotes, shows to process, more and more.
In the case of inventory management, you can add unlimited product options variants. And features. It comes with features like bulk editing and product bundling. Alternatively, you can track item shipments and edit order items before finalizing the order.
The product gives you an in-depth sales report that you can filter by product, customer, coupon. And more.
It comes with Pay Motion, a multi-channel e-commerce platform that offers revenue optimization features designed to increase sales.
Swell provides support via phone, email, and live chat.
The Basic plan starts at $ 59 per month with a 14-day free trial.
8. WP Engine – The best E-Commerce platform for lightning-fast web speeds
WP Engine is a web hosting provider primarily used for blogging due to its superfast site speed. Recently, they started offering their Genesis Pro subscription plan that comes with a featured website builder.
The framework comes with built-in marketing features. Gutenberg-ready site builders can be used to create reusable modules and to enable the next level of customization by matching the title, logo, or any aspect of your E-Commerce website to the language of your design.
Developers have an open-source community that audits frameworks and adds new security features. You can use the Sample Child theme at the top of the framework to fine-tune your site design without affecting the underlying site code.
The community also provides hundreds of useful integrations, plugins, add-ons, and extensions. It integrates with WooCommerce it’s and another central E-Commerce app.
With WP Engine as a web hosting provider, sites load very quickly, a great way to rank on Google.
WP Engine Startup plans start at $ 25 per month.
9. CloudShoppy – The best affordable E-Commerce solution
CloudShoppy is an affordable E-Commerce solution for starting your small business. It comes with pre-integrated features like payment gateway, SMS marketing, logistics, order management, and much more.
The product allows you to sell physical products and digital products. It offers a range of variations in terms of website themes.
Its inventory management allows you to add multiple variants to each product, including the ability to determine quantity-based or location-based pricing.
Analysis Dashboard gives you insights into sales reports, abandoned cart details, inventory reports, customer reports, location orders, logistics reports, and much more.
Support is available by chat, phone, and email. The support docs and knowledge base come with the proper instructions and screenshots. That being said, the instructions can sometimes seem annoying.
E-commerce businesses outside India have subtle ecosystems that often do not work with run-of-the-mill E-Commerce platform solutions. CloudShoppy solves this.
CloudShop integrated with CCAvenue, CitrusPay, PayU, PayPal, and USA-centric Instamojo with six payment options. Integration with USA-centric payment gateways with all significant USA logistics companies such as FedEx, Aramex, Delivery, USA Post, and DTDC makes it one of the best E-Commerce Website for small businesses in the USA.
Starter plans cost Rs.3000 per month or about $41 per month.
10. OpenCart – The best FREE & open source eCommerce website
OpenCart is an open-source, downloadable platform with over 13,000 extensions and 36 payment methods that can customize your site to your liking.
OpenCart has made it a competitor to the best free E-Commerce platforms for free download, upgrade and use. However, you need to secure and host the site and have a developer familiar with PHP to design the website.
They also offer a cloud-based version called OpenCart Cloud, which, combined with PayPal, is priced differently.
Conclusion
Hopefully, after reading the whole article, you will understand how much these tools are needed for your business in 2022. Now I want to know your opinion. Which tool is the best according to your business needs? Also, what Best E-Commerce Platforms in 2022 is missing from the list?