The top four e-commerce platforms: which one is right for you?

Having a quality e-commerce platform behind your brand is critical in maximising your sales and turning your ‘bricks’ into ‘clicks’.

Today’s e-commerce platforms provide huge revenue potential for brands, from large, market-dominant retailers to SMEs and even one-man startups. Consumers expect digital technologies and options to be integrated into their shopping experiences, whether they decide to research, interact or buy online.

Below, we take a closer look at the top four e-commerce platforms available on the market and help you dive deeper to determine which will be right for you:

1. Magento

Magento is highly popular on the ecommerce market, hosting around 200,000 merchant stores and boasting an excellent shopping cart function that is ideal for medium-large businesses (some recommend it’s best for businesses with over $1 million in annual turnover). It’s a highly customisable platform that can support unlimited products and thousands of transactions per hour across your different stores. You can also utilise Magento to manage and grow your customer base, run promotions and track useful SEO analytics.

Check out music venue City Winery and Aussie company The Athlete’s Foot, which currently use Magento.

2. Shopify

Are you a small brand who is just getting started online? Shopify might be your best bet! Ease of use (great if you’re not technical), modern themes/designs and 24/7 support make this platform perfect for SMEs – and it’s also 100% Aussie! Good analytics make tracking everything from trends to inventory simple, and good security along with fast page load times are a key benefit. With essential marketing tools and space for a blog, Shopify is great for maintaining a constant connection with your customers and reinforcing your brand. It sports about 100,000 stores and gives rise to over $4 billion product sales.

You can see the store showcase here.

3. Bigcommerce

100+ stylish themes, a simple drag-and-drop system and extensive customisation possibilities all make Bigcommerce one of the big market leaders in e-commerce. Bigcommerce’s 50,000 shops range from smaller ones turning over only hundreds in revenue, to larger brands that earn tens of millions per year.

A lack of fees is also highly appealing, as Andrew Bleakley writes: “You can sell as many products as you like and the software will not get in the way. There are no transaction fees involved and most of all, there are no hidden costs”. If you invest a little more time learning how to use Bigcommerce, you can get advanced features for your store, more so than you would from others.

Bigcommerce shows off some cool stores here, including Aussie designer brand Collette Dinnigan.

4. Volusion

Volusion is often seen as being on par with Bigcommerce in the platform world, and both share many similar cart features and functions. While this system might appear more complex than other simpler ones, a huge range of tutorials and 24/7 support are what help Volusion stand out.

SEO, social media and other marketing tools are also top-notch, and the platform itself claims that it is able to earn its clients more than three times the revenue of other platforms, according to Social Skinny.

You can see the store showcase here.

Adam Arbolino is the co-founder and CTO of DesignCrowd.com.au, a logo, web and graphic design marketplace.

Image credit : Flickr/fosforix