How To Start An E-Commerce Shop? 10 Top E-Commerce Platforms To Sell Online

If you are interested in building your new eCommerce business or expanding your offline business into an eCommerce one then you surely need these eCommerce platforms in order to ensure that you have all the necessary tools to manage your business online efficiently.

These eCommerce platforms make it very easy for potential entrepreneurs to set up an online store without any sort of prerequisite knowledge of coding.

There are a plethora of eCommerce platforms and finding the best platform for your eCommerce business is crucial for your growth.

Let us have a look at the best available eCommerce platforms.

BigCommerce

BigCommerce is one of the most popular and balanced eCommerce platforms. It comprises a fully-featured, all-inclusive content management system which runs some of the biggest brand names such as Skullcandy, Superdry and so on.

BigCommerce essentially has everything which is required to run your store, you can also check out the best payment methods for eCommerce via this particular platform. There is the availability of a drag and drop feature which makes the overall page-building process very easy.

You can also select a theme or a template and start your eCommerce website. The BigCommerce essential plans start from 29.95 dollars per month. If you want to avail of their enterprise-level plans you will have to contact their team in order to get custom pricing.

Shopify

Shopify is easily the most popular and well-known eCommerce platform. Similar to BigCommerce it is an all-inclusive and fully hosted platform which particularly stands out for its huge range of interactions along with third-party tools.

Shopify was initially started in 2006 and was one of the first companies which helped people to start their respective eCommerce journeys without any prior knowledge about coding.

You only need a few minutes to have a fully responsive Shopify store and then you can easily get everything up and running owing to the excellent and easy-to-use site builder and excellent themes as well.

Squarespace

Squarespace is not exactly an eCommerce platform but rather a content management system which is made for the purpose of designing any kind of website, even eCommerce stores.

The best part about Squarespace is its templates. They have a superb choice of colour palettes, cutting-edge designs and also decent fonts. If you want to display any of your visual products this is the best platform to choose from.

If you have a Squarespace plan you can access these templates for free.

Sellfy

Sellfy is essentially an eCommerce platform which was built for marketing and selling digital goods and products.

It has more than 270,000 creators as its users globally. There are a lot of other platforms as well on the list but Sellfy is the best in terms of having an e-commerce platform based on selling digital goods.

The major purpose behind Sellfy was to meet the needs of photographers, producers of music and a lot of other creators. One can even use it to sell subscriptions, ebooks, audio files, videos, photographs and so much more.

Weebly

Weebly is another eCommerce website builder with a built-in e-commerce platform. It is very ideal and affordable for entrepreneurs and even for small businesses which want a low-cost platform for their respective sites.

Even though Weebly is not as sophisticated and feature-rich it does simply very well. It has some of the best-paid plans and it also has a limited free plan as well.

Weebly also has all the essential tools which you need to start selling, including an intuitive drag-and-drop builder for the website.

Wix

Wix is another popular and multi-purpose website builder which has a built-in eCommerce functionality.

Wix is extremely beginner-friendly and it offers a simple, affordable and hassle-free solution for entrepreneurs who are looking for affordable options.

The two best things about Wix are the website builder and also the ‘Wix Editor’ which has a powerful built-in automation feature. Wix is extremely user-friendly and at the same time powerful.

Once you initially set up your website, its automatic machine learning algorithm will continuously make attempts to monetize your ad performance and also optimize them.

Volusion

Volusion is basically an all-in-one eCommerce-based solution which powers more than 180,000 online stores.

Even though it is not as popular as other eCommerce platforms such as Shopify or even BigCommerce, it still has some of the most powerful in-built marketing and analytics features. Volusion lets you manage your online campaigns through various marketing channels from a single place.

There is a state-of-the-art SEO feature option available which gives you the best chance of ranking on the results page.

WooCommerce  

If the entrepreneurs want complete flexibility and control over their respective eCommerce stores then WooCommerce should be the preferred destination. WooCommerce is quite a bit different from the other options that are available in this list since it isn’t exactly a complete platform.

It is more of a plugin which can be installed and activated onto your WordPress website and then turned into an eCommerce store.

Shift4Shop

This is another eCommerce platform which provides a solid feature-rich builder for the website, marketing tools, order management and much more.

It comes with all the normal features which can be expected from an eCommerce platform. The best part about Shift4Shop is that it provides all of these eCommerce-based solutions for free. You can avail your free branded subdomain and also get your own free domain name for free.

The only disadvantage of the free services is that you will only get all of these features for free if you use their own in-house payment processor through which they get to make the money.

Big Cartel

Big Cartel is basically an eCommerce platform which is built for artists and by artists as well. Big Cartel has been around since 2005 and is currently used by more than a million creators.

The main aim of Big Cartel is to remain small and independent. Independent creators do not look for the same features as SMBs, and they usually want something a bit more specific.