How to Choose the Best E-commerce Platform for Opening an Online Store | Magento small business pricing

They have 10 free themes. The rest are paid and prices for paid themes range from $100 to $180. They have an app store where you can find a wide variety of free and paid solutions to improve your store. This platform is suitable for small and medium stores. Shopify doesn't have very good SEO indicators, as well as problems with URL sections. Moreover, they charge fees for transactions if they were not processed through Shopify Payment, which is a significant disadvantage.

Adobe Commerce (previously Magento)

One of Shopify's main competitors in the e-commerce sphere is business.adobe.com or Adobe Commerce. Their developers position this product as the easiest to learn, but due to the lack of a built-in visual design, beginners still need to study guides with official documentation and understand the functionality. Keep in mind that you will need minimal programming skills if you want to choose Adobe Commerce. At the same time, Adobe Commerce has a huge worldwide community, so you'll be able to ask for help whenever you encounter issues.

A large number of well-known brands like Helly Hansen, Ford, Land Rover, Nestle Nespresso trust and build their sites on Adobe Coommerce. 

Adobe Commerce has 2 versions:

Magento Opensource (free): Formerly known as Magento Community, Magento Open Source is a free version of Magento that you can download, configure and host yourself. You can check the functionality of the free version here.

Adobe Commerce (previously Magento) (starting from $22,000 per year): Previously Magento Commerce was released in two versions: Magento Enterprise and Magento Enterprise Cloud. These two versions have been merged, resulting in Adobe Commerce, a premium version of Magento Opensource that includes cloud hosting as part of the subscription fee.

There are 13 free themes available, and the paid ones from $29 to $499. Many Adobe features are free but there are also paid solutions that are quite expensive. While the annual license fee is in the tens of thousands of dollars, the services provided and their quality are worth it.

For small business, Magento Open Source can be a more affordable choice than Adobe Commerce. Thanks to its free access and great potential for growth and empowerment, Magento is often called the best e-commerce platform for small businesses.

Shift4Shop (former 3DCart)

The Shift4Shop platform is positioned as a universal sales tool for small and medium businesses. It can meet the needs of both beginners and experienced users. Shift4Shop (3dcart) is an attractive option for those looking for an affordable solution with a wide range of prices and a diverse feature set.

This platform is not really for beginners, but it offers tutorials and setup steps to help you do everything. Another but is that you will still have to spend quite a lot of time mastering its functions. 3dcart limits the number of sales that you can generate for each service plan. For $19 a month, this volume will be 50k. The main advantage is that the number of out-of-the-box features exceeds the number of Shopify vanilla features. While Shift4Shop offers a variety of themes, it's hard to call it creativity as it looks a bit outdated.

Yo!Rent

Yo!Rent is one of the only few e-commerce solutions that are built from scratch for the sole purpose of supporting online rental operations. Thus for entrepreneurs interested in launching an online rental business, Yo!Rent is an ideal e-commerce solution with capabilities to rent out equipment with ease, carry out document verification, charge cancellation pricing, set self-pick-up slots, and more.

To provide more flexibility to the business owners, Yo!Rent comes with three fully customizable themes for the equipment rental, dress rental, and automobile industries. These themes play with color psychology to make your business more professional and attractive. Lastly, it is worth noting that Yo!Rent already has 20+ pre-integrated payment gateways and several third-party APIs to ensure extended functionality to users.

BigCommerce

BigCommerce is a well-known platform for creating commercial projects. It is often included in ratings and reviews as one of the top e-commerce platforms. A distinctive feature of the service is a set of ready-made options for different niches.

The constructor is easy to use, it has the functions of coupons, discounts, social networks, and advanced reporting.

There are 3 paid subscriptions available in the builder, priced from $29 to $299 (29 for sales volume up to $50k). The platform is suitable for businesses of any size. The BigCommerce online store engine stands out for two main advantages: no commissions on payments and an unlimited number of products. BigCommerce has an E-commerce Apps Marketplace with a wide range of paid extensions available.

WooCommerce

WooCommerce is the most popular free e-commerce plugin for WordPress. It allows you to convert any site based on this CMS into an online store. But to implement this, the user must install the WooCommerce plugin and other marketing tools himself.

What about the pros and cons of this plugin?

The system, unlike Adobe Commerce, is not as complex, but still not as simple as Shopify (in terms of settings). It is used by about 500 thousand known resources, including sites with high load. It is possible to use the platform on a free basic basis, but the lack of free options may still make you pay extra. If you want to make your site stand out from the competition, then you will have to install more original paid themes. The average price of such options is about $50-70. There are enough extensions for the platform to implement various functions.

At the moment, there are over 5 thousand proposals in the WP repository. The platform is best suited for small and medium businesses. This platform can accommodate up to 5 thousand products (with a stable server and competent writing of the code).

Salesforce Commerce Cloud

Salesforce Commerce Cloud offers a complete solution for your day-to-day e-commerce business. This platform is tailored to both B2C and B2B merchants. It's a part of the Salesforce product suite.

This platform is most suitable for large businesses. Salesforce offers a wide range of features, but it takes a lot of time and effort to figure out how to use all of the software. This platform works on a ‘sandbox’ basis, so it will be very difficult for a beginner to work with it, especially compared to companies offering turnkey solutions. S

alesforce solutions are more expensive than products and services offered by competitors. This is why this platform is better suited for companies with a million dollars turnover per quarter. But it's worth mentioning that it's highly customizable with 4,000 pre-integrated apps available in the Salesforce store.

Squarespace

Squarespace is a one-stop solution for anyone looking to build a website. Providing pre-built website templates and various drag and drop widgets for adding elements, Squarespace powers over a million websites. 

Along with Magento Open Source, Squarespace is one the best e-commerce platforms for startups. The creators have simplified the process of launching sites on this platform as much as possible and developers regularly create new templates.

Unlike other platforms, the Squarespace online store CMS does not have a built-in app marketplace to quickly empower a website. Integrations with third-party services are hidden in different tabs of the control panel.

In contrast to Adobe's paid Magento, small business pricing is a part of Squarespace's business model. To sell on this platform, you need a business plan that costs just $18 per month billed annually. Using it, you will have to pay a 3% transaction fee. Other plans, which are priced between $26 and $ 40, won't charge additional transaction fees.

Volusion

Volusion is now considered one of the best platforms on the market. Volusion, like many others, is a cloud platform. Customers buy a tariff plan and get access to all the features of the engine.

According to the platform, the number of active clients exceeds 185 thousand. The key features of Volusion are its extensive capabilities, built-in CRM system, and a directory of experts that have proven themselves in collaboration with platform clients.

So what are the pros and cons of the Volusion?

According to the platform’s developers, the number of active clients exceeds 185 thousand. The key features of Volusion are its extensive capabilities, built-in CRM system, and expert assistance. Full-page load on standard templates takes on average 1.5-2 seconds, which is faster than competitors. On the basis of the service, you can easily create both a small online store for the sale of goods and a large trading platform. The app store has many ready-made extensions, most of which are paid. The platform offers 4 tariff plans. The cost ranges from $ 26 to $ 269 per month. On the most expensive plan, you can download unlimited products and add as many manager profiles as you like. But the annual turnover will be limited to 500 thousand dollars. Therefore, this solution is not suitable for large businesses.

Prestashop

PrestaShop is one of the leading e-commerce CMS platforms used by a big number of stores in 150 countries. This system was developed taking into account the needs of owners of online stores of various sizes, from small sites to large marketplaces. By default, PrestaShop offers quite a lot of functionality, which is enough to quickly launch a startup. This platform is quite easy to learn and will not cause any particular problems for a beginner.

This platform is designed for small and medium businesses. Using this CMS for an online store, it is quite possible to launch a functional platform in a few hours, i.e. the platform is quite easy to use. PrestaShop is often referred to as a cross between Adobe Commerce and Shopify. Statistics show that there are about 250,000 stores based on PrestaShop. By default, PrestaShop offers quite rich functionality: over 300 standard options are built into the system.

The main advantage of the platform is that it is free. But it is worth noting that prices for advanced extensions that provide additional functionality for the site start at 39 euros, which is 2-3 times more expensive than similar solutions, for example, on OpenCart.

Wix

Wix is a renowned platform for creating beautiful and presentable websites with over 96 million users worldwide. The functionality of Wix allows you to make your site as unique as possible, without the need to be a pro in web mastering. The main advantage of this system is a large number of high-quality templates for sites of absolutely any subject.

This solution is used mostly by small business owners. The number of platform users is approaching one hundred million. Working with this platform, the user receives a workable program on a third-party resource. At the same time, there is no access to system files and it will not work to modify them.

To create a trading platform, you need to purchase the maximum tariff plan which is 28 dollars per month, but still, it is not very expensive. If you are an experienced developer, then a strong disadvantage for you will be the lack of access to the source code.

Summing up

The best e-commerce platforms for small business

For small businesses, the main parameters of platforms are the price, quantity, and quality of the functions provided for the money. Based on the combination of these parameters, the best platforms for small businesses are:

• Wix
• 3dcart
• WooCommerce
• BigCommerce

The best e-commerce platforms for startups

Unlike small businesses, startups can be large-scale, so when choosing a platform, other parameters are important for them: user experience design, SEO, support for multiple platforms for product implementation, etc.

Based on the above material and an analysis of other sources, the best start-up platforms would be:

• Magento Open Source
• Squarespace
• Shopify
• WooCommerce
• BigCommerce

How to choose e-commerce platform

While there are many popular platforms on the market, they have very few differences from each other. Your task is to decide which one suits you best by choosing business-critical criteria (price, integrations, development level) and creating a comparison matrix. Once you fill out all the data, the table will show you the best solution.

If you are searching for how to build a B2B business from scratch, then use the B2B E-commerce Suite, which includes all the essential features to build a successful B2B store.