If you want to add any form of ecommerce to your website, then there are a number of different tools you can use to do this and a number of different ecommerce platforms.
This is going to be an important decision for your business, as choosing the right platform will help to give you access to more features and plugins while at the same time building more trust and thereby encouraging more sales.
Here are a few of the most popular options and some of their differences:
Shopify
Shopify is a ‘hosted’ ecommerce solution. That means you don’t host the store on your own site which makes things a lot easier but also reduces some of the flexibility.
This tool is used by a lot of big companies, including some Fortune 500 companies, and it’s capable of storing up to 5,000 items for you to sell. It’s highly customizable, easy to install plugins with just a few clicks and relatively inexpensive to begin with.
Bigcommerce
Bigcommerce is the closest direct competition for Shopify as it is also an example of a hosted platform. This is a bit more expensive though and lesser known with fewer plugins. The main advantage? It has a lot of support for international payments.
Magento
Megento is a self-hosted solution that’s capable of hosting up to 500,000 items! It’s highly flexible too but also very fiddly. This is a good option for a large corporation but not so good if you’re a smaller business.
WooCommerce
WooCommerce is another self-hosted option but the big advantage this time around is that it’s a plugin for WordPress. That means it will integrate seamlessly with a lot of websites and is easy to customize and to add features to.
Volusion
Volusion is another option with a lot of unique benefits – this one is particularly useful for marketers trying to sell digital products.