How to Choose The Best eCommerce Platform: The Ultimate Guide
Posted on 30th Oct 2020
The eCommerce industry is currently worth $2.3 trillion and is set to nearly double to 4.48 trillion by 2020. If you’re deciding to upgrade your eCommerce software to ensure you’re getting the largest possible slice of the pie, well we’re pleased to say that you’re making a very smart move.
But choosing the best eCommerce software is not as straightforward as it seems. In fact, it is actually one of the most important decisions that you make very early on in your eCommerce journey.
To help you decide how to choose the best eCommerce platform, we’ve put together this guide that details all the factors and considerations you need to keep in mind.
Why selecting the best eCommerce platform matters for your business
Building an eCommerce business is more than just simply putting up your product listings on the web. It is far more complicated than you actually imagine. Just like running a physical retail, or a production facility, the same level of strategic thinking and planning also goes into building and running your eCommerce business.
And if you get this fundamental spot on, then you can take advantage of the digital environment where you can automate and streamline many of the tasks and activities that would have required human intervention.
But when it comes to selecting an eCommerce platform, you have to remember that your eCommerce site will dictate the following 4 things:
Growth: How quickly your business is able to grow?
Running costs: This includes the cost of building your eCommerce platform and ongoing development and maintenance costs.
Customer engagement: How you can control how your customers interact with your business.
Objectives: The right eCommerce platform will enable you to deliver the service you set out to achieve.
It is important for us to point out that many eCommerce vendors tend to focus on “skin” deep issues like design, UX branding and content. But the real eCommerce issues are found within the business process, customer engagement and lead generation. All these processes can help you determine whether you’re making a healthy ROI on your eCommerce platform.
Why use an eCommerce platform?
To put it simply, if you don’t have an eCommerce platform, it is impossible for you to compete online. An eCommerce platform is the backbone of an online retail enterprise, whether it is for a B2B or B2C company. Also, the right eCommerce platform can help to streamline how your business interacts with your clients, customers and employees.
eCommerce platforms are essentially software applications that enable businesses to execute complex functions both in the front-end and back-end. This includes CRM, inventory management, mobile commerce, web design and warehouse fulfilment.
Before we even had specialized eCommerce solutions, businesses had to build their own platform in-house by their IT and development team. This was a laborious and costly affair. These self-built solutions were usually unscalable, difficult to manipulate and were not able to integrate with other software solutions used by the business.
Today, the build-your-own method is used by a small minority of companies, but we now have a range of specialist solutions including “free” open source platforms that you can pay someone to build to your requirements, proprietary software that can also be customized with a team of developers, existing platforms such as Amazon or Walmart where you register to sell your products, or ready-made platform like Core dna that is hosted in the cloud.
We’ll explore each of these eCommerce platform types later on in this guide.
What is the best eCommerce platform?
Selecting an eCommerce platform based on their popularity is not the best way. The truth is, the best eCommerce platform is the one that successfully delivers the outcomes and objectives that you have set for your business.
These goals can be simple things like an increase in revenue, improving customer engagement or entering or creating a new market. Or they could be complex where you have many stakeholders involved that have conflicting objectives. This is where strong leadership is required to get everyone on the same page; without it, your eCommerce project will struggle to take off.
Also, the right eCommerce platform should fit well with the current technical expertise of your team. For example, if you select an eCommerce platform that is extremely popular but has a high barrier to entry, this will not sit well with a team who have a low technical expertise. In this case, you will have to draft in a technical team to assist you towards your end-goal.
Another factor that can determine your choice is your business’s competitive landscape. If you compete in a fast-paced industry, where you’re bound to encounter a plethora of technological disruptions, then you’ll need a platform that can move and adjust at the same speed as your business.
By: Sam Saltis