How to choose the right eCommerce platform

Every organisation is trying to keep up with constant day to day changes in customer shopping expectations or to differentiate their online and physical stores by providing superior customer buying experiences.

An eCommerce platform is a software application that allows the online platform business to manage its website, marketing, sales, and operations. It acts as a central hub for your business.

eCommerce platforms like Adobe Commerce and Big Commerce offer powerful features that help to run a smooth business, along with the integration of all important common business tools — they enable businesses to centralise their operations and run their business in their way.

Key criteria for choosing the right e-commerce platform

Every online shop has unique needs, and your eCommerce platform should be able to provide the required native, out-of-the-box eCommerce tools and features to run your business. 

This blog covers some of the most important questions you should ask and know what are the issues involved in choosing the most appropriate platform for your online business. 

1.   Flexible, agile, and scalable. 

When investing in a commerce platform, it’s not enough that should address only the current business needs, but must also provide the flexibility to customise buying experiences as business needs change. Look for a flexible hosted eCommerce platform solution or cloud-based eCommerce platform that you can modify as per your store and that allows you to differentiate your customer experiences and ultimately grow your business.

Investing in a commerce solution that doesn’t impose limits but enables your growth, lowers your overall costs, innovates continuously, helps to engage shoppers/buyers with omnichanel experiences, and lets you take ownership of the complete customer experience.

2.  Consistency across multi-channels

List the different use cases B2B, B2C, or both that you need the platform to support you today and in the future. For example, some commerce platforms only focus on B2B or B2C, but a growing number of merchants are looking for platforms that serve both use cases. Ask questions- Does the platform allows you to set up stores for multiple brands? Does it help in selling into multiple countries using multiple currencies? Does the platform let you centrally manage all of your commerce activity? Does it support social media marketing and the type of content required for your store? 

3.  Leveraging customer data to plan commerce strategies. 

Your commerce platform should have dashboards and reporting tools to help you consume and understand the customer data every time he visits your online store. It must have advanced analytics like GA and built-in artificial intelligence (AI) that delivers actionable insights using your target audience touch-points, and customer feedback and enables better strategic planning. It must help to identify certain behaviours of the loyal customer so you can reward them with exclusive promotions or personalised recommendations. 

4.  Support system.

 Before finalising, find out the areas of expertise of the commerce vendor’s support ecosystem and does it meet up your needs. There are multiple aspects of the support team  ecosystem that should be explored. Does the platform have a strong partner ecosystem with good reviews and a capable engineering team? Do they provide full-service partner with 24 7 support that offer coding, consulting, training, support, and other services? Do they have local offices near you? Do they have an international reach and have partners that speak your language and understand your culture? Can it enable third-party integrations and expand the solution with add-ons and extensions that meet specific business needs, like a hosted solution, payment security, accounting, shipping and order fulfilment, marketing, customer support, site optimisation, and more? 

5.  Open environment. 

Among other things to consider when choosing an eCommerce platform, one is; does the commerce platform you’re evaluating support an open environment? Can it easily integrate with your existing systems?

 When evaluating commerce solutions, assess the catalog of third-party extensions for each.

6.  Focus on value. 

A lot of time, we forget to ask ourselves- ‘Are we getting what we paid for?’ Does the solution provide a flexible licensing model? What will it cost to integrate it with your current technology stack? Does the solution deliver the capabilities your business needs today? Will it foster business growth and scale? What will be the platform price and transaction fees to invest in, deploy, and migrate to a new commerce platform? 

Who are the most recognised commerce platform leaders? 

1.  Adobe Commerce

As a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant™ for Digital Commerce, a Leader in The Forrester Wave™ for B2B Commerce Suites for Midsize Companies, and a Top Performer in The Forrester Wave™ for B2C Commerce Suites, Adobe Commerce Cloud is uniquely positioned to address all the critical elements covered in this buyer’s guide. Adobe Commerce Cloud delivers the most flexible commerce solution available and offers the largest commerce ecosystem in the world, enabling merchants to move and innovate faster. It empowers merchants to support a wide range of business models and multiple channels, addressing the needs of both B2C to B2B use cases, and making it easy to manage multiple brands on a global scale.

 2.  BigCommerce

The vast majority of new online stores today choose to go with a SaaS solution like BigCommerce. And yes — that includes B2B businesses!

This is because it has a low cost of entry, no costly development or technical headaches, and a mountable framework that’s designed to help your business grow. A platform with a great community of people both running it and using it, check out their blog,  their support materials, and the eCommerce platforms they have to offer your online business.

3.   Shopify

It is considered to be one of the best eCommerce platform for start-ups and brands with SKU counts of less than 100. It has a comparatively lower charge and is quite a popular platform providing easy integrations.

Others include,

4.     WooCommerce

5.     Squarespace

6.     Wix

7.     Weebly

8.    Volusion

Steps To Choose an eCommerce Platform

1. Determine your goal and then ask the right questions and start a free trial.

2. Compare the cost of all popular and good platforms available.

3. Determine which platform is best for your store’s design.

4. Test the functionality and ease of use.

5. Setup Flow before you launch, including loading in products, product roadmaps, domain name registration, project management roles and payment processing.

6. Product and SKU Management

7. Centralised Channel Management

8. Determine the scalability and customisability of the platform.

Once you’ve selected the most apt eCommerce platform for your online store, you’re ready to create and launch your online store!

Final thoughts

As eCommerce technologies continue to advance, open SaaS eCommerce platforms, like Adobe Commerce, BigCommerce, Shopify WooCommerce store are taking a leap forward.

As brands demand more native user experience (UX) features, and product or backend optimisations, there has been a massive shift to SaaS and headless commerce as they remove much of the complexity from running an online business.

Choose a service provider that can advise you on the right software and its implementation, provide you out of box functionality, and set up a competitive edge for your digital experience platform for online marketing.

Adobe Business: Products & Services with adobe experience cloud. (n.d.). Retrieved September 8, 2022, from https://business.adobe.com/ 

How to choose the right eCommerce Platform for your business (2022). The BigCommerce Blog. (2022, March 9). Retrieved September 8, 2022, from https://www.bigcommerce.co.uk/blog/selecting-ecommerce-platform/ 

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