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How to Choose the Best E-commerce Platform for Your Business

How to Choose the Best E-commerce Platform for Your Business

Mar 13, 2023 in E-Commerce Solutions by Dr. Süleyman Demirci

Deciding on the best e-commerce platform is crucial for the success and growth of your online business. With so many options in the sector, you may feel overwhelmed in determining which environment best fits your business. You can choose the best platform that meets your requirements, depending on your business needs, level of technical expertise, scalability of the e-commerce, third-party integrations, and customer support.

From the standpoint of these factors, choosing the best e-commerce platform for a digital business becomes a challenging task for everyone. This text will discuss choosing the right e-commerce platform for your business.

1. What are Your Business Needs?

You must identify your business needs as a first step when choosing the best e-commerce platform. Consider what features and functionality you require for your online stores, such as product management, payment options, shipping methods, and marketing tools.

You may have a preconceived notion about a particular platform, leading you only to consider that platform and disregard other options. Considering these too much can lead to you making the wrong decision if that platform is not the best fit for your business.

2. Is Your Technical Expertise Enough?

E-commerce platforms have complexities, requiring different technical expertise to set up and maintain. If a business needs more technical expertise to achieve these, you may need some help implementing and customizing the platform, causing issues with functionality and performance.

In the beginning, evaluating platform capabilities, and understanding their intricacies and customizations, integrations, and scalability can be challenging. The variety of these options can make it challenging to understand which platform best fits your business.

If you have a team of developers and designers who can build and maintain your e-commerce website, you may opt for a more customizable platform like Magento or WooCommerce. On the other hand, if you need more technical expertise to customize such platforms, you may prefer a more user-friendly platform like Shopify or BigCommerce.

3. You Need to Consider an Easily Scalable Platform

As your business grows, your e-commerce platform should scale with your needs. If the platform cannot handle the business's growth, it can lead to site crashes, slow page loading times, and inadequate bandwidth. Such unwanted consequences can negatively impact the customer experience and search engine ranking and lead to lost sales and revenue.

You need to Consider an Easily Scalable Ecommerce Platform - Admirise

Therefore, consider the platform's scalability and whether it can handle increased traffic and sales volume without experiencing downtime or slow loading times. A scalable platform like Magento or WooCommerce can provide the flexibility and customization options needed for long-term growth, and Shopify-plus can also provide you with growing scalability. However, it can still be challenging to predict future e-commerce requirements, leading to difficulty in selecting a platform that can handle future growth and changes.

4. You Should be able to Integrate Your E-commerce Platform Seamlessly with Third-Party Tools and Apps

To effectively manage an e-commerce business, integration with other tools is often necessary. Payment gateways, shipping providers, accounting software, customer relationship management (CRM) systems, and marketing automation tools are just some of these integrations.

However, the integration process can be complex, and choosing the wrong e-commerce platform can make it even more difficult. You may need to handle unexpected issues when deciding on the wrong platform because of unnecessary features and functionalities.

More specifically, integrating these tools can lead to issues with data management, inventory tracking, and order fulfillment, which can negatively impact the customer experience and result in lost sales. Therefore, selecting an e-commerce platform that seamlessly integrates with the tools and services you currently use or plan to use is crucial. Check if the platform offers integrations with third-party applications to avoid future complications.

5. Responsive Support is Essential!

Having responsive customer support is crucial for e-commerce platforms. Choose a platform that offers support through multiple channels, such as live chat, email, or phone. You should also review customer support reviews to see how previous users have experienced the platform's support. Nowadays, most platforms offer responsive customer support.

6. Reconsider the Balance Between Costs and Functionality of E-commerce

It's essential to consider the costs associated with e-commerce carefully. Platforms can have varying costs, including upfront investments and ongoing maintenance fees. While cost is a significant factor in selecting the right platform, balancing this with your business's desired functionality and scalability is essential. Consider its capabilities before choosing a platform based solely on its cost. Determine your budget and how much you're willing to spend on a platform while balancing the top features and costs.

7. Better User Experience (UX) Makes a Huge Difference!

The UX is also critical for e-commerce growth and success. The lack of a user-friendly platform may lead to difficulties in creating a seamless UX and too much complexity for customers and administrators. For instance, it may reduce the time a potential visitor spends on an e-commerce website or increase the rates of drop-offs. It may lead to high bounce rates, abandoned carts, and reduced customer loyalty.

Online is Better, Better User Experience (UX) Makes a Huge Difference - Admirise

To achieve sustainable growth and increase revenue, the platform must be easy to use and navigate for customers and administrators. Where simplicity, functionality, and enough features combine, you can decide on the right e-commerce platform for your online business.

The Role of an E-commerce Agency in Helping to Decide the Best E-commerce Platform

An e-commerce agency can help a business select the best e-commerce platform. The agency can effectively implement and manage the platform to support the company's growth and success by providing a wide range of services, including expertise, customization, integration, maintenance and support, and optimization.

The agency can also offer sound guidance on platform features and scalability to ensure the platform can provide solutions for specific business needs. Here are some concrete examples of how an e-commerce agency provides you with its expertise:

  • Conducting an audit of the business's current e-commerce platform and identifying pain points and areas for improvement.
  • Recommending a platform based on the business's specific needs and budget and guiding how to customize and optimize it.
  • Providing insight into the latest e-commerce trends and best practices.
  • Designing a user-friendly and attractive interface: An e-commerce agency can easily create a custom design that reflects the business's branding and meets the needs of its target audience.
  • Integrating custom functionality: It develops custom functionality, such as product configurators, advanced search capabilities, and customized checkout workflows.
  • Optimizing the platform for search engines: It can also create personalized content and product recommendations based on user behavior.
  • Integrating the e-commerce platform with the business's inventory management system to automate inventory tracking and fulfillment.
  • Integrating with third-party shipping providers to provide accurate shipping rates and tracking information.
  • Integrating with payment gateways to securely process transactions and reduce cart abandonment.
  • Providing ongoing maintenance and support ensures the platform is up-to-date, secure, and running smoothly.
  • Monitoring site performance and adjusting as needed ensures optimal load times and user experience.
  • Providing technical support to address any issues or concerns that arise.

Everything works well, but is that all for an e-commerce platform? Of course not! Ongoing optimization always stays there! An e-commerce agency can optimize the platform for performance and UX. These actions include optimizing page load times, ensuring mobile responsiveness, and improving search engine rankings, which can improve customer satisfaction, increase conversions, and ultimately drive revenue growth. Agencies can provide the following implementations to get these results:

  • Conducting A/B testing to identify opportunities to improve site performance and user experience.
  • Optimizing product pages and category pages to improve search engine rankings and drive traffic.
  • Implementing strategies to reduce cart abandonment, such as exit-intent popups or abandoned cart email campaigns.

Final Say

In conclusion, choosing the best e-commerce platform is essential for the growth and success of your online business as much as managing that platform. The considerations for selecting the e-commerce platform, including your business needs, technical expertise, budget, third-party integrations, and responsive and quick support that you can get, will play the most critical role.

The complexity of all these factors can make choosing the right e-commerce platform a challenging task. However, evaluating the factors rightfully and seeking help from an agency can help you choose the best e-commerce platform that meets your requirements and supports your business's growth and success.