Definitive Guide to Pick the Ideal Platform for Your eCommerce

by JONATHAN PAUL Jonathan Paul working at PHPProgrammers, a leading

While the world has been seeing unprecedented growth of eCommerce businesses, this article will provide you with a definitive guide on how to select the most befitting platform to build your own unique website and reap fruits from the thriving sector.

eCommerce industry has been experiencing an ever-rising growth touching some 2.3 trillion of sales worth in 2018 as per Statista reports. While the figure is expected to further grow (or perhaps get doubled) by the next 3 years, it’s time for merchandise businesses to make the most of this thriving sector if they still haven’t. However, building an eCommerce website solution is more than just listing all your products on a website. You need to choose the platform that matters for your business and can best cater to your website requirements. Making the right choice of platform is, in fact, the foremost important decision to take before you start your eCommerce venture.

To make the decision easy for you, we’ve put here a definite guide to find out the ideal platform amongst the lot. The following section mentions the factors and key considerations that can help you go in the right direction to pick one platform.

Pricing model

Though this is the first consideration, it is never the most important one. Find out the pricing terms for a host of popular platforms like Magento, Shopify to pick one that fits into your budget. Some have a base rate, while some require timely subscriptions. Remember, there’s also a great associated cost in entrusting the task of the website development to an expert web development company. So, make your choice wisely by considering the features provided and then going for the one that offers all at the lowest price.

Security

When it’s about crafting an eCommerce, make no compromise with the security. Customers place a huge trust on the website’s payment gateway when they choose online payment options like credit/debit cards or net banking and put in all credentials. Thus, make sure your chosen platform is in line with security standards set by the PCI (Payment Card Industry) and keeps the belief of the customers that their financial information will never go in the wrong hands.

Mobile friendliness

While more than half of online purchases take place through mobile devices, it has become supremely important for every eCommerce business to build a website that performs uniformly in all mobile devices, including tablets and iPads. Thus, you should associate with the platform that will allow the buyers to access, scroll and purchase anything from your site using their own mobile devices.

Collections of themes and integrations

Besides considering the key set of features offered by the platforms, find out the extensions and shop themes they have in store. A limited number of such facilities can make your store’s cost of maintenance and up-gradation much higher when you need to get your website remodelled in future with a new look and new functionalities for growth. Thus, make sure to choose one that has a big collection of extensions and themes to help in upgrading a site any time with minimal help from a development company.

SEO-friendliness

No matter how useful or beautiful an eCommerce site is, buyers are not going to know about it and visit until its homepage and product pages come up in the top results of the search engines. So, pick a platform that can best optimise the pages of your website and give them profuse visibility in search engine results when the relevant keywords or products are typed.

While these are the most valuable considerations, there are few more which you need to have in your platform to get a near-perfect eCommerce store like customer support integrations (live chat, customer reviews), multiple payment options, and easy-to-use admin functionality. However, above all, knowing well hat are the goals your store needs to accomplish over time can make the process of choosing a platform much easier.

Jonathan Paul is an eCommerce expert with hands-on experience in Magento eCommerce solutions and works as a team lead at PHPProgrammers. It is a top-ranked web development company providing services of Magento development in Sydney to help retailers merchants originate their online presence.