eCommerce is a hugely growing industry, and as such, there are a vast number of opportunities. Building your shop on a platform which will help you get visitors to your site is important.
The team at Evolve SEO Agency conducted a study to find out which ecommerce platform is the best for SEO. We have summarised some of their findings below:
WordPress
Unlike other CMS platforms on this list, WordPress does more than just helping you build online stores. This open-source platform covers pretty much everything from media galleries and simple blogs to full-featured, top quality web stores. Since it’s open-source, getting a copy is easy and free. The platform is significantly powerful and configurable, ably supported by a massive ecosystem of extensions and add-ons. Most importantly, there is zero hosting service to purchase, no security issues, no updates to take care of, and zero installation worries.
Pros
• Basic site is forever free
• Comes with hosting service
• Supports multiple sites
Cons
• Customising pages could be difficult
Shopify
Shopify is your ecommerce platform that offers pretty much all things you require to create and develop a web store: a comprehensive product catalog, template-based website builder, automated fulfillment through different integrations, easy payment processing, inventory management, robust analytics, etc. The platform offers 72 high-quality templates – of which eight are free. There are different themes in various styles. Professional store features comprise product reviews, abandoned checkout recovery, automatic shipping and tax rates, multiple payment gateways, and lots more.
Pros
• Zero bandwidth, disk space, or product limits
• No limits on annual revenue
• Extremely functional and intuitive mobile app
Cons
• Not as feature-packed as BigCommerce
Magento
Magento is an e-commerce platform used by countless small and multinational businesses. The basic level software is free – enterprise users can upgrade to the paid tier for greater and stronger features and functionalities. Compared to other platforms on this list, Magento is a bit more advanced. This could be both a great thing and a minor drawback. It’s great because it helps you build a truly robust online store. The same attribute might work against you if you have zero web development experience. In such a case, you may need to hire someone who knows a thing or two about website development.
Pros
• Extremely robust, yet flexible
• Open source
• Solid multistore and multilingual support
Cons
• May need some PHP code editing
BigCommerce
BigCommerce offers you pretty much everything you need for creating, managing, and growing your online store. The e-commerce platform provides a wide range of themes – both free and at affordable prices. The integrated CMS helps build, categorize, and manage even the most complicated product catalogs. BigCommerce’s broad sales channel support also helps you sell on other platforms such as Facebook, Amazon, eBay, Pinterest, and Square POS. Its various e-commerce plans support a range of unlimited items, bandwidth, file storage, and staff accounts. Also, there are zero transaction fees for the more than 40 payment gateways supported.
Pros
• Feature-loaded
• Zero additional transaction fees
• Hundreds of extensions and apps
Cons
• Could seem complicated