How do you choose an e-commerce platform that perfectly suits your business goals (and promotes your success)? To find the best platform for your e-commerce website, you need to consider several things, including:
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The size of your company
Some e-commerce platforms can only process a certain number of products, a certain transaction volume or a certain number of visitors to your website. Also remember how your company will develop: If you plan to grow fast, you must be sure that the platform can grow with your company.
Budget
Costs are one of the most important factors when setting up and operating an online shop. Consider what resources you have and how much capital you can invest in setup and maintenance. If you have a team of developers, an open source or headless platform may be the best solution. Alternatively, a SaaS platform can help you create a website quickly and easily, but the cost can increase as you grow your business.
Plan which functions you need and inquire about the costs of setting up and maintaining your website at the beginning and in the future.
Ease of use
Similar to budget planning, you must also know your options when creating and maintaining your online shop. If you are just getting started and don’t have a team to help you, you may need an e-commerce platform that makes the process as easy as possible for you – with a simple website builder, basic e-commerce features and free themes.
To develop an advanced online shop, you probably need technical expertise, be it an internal team or a developer or an Ecommerce software development agency that can help you create your shop.
Options for individual design
Do you have any ideas about the design and functionality of your online shop? Then some e-commerce platforms – especially SaaS systems – could be too limited. Open source and headless solutions where you can customize the code give you more freedom, but usually require some programming skills.
Functions
It is important to think about what you need to offer your customers in order to satisfy them, how you can attract visitors to and inspire them to your company, and what technology you use behind the scenes to make business operations effortless. Whether you want to use email marketing, social media tools or real-time analytics to improve your work, it’s good to know what features a platform can offer before you decide on one.
Also remember how easy it will be to add new features and features to your e-commerce website as it grows. SaaS platforms usually offer a number of standard functions, but are often not very flexible in terms of what you can add. Open source platforms and headless platforms offer more flexibility, but require the know-how of developers to implement new features.
Location
When choosing an e-commerce platform, you should think about the markets in which you want to sell. You may need a platform that can offer the languages and currencies preferred by your customers. It is also important that your provider helps you to meet all the legal requirements of the countries in which you operate. Research has shown that 40% of consumers do not shop on websites where their language is not displayed.
Payments
One of the most important aspects of operating an e-commerce company is to ensure that your website visitors are satisfied and give them the confidence to buy something. This means that you have to make sure that you offer your customers the preferred payment methods and a checkout that is optimized for your conversion. Finally, data shows that an optimized checkout can increase the conversion rate by 35%. To achieve this, you will probably want to work with a payment service provider.
Security
It is important to provide the necessary level of security to gain the trust of your website visitors and to avoid fines for non-compliance with the required regulations. Therefore, the best ecommerce platform should help you comply with the latest security standards and offer measures such as SSL certificates and two-factor authentication (or make it transparent when you need to organize this yourself).
