Location, location, location was, and still is, the golden rule when choosing where to place your brick and mortar shop. Is there a golden rule to guide the choice of your eCommerce solution too? Nowadays most businesses, and even more so small businesses, are looking to build their digital storefront and capabilities. Surely the commercial potential of an actual area on the map or the average footfall around there, will not be of any help when choosing the eCommerce platform for their business.

There are a plethora of e-commerce solutions and selecting one platform or another, especially for strategic small business owners, is not an inconsequential decision. It is also not an easy one to make, even less so if selling online is a new thing to begin with. Additionally, choosing and committing to one provider or another feels anything but comfortable if you are what many of our clients call themselves: a “non technical person”.

The objective of this article is to provide basic information, and a set of criteria to have in mind when selecting an eCommerce provider, so as to create some ease around making this decision - alone or together with a digital partner.

We will look at the typical criteria to keep in mind when selecting an ecommerce solution, as well as additional elements to consider (not included in the comparison table here below). No solution will rank as best at all criteria - this is not the point, but rather to guide your choice based on which aspect ranks as the most important one for you, the website owner.

Before we go into details, two notes on the eCommerce platforms classification:

Some are eCommerce platforms at the core, hence they bring a full regalia of options and capabilities to enable and empower online sales - for example Shopify, BigCommerce, Magento. Others are CMS tools at the core (solutions to build a website - Wix, Squarespace, WordPress, Weebly) but offer simple or more advanced eCommerce add-ons or eCommerce functionalities.
Some are open source and free of charge allowing for your creativity to go wild in terms of the design, the functionalities or the hosting options, but these require more time to be built and demand for at least some tech talent (Magento, WooCommerce for WordPress, BigCommerce). Hosted solutions usually offer ready-made design templates, hence virtually anyone can build an online shop easily. Customization options are at times limited though.

Criteria to keep in mind when choosing an eCommerce solution

User friendliness is generally important for any digital tool out there but especially important when you are not into HTML or coding. Are you imagining drag and drop process, some bulk uploads, save and publish? Then, ranking high at user friendliness we have Shopify, Wix and Squarespace. At the other extreme are Magento, BigCommerce, WooCommerce. All of the latter would require expert knowledge and ongoing technical support as well.

Ready-made design templates make it easier to build and launch and eCommerce website. When you do not have very specific demands and expectations from the “looks”, these come in handy, right?. Built-in themes and design layout are not normally highly customizable but they tend to be optimized for all devices and that is a critical aspect.

SEO capabilities, the ones built-in in the platform can be strong or less powerful, depending on each provider. Of course, the SEO content optimization work is itself is equally important as no tool will just magically and automatically do the SEO job for you. Some platforms, like WooCommerce, will allow you to add an SEO plugin while others, like Squarespace, won't.

Let’s consider also the online payment options that you intend to enable on your eShop. Shopify, BigCommerce and Wix come by default with a selection of built-in payment options. Squarespace has limited options by default and WooCommerce has none at all hence, it needs a third-party payment gateway that requires additional work.

Whether you are a techy person or not, having support available for any issues with your store is highly important. In some scenarios you would have to rely fully on the person who has built the eShop (the case for WordPress with WooCommerce or BigCommerce and Magento). This generally applies to open source solutions and, of course, it brings building and maintenance costs. At the other end, you have the “user friendly & hosted” solutions that come with multiple online or even phone support options, as part of the monthly/yearly fee you would pay to use the platform for your eShop.

Free trials will allow you to test most platforms before committing and from the presumed free options all the way to thousands of dollars, the cost range is wide. The most important aspect here is to make at least a quick calculation on your own adding up all fees, not just the monthly/yearly one pays at the beginning. So, don’t forget hosting fees, transaction fees, fees for add-ons, plugins and extensions that you might need on top of the base solution, integration fees, support and maintenance fees.

If you are looking to start small but grow fast, scalability is something to keep in mind. Some solutions like Wix do not allow you to export your data so migrating your eShop later on to another eCommerce platform is not possible. You would have to start from scratch and this is not a task to be underestimated.

Do not forget mobile friendliness (always prefer mobile first platforms) and speed - quite crucial both. Squarespace has a fame for advanced mobile optimization, but of course also native eCommerce solutions can do well from this point of view. Regardless, it is important to monitor your site speed and make sure that too big images and too many plugins added to the website, do not affect the website loading time.

Let’s take some concrete scenarios now

Are you looking to make pricing available in many currencies, calculate prices and taxes on the fly, deliver your products to many destinations and operate many transactions per day? In this case a native eCommerce solution like Shopify will tend to serve you better and offer more scalability and flexibility.
Are you selling a limited range of products, operating mostly in one currency and/or in one market? Or do you sell services, and maybe also already have had a website for a while that you are happy with? Enabling eCommerce functionalities from your core CMS platform (Wix, Squarespace) or adding a plugin (WooCommerce for WordPress) will also “do the job” just fine.

We strongly believe in the importance of understanding what you buy, why you buy it and what you expect “it” to do for you. This doesn't mean that as a business owner, you must spend days investigating all the eCommerce options, or get training to understand everything about them before making a decision. Instead, we encourage you to:

Start by evaluating the capabilities you have in-house (time, skills, resources - money and people).
List the areas that are the most important to you (user friendliness, rich payment options, design, tech support).
Make a quick calculation of how much revenue you expect to make from selling products and what are the costs associated with the eCommerce solutions you are considering. Add up all the costs and do not forget to consider the transaction fees that each platforms practices (look this up in the small text!)

From here onwards the choice will be easier, as you have already narrowed down your options. If you rely on someone else for advice, make sure you ask all the questions that are important to you, so as to validate further the choice made for your small business.

Are you feeling a bit more confident about making a choice for your eCommerce website? Still having doubts? We would be happy to have a conversation about your own business case. Let’s talk!

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