They say if you are not online, you don't exist. Retailers should interpret this as: if you don’t have an ecommerce website, your business is off the radar for a helluva lot of customers. Last quarter, Walmart's online sales increased by 97%. Amazon’s Q2 sales & profit growth was 40%. But it’s not just the big guys, benefiting from consumers’ spiked appetite for online shopping. Smaller retailers such as Howards Storage World, B-Wear Sportswear, and Plain Jane among others are seeing double and (even triple!) digit growth in ecommerce revenues, compared to the year before. What else do these three companies have in common? Their fresh ecommerce website designs are spot on and optimized for customer conversion. And here’s how you too, can join the growing array of retailers that consistently beat their yearly ecommerce targets. Price: $70 equivalent to Russian Ruble
ation retail operations or hobby side-project, no matter which type of ecommerce site you plan to build the first thing you need is an ecommerce platform to help you build the best ecommerce store.
An ecommerce platform is a software application that lets you set up an online store and manage its marketing, sales, and operations.
There are 3 main types of ecommerce platforms on the market:
Each of them provides you with a toolkit for creating an online store: page builder, checkout page, payment gateway integrations, and more. The difference between those ecommerce platforms lies in the levels of:
SaaS platforms offer out-of-the-box ecommerce store design experience. You can design a store using a drag-and-drop visual editor in several hours. But the tradeoff is limited customization and incapacity to add custom features.
Open source platforms are like a blank canvas that with enough time and effort can be turned into any sort of ecommerce website. But you are creating everything from scratch. That means heaving a coder and a designer on call.
You can choose between headless commerce and Open SaaS platforms such as BigCommerce, SaaS platforms like Shopify (does have a headless commerce offering, but has rigid API call per second limits), SaaS website builders like Squarespace and Wix, and open source platforms like Magento (doesn't have a native theme editor) and WooCommerce (technically an ecommerce plugin). Such ecommerce solutions don't limit your design capabilities so that you can create beautiful and unique websites. And you don't need to build core commerce functionality from the ground up.
At any rate, no matter which store builder you choose to start up with, make sure that your top pick has the following features:
