Best E-commerce Platform 2022: It’s Not as Difficult as You Think

Online Business Goals

Before taking the big decision, you might want to ensure you're headed in the right direction. Firstly, ask yourself what your primary goal is. Yes, you want to create an online store for selling your products, and the website design should be beautiful to attract and retain customers. But these are just components of the core idea — to run a good business. And the tool for reaching this goal is your ecommerce store. So, it's about time to find out what characteristics the ideal store should have.

1. It opens fast. Store development is pretty expensive, and a quick launch enables you to reimburse these costs shortly since you start earning money as soon as the store is live. 

2. It is stable and reliable. Remember, you lose your funds whenever your website is offline or stops working well.

3. It is secure. The issue is critical because of the financial transactions involved. Once customers give you their credit card information, you must ensure that the data is protected. Otherwise, it would help if you got a great lawyer.

4. Its functionality doesn't hinder your sales. In other words, store maintenance cost is relatively low. You want to be able to upgrade it with minimum development work.

WooCommerce and Magento

WooCommerce is a plugin for WordPress. Therefore, it is open-source software and Magento, which means you should install them on your servers. When it comes to open-source, you have complete control over the servers and the code. On the other hand, responsibility for their stability and security also falls to you. 

It wouldn't be a problem if the websites based on WordPress were safe. But unfortunately, they aren't. You can check it by searching, "remove malware from WordPress." Google returns around 5 million matching results. That is quite a compelling number!

By the way, providing security is expensive and takes a lot of time. 

Moreover, you must monitor website load and upgrade your servers to prevent crashes. But, of course, it is not free either.

So, if you know precisely why you want to have complete control over your store, you may choose an open-source software platform. If not, we recommend that you opt for a hosted solution.

Shopify and BigCommerce

Shopify and BigCommerce are pretty similar. You get high uptime and security out of the box without handling servers and transactions. These platforms enable you to create a store fast using free or premium themes. No additional development work is required.

All themes are fully customizable, and it's easy to tune up the front end.

Both platforms have app stores. You can extend the functionality and integrate the store with third-party services.

Monthly pricing plans are comparable, too.

How to make a decision, after all? The key is reputation. According to Google trends, Shopify is much more popular. It means you'll have more apps on the app store and a broader community, with more guides and helpful materials. Also, popularity guarantees that the platform will evolve and remain significant in the future.

Sell your products anywhere with Shopify. Shopify has everything you need to start selling, all in one place. Try Shopify free for 14 days. No credit card is required. Click the link and start a free trial of Shopify!

Conclusion

You may find this article biased since VT Labs offers Shopify development exclusively. And maybe you're right to some extent. Nevertheless, we only meant to share the reasons why we chose this platform. Besides, if our client's business goes well, then so does ours. We think there are no better options than Shopify for starting an online store. Looking to move your store to Shopify? Check out our page about migration services for more information!