Companies, for a very long time, preferred having a team of talented marketers who could fetch potential customers. More attention was given on product marketing, analyzing customer preferences, and preparing online advertisements. But with the ZMOT marketing model coming into the picture, things aren’t the same and the situation is rather messy.

Bigger companies now try to focus on making outstanding customer shopping experience while keeping the marketing tab open on the side. They try to maintain a healthy balance and implement both strategies appropriately. As a result, some companies manage to join the Age of Unicorns club eventually, but many fail to achieve such numbers and seek help.

What is an eCommerce platform?

An eCommerce platform is a type of software that works online, allowing business owners to manage their websites, products, sales, and other necessary operations with little or no knowledge of programming.

Recall your last purchase on Amazon.com. How was it? Was it easy to find the product you were looking for? Did you pay using your preferred payment method?

If you’re most people, your online shopping experience must have been seamless. And rightfully so, eCommerce marketplaces like Amazon offer the best-in-class online shopping experience to their customer.

How does it benefit you?

In the year 2018 alone, approximately 1.79 billion people purchased something online. And it is predicted that approximately 1.92 billion will make an online purchase by the end of 2019. So it should be apparent you’ll find most of your customers online, no matter what you’re selling.

It’s a lot cheaper. Believe it or not, launching and maintaining an eCommerce website will roughly cost you 10% percent of your total budget. You’ll be shocked to see the price difference when comparing it to the cost of building a brick and mortar store down the corner.

Having an eCommerce platform will have a huge impact on the overall profitability and stability of your business.

Types of eCommerce platforms available

Newer technologies are being used to build and deliver edgy eCommerce platforms in the market. There are essentially two categories of them available to consumers worldwide:

Open Source — Like WooCommerce, Magento, and OpenCart. SaaS-based — Like Shopify, BigCommerce, and Volusion.

For your eCommerce platform to work, you would need a web hosting environment. Here are two of the most common hosting platforms available for the users:

Cloud Hosting — widely used along with Open source platforms. Eg, CloudWays.

— widely used along with Open source platforms. Eg, CloudWays. On-Premise or Self-Hosted — usually come along with SaaS-based eCommerce platforms

Let’s begin with the Open Source eCommerce platforms first.

Open Source eCommerce platforms

Open source eCommerce frameworks are generally free of cost. You can download their software, set it up on your website, and get it running instantly. You just have to take care of web hosting. There are many affordable plans available in the market for you to choose from.

With Open Source platforms you can have more control over how your store looks and operates in general. You can select the design or theme for your store and customize as you please. Most open source platforms allow users to install specific add-ons/extensions/plugins in order to extend features present on their website. There are dedicated stores for these plugins and themes, as most of them being free to download.

Since these platforms are being constantly controlled by developers, users can expect a bunch of new features every now and then. And since it’s very nature is open, the developments are generally community driven. Meaning, based on the new requirements and necessities observed in the community, developers introduce new features or a new plugin altogether.

WooCommerce is a great example of a community-driven open source eCommerce platform. It comes with thousands of themes and plugins developed by hundreds of developers and theme authors.

PluginHive, for example, is one of the best plugins authors out there for online shipping and delivery management. We’ll talk about it later in this post.

The best Open Source eCommerce platforms in the market are,

WooCommerce Magento OpenCart Zen Cart PrestaShop

WooCommerce

It’s a WordPress eCommerce plugin, that converts your WordPress website into a functional eCommerce website. It comes with necessary eCommerce pages like Shop, Cart, Checkout, My Account, and offers a secure payment gateway, dedicated order management page, and much more. You’ll have to install WordPress (open source) on your web hosting, then install the WooCommerce plugin onto your site.