E-COMMERCE

Do you have products that you want to sell online? If so, then you absolutely need your very own e-commerce store. Having your own e-commerce store not only allows you to sell your products online, but it also gives you complete control over the entire online sales process which is an absolute necessity if you want to run a successful e-commerce store.

What makes an e-commerce store successful? There are a lot of strategies that you will need to implement in order to make your e-commerce store successful and we will cover a lot of these strategies for you later on in this article. However, the first thing that you need to decide is which e-commerce platform fits your business the best.

There are dozens of e-commerce platforms to choose from but there are only 3 e-commerce platforms that we recommend. Why? To put it simply, these 3 e-commerce platforms integrate the best with the 3rd party tools that you will need in order to run a successful e-commerce store. We will talk about these tools later on in this article as well, but first, let’s dive right into these 3 e-commerce platforms so that you can make an educated decision on which e-commerce platform will work best for you.

Here Are Our Top 3 Recommended E-Commerce Platforms:

WooCommerce is an add-on to the highly popular content management system, WordPress. It’s the go-to e-commerce platform for businesses that want to customize their design and their user’s entire e-commerce experience. It’s also the e-commerce platform of choice for businesses who want their website and their e-commerce store to be integrated on the same site. With WooCommerce, all of your website revisions and e-commerce orders are done from the same website and they both can be customized as much or as little as you want to. There are thousands of plugins and integrations as well which makes the e-commerce possibilities almost endless.

PROS:

The biggest pro of WooCommerce is its customizability. Since WooCommerce is integrated within WordPress, you can customize your customer’s entire e-commerce experience from start to finish which will help increase the overall traffic to your store while increasing your overall sales when done correctly. This is definitely the biggest advantage that WooCommerce offers to the other e-commerce platforms out there.
Since WooCommerce is built on WordPress, you will have access to the most amount of plugins and integrations than any other e-commerce platform. This will save you money on development costs because you would normally have to pay a developer to customize features you want on your e-commerce store. However, with access to literally thousands of plugins, you can mostly likely just find and install a plugin to accomplish your customizations instead of paying a developer for each one. These plugins could be free or paid, but either way, plugins are going to be significantly cheaper than paying developers.
WooCommerce / WordPress developers are cheaper to hire than any other type of e-commerce developer. Why? Because 1/3 of all websites on the internet are WordPress sites. This means that they are more developers to choose from and they compete on price for your business.

CONS:

WooCommerce is self-hosted which means that you will need to set up and pay for separate hosting. You will also be responsible for all of the WordPress and WooCommerce updates and maintenance. Yes…we listed this as a con but this could actually be a pro as well because when you host your website/e-commerce store yourself, you control it 100%. That means that you control the updates, the maintenance, the design, the process, the code, the speed, your customers, and everything in between.
Bugs. Anytime you deal with multiple integrations within WordPress, WooCommerce, plugins, servers, APIs, etc, you will run into bugs. There are a lot of moving parts with WooCommerce and you will eventually run into some bugs. Luckily there is a huge community of WordPress and WooCommerce users out there willing to help you with these. You just need to make sure that you stay on top of your updates, maintenance, and backups so that your risk of running into bugs is significantly less.
WooCommerce usually requires the assistance of WordPress and WooCommerce developers to set up and maintain your e-commerce store. These are added short-term costs, but they will save you money in the long-term by insuring that your store continues to market and sell your products as it was designed to do.

WooCommerce should be the e-commerce platform of choice for businesses who want to do more than just have an online e-commerce store. The best part of WooCommerce is that it’s installed onto WordPress which is the world’s most popular CMS. Having your e-commerce store built onto WordPress basically gives your e-commerce store hundreds of new marketing tools that will allow you to supercharge your marketing efforts and get significantly more traffic to your e-commerce store than any other platform if utilized correctly.

Shopify is the most popular hosted out-of-the-box e-commerce platform in the world and for good reason. It’s the go-to e-commerce platform for small businesses who want to get their store up quickly and for those that prefer simplicity over customizability. With Shopify, you only need to sign up, pick a theme, upload your products, fill out the details, and your store can go live. Sure, you will still need to customize a lot of your settings to your liking and most likely will need to hire a developer to make it look professional, but as far as simplicity goes, Shopify is the easiest and quickest e-commerce platform to get up and running.

PROS:

Shopify is hosted on their servers, so no need to set up and configure hosting with a 3rd party hosting provider. Hosting is included and it’s secure!
Shopify gives you all of the e-commerce basics out of the box which means that if you are comfortable with computers, you can probably build and manage your own e-commerce store all by yourself using Shopify.
Shopify integrates with hundreds of 3rd party apps that make things like shipping, bookkeeping, sales tax, payment processing, SEO, marketing, automation, and much more a breeze.

CONS:

Our biggest con to Shopify is that it lacks customizability. For example, you can’t customize the checkout process (unless you upgrade to their higher plans). Also, if you want custom features on your site, you will most likely have to look to a developer and/or 3rd party apps.
Shopify’s 3rd party app integrations are expensive and they are usually charged monthly instead of one-time fees like most of the other e-commerce platforms. For example, if you want a photo gallery on your Shopify store, you might have to spend anywhere from $5 to $20 per month for a 3rd party app to do this. There are free apps as well so keep this in mind.
Shopify’s simplicities and limitations are frustrating. For example, do you want to offer free shipping for a specific SKU? You can’t unless you find a 3rd party app that does this. Another limitation is that you can’t ship via FedEx unless you upgrade or deploy another app. Do you want to run a single report that can be synced to your bookkeeping software? Good luck doing that without 3rd party apps.

Magento is the e-commerce platform of choice for small-to-medium-to-large businesses that want a professional e-commerce solution for their brand and their products. When we refer to Magento, we are referring to the open-source (free) version of Magento, not the enterprise version Magento which is expensive, just FYI. Magento is the most powerful e-commerce platform on our list, but it’s also the most expensive to develop and host. However, if you’re a medium-to-large business that needs a professional e-commerce solution with over 500 SKUs, take a look at Magento.

PROS:

Magento offers several unique features that the other e-commerce platforms just can’t offer. For example, if you sell business-to-business (B2B) and you sell business-to-consumer (B2C), then you can setup your Magento e-commerce store to allow your business customers to log in and see business pricing and/or business only products. This is just one of many other unique features that Magento offers. It also has a bunch of extensions and integrations and can handle just about anything you throw at it.
Magento is highly scalable so if your business only sells 250 SKUs but you plan on having 250,000+ SKUs soon, Magento can handle it relatively easily. Magento is not only scalable via it’s SKUs but also scalable in many other forms as well. For example, if you needed custom API integrations with 3rd party programs, Magento has the framework in place for this as well.
Magento is surprisingly very good with SEO (search engine optimization). If high search engine rankings for your e-commerce store are important to you (we sure hope they would) then you can rest assured that search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo will pick up your store and rank it accordingly when you use Magento’s SEO capabilities wisely.

CONS:

It’s the most expensive e-commerce platform to develop and maintain out of the 3 e-commerce platforms that we work with and recommend. There are several reasons for this but the biggest one is the fact that Magento is huge and requires both backend and frontend development skills in order get it up and keep it running which increase it's development costs.
It’s harder to find good Magento developers than it is to find good Shopify and WooCommerce developers because of the technical requirements that are needed develop on Magento. Magento developers are usually full-stack developers who do front-end and back-end development while WooCommerce and Shopify Developers can mostly get away with only having to be front-end developers.
Magento is more demanding when it comes to hosting and it will require either a VPS, Dedicated, or Cloud Server to run properly. This increases the monthly hosting costs to anywhere from $100 to $500+ per month for just the hosting.

If you want a professional e-commerce solution that will allow you to scale as well as give you the power of unlimited customizations, then you need to look at Magento. It does just about everything.

As you can see, no matter what type business that you are in, there is an e-commerce platform that will work for you.

Drew Restivo
Founder at HiredMarketing.com

We would LOVE the opportunity help you build, maintain, or update your e-commerce store. This is one of the many reasons why we created HiredMarketing.com because we want to be your product marketing hired hand when you need help. We work on demand, so we can do as little or as much as you need us to. We work on a monthly retainer model so you get to determine how many hours we work on your product marketing projects each month, so you never have to worry about going over your marketing budget. The days of having to hire and train in-house employees for individual marketing tasks are gone. You hire us and we will use our own proven product marketing specialists to carry out your product marketing tasks efficiently, effectively, and within budget.

If you have questions or if you’re interested in learning more, let’s talk.

If you’re the type of person that needs more data before you want to talk to us, then let us conduct a FREE (for those that qualify) Product Marketing Game Plan (PMGP) on your business and products to show you which product marketing strategies you should be implementing to increase your product sales. For your free Product Market Game Plan (PMGP), click here.

If you want to know our transparent pricing options or if you are ready to hire a hand to help you market your products and increase your product sales, then go ahead and click here.