Online trends and technological advancements have allowed many businesses to reach to a broader spectrum of the client as well as the market. Besides, it has also fueled many new online ventures and businesses. While there’s no denying that the web provides many new opportunities for the companies, it is important for the organizers to utilize that opportunity. But, how?
To market your business on the web, you would need a properly equipped website. But, building an eCommerce website is a mammoth thing, and fortunately not required. Today, there are various pre-built platforms and packages to look for. while some eCommerce platforms offer standard functionality like to showcase the products in an online catalog, managing customers, taking payments and more, others offer more than that.
And, which commerce software is for your business depend completely on your needs and specific requirements.
Shopify:
Shopify is one of the most popular eCommerce platforms that can easily manage a large number of shopify stores products, payments, shipping that too with all major chores.
Moreover, you can call it a comprehensive cloud-based platform, which does not require any maintenance and upgrades on the web server.
Advantages Of Shopify:
- Easy To Use: Although it features various different elements, it is one of the most popular and easiest too that let you create eCommerce sites with ease.
- Extensions And Third-Party Apps: Another important reason to incorporate Shopify is that you don’t need any pre-built apps and codes to get the work done.
- Impressive Themes: Shopify is filled with more than 180 professionally built themes to give your business a personal touch without even hiring a dedicated professional.
Disadvantages Of Using Shopify:
- Few Free Themes: The total number of free themes in the Shopify are limited, which give rise to additional cost.
- High Costs: some of the advanced features like reports, real-time shipping, gift cards, and other advanced features don’t come under the Shopify basic plan. In fact, for that, you have to pay extra money.
- It Has Its Own Unique Language: Shopify uses a template language, liquid, which is independently created by their team. This means, if you want to go to backend, you will witness the proprietary coding, that is quite complex.
- Apps Are Costly: Shopify features more than 500+ apps with most of them come with a premium plan.
What Are The Best Shopify Alternatives:
Since most platforms, look identical and have only a few exceptions, picking one best eCommerce software would be the most daunting thing. So, here are the top Shopify alternatives you can look:
Bigcommerce:
With so many customized options and other built-in features, BigCommerce is for small businesses, B2B businesses as well as other big enterprises. It helps businesses to create an online shop with conversion tools inbuilt marketing.
Moreover, it gives you the ability to integrate easily with Amazon, Facebook, Google shopping, and other platforms. Also, you can convert it easily from the desktop app to the mobile version. BigCommerce also offers 7 free and more than 100 paid and responsive themes that let you customize with just a drag-n-drop.
Magento:
Magento is an open source website platform that comes with unlimited customization options and up to 300 different extensions and plugins. On the platform, you will see some pre-installed widgets, themes, and more.
Moreover, the Magento opens all avenues when it comes to marketing to the customers and creating things like discounts, membership plans, recurring payments, and more. Magento is similar to WordPress; plus you can choose your theme from the hundreds of other available.
Opencart:
Unlike other open source platforms, OpenCart is lightweight and easy to use. It’s an open source e-commerce platform that is used to create a scalable, responsive, and professional online store. Its marketplace comes with over 13,000 different modules, themes, and extensions.
Moreover, there are over 30 payment and shipping gateways. The platform’s administrator dashboard contains all the required features that are needed to run the online business.
Woocommerce:
It’s a free WordPress plugin that let e-commerce merchants turn their WordPress sites into the business. wooCommerce has its own secure shopping cart (that you can integrate with advanced features) and payment platform.
It makes a great option for smaller brands, which have WordPress development resources handy. Moreover, it’s mobile-friendly, easy to scale, and comes with an active community forum to deal with problems and other issues.
Drupal Commerce:
Drupal Commerce is flexible, easy to use platforms that comes with a lot of flexibility for users. You will get a ‘commerce kick-start’ package that will give you the most popular add ons, which you can use in commerce.
It features complete product administration system, which includes shopping carts, multicurrency support, checkout forms, multilingual support, and more. In addition, there’s a huge list of third-party integrations for payment gateways, accounting applications, fulfillment services, social networks, and more.
Wix
Wix is another most popular, go-to e-commerce platform for the DIY website owners who are looking for a website for online stores and businesses. It comes with 72 free themes along with a simple setup.
It comes with various different design templates for blogs as well as for business sites. It’s easy to use, great-looking and is perfect for the businesses. So, if you are starting with e-commerce, you can use Wix’s online hosting.
Salesforce:
Formally popular as Demandware, Salesforce commerce is a cloud-based eCommerce platform that is designed to tailor the needs of B2B retailers. Being a part of the Salesforce product suit, it comes with a wide range of other marketing and CRM services. Moreover, this makes SalesForce a great option for the enterprise-companies who completely rely on Salesforce’s other services.
Some of its impressive features include AI and personalization, order management, globalization of international businesses. Furthermore, Commerce Cloud can easily take higher sales as well as traffic, but that too with complex technological requirements.
Zen Cart:
If you are looking for a system, which is perfect in handling product management, Zen Cart is for you. It’s a PHP-based, MySQL database system, which offers support for various languages and currencies. Zencart comes with a large support community and offers different add ons.
It let you easily navigate your clients through an online store with ease, helps you review different size images and more with ease. Some of its impressive features include multiple language support, easy to install, multiple currency support, comes with a wide range of product management tools.
Big Cartel:
It’s an eCommerce platform that is designed in a way to help artists who want to sell their work on the web. There are various free Impressive themes available in unique designs that merchants can easily customize according to their needs. Other impressive features that Big Cartel comes with is real-time stats checking, options to add promos, discounts, custom domain, and more.
Squarespace:
Bring your projects to center stage with Squarespace. Comes with the best design template so that you have a beautiful website that suits your needs. While it has no app store, it comes with the real depth and strength with its features.
Besides, Squarespace is popular with various artists and is created with the smaller product catalog; it offers unlimited product listings, including different SKU’s and multiple variants. Moreover, it also supports subscriptions, recurring payments, marketing tools, and more for abandoned cart recovery, and a variety of other advanced features.
This completes the list, if you are in quest of looking something better than Shopify, keep the above mentioned in consideration!
I am not aware of the other alternatives but Having knowledge regarding Salesforce, and I can say that the Salesforce alternative that you have mentioned is totally correct, you can manage the whole business process by using this Salesforce, all you need to do is to hire a good Salesforce company like 360 Degree Cloud – https://360degreecloud.com/salesforce-consulting/ , and tell them your requirements, they will help the businesses in terms of Salesforce in the best possible way.