So you've decided to take the plunge.
You're trying your hand at the exciting world of ecommerce, and you're ready to start creating a beautiful, secure website that serves as your online store.
Selling products online is a perennial staple of internet entrepreneurship, and many people have had a tremendous amount of success with it. There's a lot of money in it, and a vast wealth of niches and subniches out there that no one else is focusing on yet.
Ecommerce starts with one obvious but very important thing: your website.
You need a website that serves as your online store, where people can browse your wares and make a purchase. Sure, you can sell on Amazon, Ebay, and even Etsy, but your own online store with your own unique branding is a major asset.
One of the first steps in creating your ecommerce website is choosing the right platform. There are quite a few of them out there: Shopify, Magento, BigCommerce, WooCommerce, Lemonade Stand, Wix, Weebly — the list goes on, and that's only a small sample of the options that are out there.
If you're not technical, this can get confusing pretty quickly. Even if you're comfortable working with a WordPress site you created, ecommerce platforms bring their own distinctive set of features, concerns, and potential problems.
So which platform is the best? Overall, it's one of those things where there's no single one-size-fits-all answer. It can depend on what you're selling, the size of your inventory, your level of tech proficiency, and the degree of customization that you're going to need.
In a recent article from Entrepreneur, the CEO of a digital marketing agency called The Media Captain explains how to choose between the best ecommerce platform options.
Choose wisely.
If you’re looking to get an e-commerce site off the ground yourself with minimal technical capabilities, I recommend Shopify for the theme store, plugins and built-in tutorials. Shopify is all-inclusive when it comes to an ecommerce platform, meaning you can get all you want in a “one-stop shop.”
If you have some technical capabilities and want to expand on the out-of-the-box offerings that Shopify offers, then I recommend going with WooCommerce. As an ecommerce platform, WooCommerce is more robust and has many more plugins at your disposal. Keep in mind that WooCommerce can be more challenging when it comes to customizing and coding requirements.
If you need to build an ecommerce site that is completely customized, I recommend a platform like nopCommerce, which is trusted by more than 27,000 store owners. If your business needs something extremely customized, a platform like Shopify or BigCommerce makes it difficult to complete these customizations. NopCommerce is a great option for those .NET developers.
You can learn more about these eCommerce platforms at Entrepreneur.
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