Top Ecommerce Platforms for Small Business Owners In 2022

By praveen Raja | Posted on June 16, 2017

Let’s discuss the best eCommerce platforms for small business owners and startups in this blog.

Like many other small business owners, you’ve probably considered selling your products or services online. And why wouldn’t you? Deciding to start an eCommerce business is a great way to expand your customer reach and increase brand awareness.

Many surveys predict an increase in worldwide eCommerce sales from $3.2 trillion in 2020 to $8.5 trillion in 2025.

To start selling online, you’ll need an eCommerce platform for your small business. An eCommerce platform is a software application that allows an online business to manage its website, sales, and operations.

Table of Contents

Best Ecommerce Platforms For Small Businesses in 2022

To help you decide, we’ll compare the best eCommerce platform on the market that suits the small business. These platforms are the best eCommerce platforms according to many user opinions.

With more than 100 eCommerce platforms, it can take some time to find the right one for your small eCommerce business.

Magento – The best among ecommerce platforms

Magento is the popular eCommerce platform used by small to big business retailers. More than 250,000 merchants around the globe use Magento as their eCommerce platform.

Since it is an open-source model of development, you can develop it from scratch level. The platform has a high level of security, customizable, and scalable as well as. It offers huge features, which are critical to building a high-end eCommerce website.

Magento is moreover like WordPress but it for eCommerce. Since setting up a store and managing it with the Magento platform is a complex one. So this platform is not recommended for beginners.

Benefits of Magento

Good user experience which is easy to use as well as manage

Since it is an open-source platform is open to all sorts of customization

9000+ plug-in/extensions to scale your business

Free social eCommerce extensions help you to sell on social media platforms

Extensive resource library for store management and online community of store owners.

With almost one-fourth of the market share, Magento leads the market for more than years. For its scalability, many companies use Magento as the underlying eCommerce technology. Thus, the Magento platform is the best in building enterprise-level eCommerce online stores.

Shopify – An ideal eCommerce solution

Shopify remains the ideal eCommerce solution for beginners with conventional requirements. The platform offers you to choose different packages according to your budgets. But, if you have any unique design ideas for your online store, better find some other platforms.

With over 325,000 active users, Shopify tops the list in mobile shopping and social eCommerce. The platform continues to fulfill the necessary requirements of online stores.

Benefits of Shopify

It provides over 100 store templates and themes to choose from

1500+ apps, plug-ins/extensions to extend the store’s functionality

Option to connect your store with your Facebook page and sell on it

Built-in the friendly shopping cart and seller mobile apps are becoming the advantage. Also, the platform enables to connect store owners with developers for post-development support.

24/7 support via live chat, phone, and tutorials as well as the Shopify community forum

Besides, to that, most of the extensions for more functionalities are for free. So, running your store on the Shopify platform might be a little expensive than you expected.

Moreover, Shopify has its own coding language called ‘Liquid’. So any type of customization in the system will come with some more expense.

PrestaShop – New age online business platform

This is an open-source PHP-based eCommerce platform that comes with an Open License. PrestaShop is used by more than 250,000 shops universally. It utilizes a smarty template engine for PHP. Its easy customization and many payment gateways are the major benefits of Prestashop.

PrestaShop is more suitable for the small and medium scale. It has some convenient in-built attributes like statics, membership, and shipping tracking. Cloud technology and open-source integration create PrestaShop a robust eCommerce solution.

Benefits of Prestashop

Custom store design with Themes

Friendly’ URL structure

Integrates with any payment provider through modules

Automated follow-up emails

Unlimited carriers and destinations to fine-tune your shipping options

Secure admin

Prestashop is easy to customize and develop as you want. Even though it is customizable, it is good to customize some basic modifications. You need some deep knowledge to perform changes in the coding section.

Note:

If you are already having a website using Prestashop, and facing issues like:

front office translation, adding products to your store, creating customer groups

or any other issues related to Prestashop, you can refer it from here.

Bigcommerce – a leading ecommerce software

Launched in 2009, BigCommerce is currently hosting over 55,000+ online stores. It is one of the leading eCommerce software providers in the market. The platform creates a website for all types of stores.

While considering the detailed list of built-in features, it provides in the niche. BigCommerce is always best for the people who are not from a technical background.

If you are looking for a full-fledged online store to scale your business. But don’t want to struggle with editing CSS/HTML codes, then BigCommerce is the best platform for you.

If you are ready to compromise a bit on your themes. Then BigCommerce is perfect for your eCommerce business need than Shopify.

Benefits of Bigcommerce

Extensive built-in features including newsletters, coupons, shipping, tax, analytics, and more

Unlike Shopify, BigCommerce charges no transaction fee

All free and paid themes are responsive and offer a smooth mobile experience

Integrate your store with Facebook, eBay shopping and a range of comparison sites

Powerful support with the helpful setup wizard for extensive guides with visual representations

One little disappointment with BigCommerce is, it lacks free themes. At present, BigCommerce is currently offering 7 themes for stunning looks. While most of their market competitors are offering more than 20+ free themes.

Anyhow, the platform has a list of premium themes and also allows you to customize these themes. If you need to give your store a unique look and style.

Conclusion

Every eCommerce platforms are unique in their terms for small business owners. It depends upon your requirements and budget. If you are not concerned about the budget and have some coding skills, then you can go with Magento development.

Since you need to install some more plug-in for Magento. Or else, if you are not strong with technical skills in building a site. Want to design your eCommerce website with less budget?

Then go with the PrestaShop platform development.

When you have an idea to create an Ecommerce Website, do not hesitate to spend a penny for the website.

Contact us to know about the eCommerce development process.

Top Ecommerce Platforms for Small Business Owners In 2022

praveen Raja

Comments

17 responses

Danny

Hey there,
Im an european and here its prestashop that is ruling the sphere. I feel, you can also provide better informations with deep insight on each of these platforms for good comparisons.

June 17, 2017

Reply
1. bright
  
  Hello Danny,
  I agree. I will share these informations on another writeup and possibly link it here. Thanks for your idea on prestashop for small business ecommerce development.
  
  July 6, 2017
  
  Reply
Lucy

I certainly require why you have left out prestashop to third and not having mentioned opencart here. Despite these power over 30% of stores operating in ecommerce and prestashop boasting of running with NiKE.

June 17, 2017

Reply
1. bright
  
  Hello Lucy,
  The idea is not to leave out opencart outright,I will add opencart up in the blog. Prestashop, i agree, empowers over 1 million ecommerce stores, but always magneto is on the top, with their technical ability and scalability. Thank you for the writeup.
  
  July 6, 2017
  
  Reply
Kevin jaw

Thank you for the contribution. Need help with how can i build my store with magneto.

June 17, 2017

Reply
1. bright
  
  Hello Kevin,
  Most welcome. You can write to us at support[at]webnexs.com. someone from our support team will be certainly assisting you with your requirements.
  
  July 6, 2017
  
  Reply
Corrie Tiean

Thats a best one you have explained here. I wish, you could have explained in detail further about why should i choose a platform over another?

June 21, 2017

Reply
1. admin
  
  While i can say, based on the versatility and updates, prestashop and magento seem to rule the roost, i certainly need your business idea to suggest one platform over the other. Please do email me in support[at]webnexs.com.
  
  Thank you
  
  June 22, 2017
  
  Reply
KennethUnubs

The informations you provide here are splendid. I would like to have my website for selling my autoparts online with magento. How can i do that? Need your suggestions on how could i frame it.

June 21, 2017

Reply
1. admin
  
  Hey Kenneth,
  Sure, can you email me on the specifications you have in common, i mean, the attributes of the parts. This will help me in understanding how best we could stack the product in magento platform. I hope that would be the step one, because, understanding your products specs, that has be listed and making customers to find all the details easier coupled with admin adding them easy would be the primary focus. Rest everything would go common or can be sourced from marketplaces based on the requirements.
  
  Thank you.
  
  June 22, 2017
  
  Reply
Edward cealm

Hey, why is that you are referring to open sources like magento and prestashop? Isn’t there a possibility that i can move with custom frameworks like Laravel , codeignitor? I hope open sources will have security lapses in their architectures. What do you say?

June 22, 2017

Reply
1. admin
  
  Hey Edward,
  I could say security lapses are always there in any platform, but magento, prestashop releases security patches once in every while( atleast a month) so you can stay top on security architecture. Plus, your server should be secured to avoid lapses which has to be hardened by server specialist. On answering your custom PHP frameworks, if your scope is beyond what these frameworks offer now, you can go for custom ECommerce platform. That would be better. So its much vague at a point to just blatantly say, without requirement in hand to suggest magneto, prestashop for a business.
  
  Let me know your thoughts, if any.
  
  June 22, 2017
  
  Reply
Timothy

Why do many developers would say magento is the #1 platform? What does it really mean to have in it? Im not a techie, but i would like to understand about how this can help me out for my ecommerce business?

July 1, 2017

Reply
1. bright
  
  Hello Tim,
  Certainly as you marked up here, magento rules the ecommerce space. Many brands, big and small seek out for magneto in having their store up. There are few reasons why magento can be the best platform.
  
  1. Manage your orders unlimited and get reports on your customer to any extent.
  2. Never worried about the format of inventory you have, you can always add them with no restriction.
  3. Unlimited possibilities to design your store to perfection.
  4. Best user experiences ( UX) as you would like to have it in store.
  5. Manage your inventories, upload them in bulk. Never face any slack even you uploading 1000s of SKUs at one tranche.
  6. Never worry about performance. If your mangento doesnt perform, obviously, its not the store, but the other aspects surrounding them.
  
  and there are a lot of them to tell you here. But i worry, spaces aren’t enough to get it done. You can checkout with our business development team on the same. For further queries, please write to us at support[at]webnexs.com
  
  July 6, 2017
  
  Reply
Louis

Shopify will always be the first choice for all when it comes to ecommerce platform. I loved it because of more customizable it is and how quickly you can get a store off the ground.

November 30, 2018

Reply
Jayden

Thank you for this great and detailed article. It gave me a huge information as an e-commerce searcher to me.

December 1, 2018

Reply
Hugo

Nice list of e-commerce platforms you have listed here. No doubt Shopify is the best choice to create e-commerce stores. You can easily create a Shopping site using Shopify platform and they have awesome support and extensions as well.

January 21, 2019

Reply