Top 5 eCommerce Development Platforms for Your Online Store in 2024

If you want to go online and start your own online store, you need to first figure out the most suitable & Top eCommerce Development Platforms that can showcase your online business and help you generate improved ROI.

These days the eCommerce wave has just taken the entire retail industry into its stride of selling online. With the growing digitization and evolving technology, every business just wants to jump on the bandwagon of e-commerce concept through the online store. This growing craze of having an online store is normal considering the continuous uprising trend in an increasing number of customers buying online. This trend of a growing number of online customers will keep shooting with every passing year. Although, launching an e-commerce store cannot guarantee business success, what would you do make in this cut-throat competition?

Would you do it with affordable price, extraordinary marketing efforts, in-house cost deduction, and excellent automated e-commerce setup – still there are so many things to do! To start with, let’s find out the pros and cons of the top 5 best e-commerce platforms.

1. Magento

In Magento Community, the free version has nearly 70% of the total features which you can use if you want to go without any budget. It has more than 9,000 plugins published to date, so you have a vast opportunity to install the desired ones for your e-store. Being open source, it is absolutely free without any monthly subscription fees and easily scalable.

When it comes to the price tag to unleash advanced features, it is high, and being an entrepreneur you may have to shell out as much as USD $20,000 for Magento Enterprise Edition. It is not simple to set up and customize, you would require expert programmers from an e-commerce web development company to manage Magento, and you cannot survive and tailor your Magento store with DIY.

2. Shopify

You can start selling on Facebook by integrating the Shopify website in as less as $9, which is the biggest benefit of Shopify. This platform is equipped with a mobile-friendly feature and also offers a mobile app for an added amount. It has a very well-defined checkout process with lower shopping cart abandonment rate. You will also get a range of 3rd party apps and plugins. You can create anything from scratch using this platform. It has its own community to solve problems and offer commercial support all 24×7.

Coming to the cons, all transactions are charged with some added fee reserved for Shopify, even the monthly subscription charges are at the higher end. In this platform also it is not easy to customize your Shopify website and even the add-ons may not offer the desired feature. You need to get the help of a very specific type of Shopify development services provider with hands-on “liquid” programming language experience. The extensions are also expensive and you rarely get any free plugins.

3. NopCommerce

NopCommerce is a refined, domain driven, MVC e-commerce framework with amazing architecture without any loopholes. You can easily create an e-commerce website by implementing database design and application design using nopCommerce elements. Similar to open source development, it has all the tools, IDEs hence it is self-capable. It is amazingly quite cost-effective with all features unlocked. There is no community or enterprise edition. You simply have to buy it for USD $100 for monthly support. It already has 40,000+ websites hosting on it. You can start it in a week.

Although nopCommerce is free, you have to pay for owing its ingredients as ASP.net and SQL server is owned by Microsoft. You need to learn it as it is a bit deviated from the main path i.e. generic PHP developers. You need to hire technical experts if you can; either online or remote basis to get some custom e-commerce development and site maintain and management. It is still in its nascent state hence, an adaptation of nopCommerce is lower in e-commerce ecosystem.

4. BigCommerce

Most BigCommerce themes are known to offer consistent user experience across devices being responsive, irrespective of it being free or paid. You can make use of several enterprise features in must lesser cost than premium pricing plans, like gift coupons, tax, analytics, etc. It is quite easy to integrate your e-commerce store with eBay, Google Shopping & Facebook.

You will have limited free stuff and themes for the specific identity of your store. It cannot be integrated with Amazon right now, hence multi-vendor online store concept will have to wait for this platform.

5. WooCommerce

This is the most amazing and popular e-commerce amongst free products. Nearly 30% of all e-commerce websites use WooCommerce. This is considered to be the most common or “default” e-commerce genre to opt for. You get it done by experts at a cheap rate. It has a very easy user interface, just anyone can DIY. It offers unlimited plugins – free and premium both. You can select the right ready-made themes as it has a pool of industry wise readymade themes available.

Coming to the cons, it is not very easily scalable. It does not offer any enterprise features like Business Analytics, etc. It is slow in load and Google is revamping its structure to increase the speed of 1000s of sites post upgradation.

Synopsis

Above listed are Top eCommerce Development Platforms most popular and widely used that you can rely upon given your business needs and other aspects. There are several other e-commerce platforms also like Open Cart, Prestashop, Volusion, OS Commerce, Zen Cart, Drupal Commerce, Joomla/ Virtue Mart etc. to look at. All the above-mentioned Top 5 eCommerce Development Platforms in this para are popular names powering hundreds of websites at the moment, but unfortunately cannot be put in the top 5 leagues at the moment. It is always recommended to hire an ecommerce marketplace development services company to help you create your dream e-store the best way possible.