Over the past two decades, e-commerce has evolved at a firm rate. Retail e-commerce sales just keep amplifying. Figures show a tremendous swift and we expect a prosperous 2019 for e-commerce and e-marketers. If you are an aspiring entrepreneur, who’s seeding for the perfect time to start an online e-commerce store then this is the time. Building an e-commerce site is a vital task since you are capitalizing your products/services on the extensive blanket of online sales. A web developer would get your business started of course but opting for a smart, already-built e-commerce platform saves you time, effort, energy as well as cut back on the risk of errors.

eCommerce platform

Our society is an experience-hungry society influenced fairly good by age brackets. Serving these masses need a unique business plan model. When you have researched enough for offering a line, it needs to be exhibited in an efficient manner. The core idea behind every e-commerce startup is — sales. And to boost sales, you need your product, marketplace and technology checked twice. Reviewing product is fairly easy with some survey and pivotal study of the demographics, one can predict and play around with product lines. However, deciding an e-commerce platform is one of the most critical decision. Certainly, with user reviews and free demos, you can get your hands on experience with the interface but drawing out inferences can be hectic and overwhelming.

Selecting the RIGHT eCommerce platform

Evaluating an e-commerce platform depends on various parameters like the responsive design of the website, pricing and multiple payment options, SEO friendliness, scalability and such. These parameters are extremely important from the customer’s point of view. It’s time when the comfort and convenience of the customer take the front seat. Also, ease of navigation, value for money, trust and security concerns clouds around a customer who is shopping on your e-commerce site. Selecting the right platform will not only bring operational excellence but better return on investment. Here, in this post, we’ve hand-clasped significant factors while deciding your e-commerce platform.

Types of eCommerce platforms

1. Build your own: You contract someone internally or externally to develop it.

2. Traditional platform: You purchase and pay an annual fee and your developer team will build customize on top of the platform.

3. Open source: Without paying a fee for the license, you just pay for initial developments, upgrades, integration, etc.

4. Cloud platform: Slightly murky, this platform have bolted onto a hosting system and insist on calling as cloud platforms.

5. SaaS platforms: For a fixed monthly fee that manages server use, maintenance and upgrades, SaaS is a single codebase platform.

Hidden Costs For All eCommerce Platforms

1. Maintenance cost:

If you select an open source, then you must have to look after the performance and persistence of your eCommerce website. Depending on the size and volume on it, these maintenance costs vary.

2. Upgrades:

If you’ve built your eCommerce website on an open platform, you have to keep a check to download and install updates in time. Installing these updates does require a beginner level’s technical knowledge.

3. New features or improvements:

Customer behavior is ever evolving. This enforces e-marketers to assure that his e-commerce site is relevant to the trends and synced up to date with new features or improvements.

4. UX changes:

UX change is precisely defined as the overall change in the user experience on your eCommerce platform. Respective to consumer trends and behavior. If you inspect that your current eCommerce platform is too rigid to adapt to changes, you can opt to re-platform to another system as a last resort.

5. Client First Approach:

Step in the shoes of users. A platform that is user-friendly can boost confidence in website visitors. As we soak in the IoT-era, we’ve encountered many technological disruptions, sometimes with voice assistant devices, smart-programmed refrigerators, and smart wearable devices.

Common Mistakes To Avoid While Selecting an eCommerce

1. Inflexible platform

A rigid infrastructure of an e-commerce platform leads to the sluggish performance of your website and eventually, your lead visitor will go bored and turn off. Make sure you crunch the downtime when you wish to add some new feature or insert a small component.

2. Difficult to scale

Be double sure when you decide on your e-commerce platform for your online store. If your platform lacks scalability and if they cannot sustain multi-tenancy or multi-site, your business growth is restricted there itself.

3. Excessive features

When you invest in an e-commerce platform that is loaded with features that you, as an e-marketer needs, you are going to get a poor output.

Tip: Select a platform that has minimum ‘must-have’ requirements at the same time allowing you to add new features and capabilities as your sales grow.

4. Customizing

Before selecting your e-commerce platform, project your expected customizing needs. If your platform is rigid and you want to customize your internal system, you end up with extreme options as a solution which can be neglected.

Conclusion:

The above guide is as comprehensive as we think you would need. However, there selecting an e-commerce platform is a strategic decision and needs to be double checked with the set goal. But as we stroll into the era of IoT devices, it’s extensively important to choose an e-commerce platform that is built to give more control to you today as well as tomorrow. And that is when the headless e-commerce and dotCMS comes into a picture so that e-marketers can now easily adapt to new devices or channels.