What is the Best Hosted eCommerce Platform?

When we say hosted eCommerce platforms, what we’re talking about is a bundle of existing technologies that allow your business to function as an online store with minimal without major technical hurdles. The typical features included in the bundle range from protective encryption, sales cart software, marketing and SEO plugins, payment processing,  customer database management, and so on. Before you choose the site you want to hitch your proverbial wagon to, take a minute to figure out what you need out of your eCommerce platform.

WooCommerce is a plugin built for WordPress sites that allows you to transform them into an online store in just a few minutes. Woo works well for businesses who have been selling in reality and are looking to expand into the digital realm using an existing WordPress site.

It also accepts Apple and Google Pay, Square, Stripe, Amazon Pay, and most major credit cards. It allows you to put your products into the Google Store and use Google Analytics to integrate with SEO and PPC, and it offers point-of-sale integration as well.

Woo is free to start out with. Just download the plugin and add it to your WordPress site.

Squarespace is a website builder with built-in eCommerce functionality. You can host an unlimited number of products through their eCommerce website templates, and everything is mobile-friendly.

It also comes built-in with Point-Of-Sale functionality so you can get paid in-person; perfect for a Bazaar at Christmastime or a farmer’s market. You can build your site for free and trial it for a week, and from there, the annual plans cost $18 a month for the standard business plan or $26 for the commerce plan. Take a look at the differences here.

Shopify starts out by offering a 14-day free trial, so you can get your feet wet and get products loaded into the site before you pull the trigger on a paid subscription (starting at $29 a month.) There’s no limit to the number of products you can have in a Shopify store.

The site is powerful enough that it integrates with up to four physical locations (warehouses, sales floors, stores; etc) at the starting price, so it works well if your business is larger and distributed. It accepts basically all forms of payment, and Shopify is the go-to standard for most internet-based businesses.

The one downside is, if you don’t use Shopify Payments, their built-in card-accepting software, each transaction has a small fee attached to it. If you’re already using NCR or some other payment-processing program, you may want to keep that in mind or switch over to save yourself the money.

Big Cartel is a great free starter for a smaller business. You can Sign up and sell 5 products for free, and the pricing scales up beyond that based on the number of products you’re selling. It integrates with point-of-sale technology, and the site bills itself as perfect for artists and designers so you can sell at a pop-up or a convention, and then hand out business cards and make some dough selling online as well.

Volusion’s pricing starts at $71 a month for businesses and goes up from there, based on what functionality you want. Volusion comes with a ton of accessible ‘how to use this product’ articles that can really help you get started if you’re new to the game or looking for help. It comes with built-in integrations with Apple Pay, Stripe, and PayPal, and it integrates with tools like MailChimp and Google Analytics, so you can keep using software you’re familiar with if you’ve gotten started in the eCommerce world already.

It also boasts a pretty substantial data collection suite, so you can categorize and contact customers based on their purchase history, gender or age, or whatever data point would suit your business most.