Category: Software Review

What is the best ecommerce platform for a small business in 2021?

This year is the year you will go big online. Your small business can bring in more customers and sales by improving your ecommerce game. To do that you will need to choose the best ecommerce platform for a small business. In this article you will find out which are the best platforms, how you can use third party professionals to implement them and how to get your team on board with it.

Here is what you will learn below:

  1. Choosing the best ecommerce platform for a small business
  2. How to hire ecommerce developers and designers for your platform
  3. Adding content to your online store
  4. How to train my team in using ecommerce platforms

Choosing the best ecommerce platform for a small business

Ecommerce platforms are usually targeted at two types of users

  • small and medium businesses (such as yourself)
  • large retailers

I will not get into too much details regarding what large retailers use but if you want too, you can check them out here.

Instead, I will focus on guiding you through the four most popular options ecommerce platforms for a small business. 

Before I go any further I would like you to have a look at this two charts from Google Trends showing how many searches for each of these ecommerce platforms have been registered in the past. This is a great way to see how popular each of them is and what could you expect in the future.

The first one was in 2015 when Magento was king and Shopify was barely starting to grow in popularity:

The graph above shows how the four most popular solutions for ecommerce have evolved throughout the years in terms of Google searches. You can see Magento at the top, Prestashop right beneath it, WordPress ecommerce at the bottom and Shopify growing like crazy.

This is in 2021:

Things have changed dramatically. Shopify grew exponentially leaving all others behind. It’s steep increase in 2020, during the pandemic lockdown shows just how valuable this ecommerce platform has become.

Magento – the ecommerce platform for small businesses with a web development budget

Magento is an ecommerce platform aimed at mid-sized businesses

Magento is owned by Adobe (it was previously owned by Ebay) and works as an open-source application. It first hit the digital shelves in 2001 so it packs quite a lot of experience.

It is estimated that roughly 210 000 stores are now powered by Magento. It is usually used by medium sized retailers because of these reasons:

  • the number of features aimed at web stores that have passed the startup phase
  • enhanced sales, online payment, returns and customer info features
  • ability to customize and extend beyond the standard installation
  • ability to handle large number of orders, if optimized

There are however, some caveats:

  • you will need experienced developers to handle customization and/or extensions
  • increased server costs due to increased requirements

Long story short: Magento is fit for medium to larger retailers. It is usually installed on your own hardware (server) so beyond development costs you will also need to take into account hosting costs. Development and server costs usually top everyone else on this list. However, it makes up in stability and features what it lacks in cost structure.

Prestashop – the ecommerce platform for when you really don’t like Magento but still want open source

Prastashop - a good open source ecommerce platform for a small business

There are now more than 200 000 stores using Prestashop. The company started in France and is now a global player that aims for Magento’s spot. Unlike Magento, it can be used both as a hosted solution (on your own server) or as a cloud solution (where you pay a standard monthly fee for the right to use it).

It’s easier to find developers that can handle Prestashop’s structure so development costs could be lower. It’s a good option when it comes to ecommerce platform targeted at a small business.

The pros:

  • easy to install and setup
  • you can start your store without any technical know-how (with the cloud solution)
  • has great warehouse and suppliers management applications
  • development costs are lower, due to having rather simple technical requirements
  • hardware requirements are lower, resulting in great performance and lower server costs

The cons:

  • it may not be the right solution after you go beyond being a startup and you’ll have to move up
  • smaller developer community

All in all Prestashop is a great choice for small to medium online stores so it’s definitely worth checking it out. It may not get you to $1 billion in sales but performs great for startups. It’s highly customizable and easy to manage.

Shopify – probably the best ecommerce platform for a small business

Shopify - probably the best ecommerce platform for a small business

Shopify is probably the best ecommerce platform for a small business. It works great for small startups, you can start using right away, its pricing structure is great and you get tons of apps you can use on your store. It is the fastest growing solution right now and it is used by 1 500 000 online stores. That’s a huge jump from 150 000 just 7 years ago.

Not only that but the company is really well funded. After it received $100 million in venture capital in 2013, the company became a publicly traded company and its market cap is now $160 billion. Shopify started as an online store solution but now serves businesses both online and in-store through its Shopify POS solution.

The pros:

  • cloud solution: data is always safe, you can access it from anywhere
  • extremely easy to setup without technical know-how
  • you can extend your shop through third party apps and visual themes
  • can work both for online and offline sales
  • extensive developers and designers community

The cons:

  • not so easy to extend beyond core features. The solution can be extended through separate apps
  • apps are purchased separately

From my point of view Shopify is the best ecommerce platform for a small business and its probably going to stay this way for quite some time.

WordPress & WooCommerce – easy, free and unscalable

Although WordPress is not technically an ecommerce platform, it evolved beyond its original use case and its content management is now extremely adaptive. Using ecommerce themes and ecommerce plugins such as WooComerce, shop owners can easily extend WordPress beyond content management.

What WordPress lacks in native ecommerce support it more than makes up in developer community, theme and plugins support. At the moment 74.6 million websites rely on WordPress. Out of this huge figure more than 50% are self hosted.

There are 40 translations for WordPress and WordPress.com receives more traffic than Amazon. 

Unlike other ecommerce applications that are built with commerce processes in mind, WordPress is great at managing content. Products can be described in so many ways and content can be easily published. This does wonders for search engine optimisation and communicating with your audience.

The pros:

  • huge user base, very popular application
  • a large variety of themes and plugins (almost 50 000 plugins at this date)
  • a large number of developers
  • easy to set up and manage
  • a large knowledge base
  • many themes designed specifically for ecommerce

The cons:

  • not built specifically for ecommerce
  • only the hosted version can be used as an ecommerce application
  • not many operational tools (such as inventory management, complex customer service etc)
  • can only be used for smaller numbers of products. If you have more than 2000 products and more than 5000 users you should check something else out.

Long story short: WordPress is a great way to get your store off the ground quickly and at a low cost, especially if you have few products. But if you want something more, you will probably need to look into other ecommerce solutions for small businesses.

Best ecommerce platform for a small business compared
Visual comparison between the best ecommerce platform for a small business

How to hire ecommerce developers and designers for your platform

For all those solutions above, you will most likely need two types of support:

  • implementing and extending the applications: you will need to look for developers
  • adapting the standard layout for your own needs: you will need to look for web designers

To do so, you will need to find talented and effective designers and developers on established online marketplaces. The freelancing marketplaces are pretty straightforward. Think of EBay for digital jobs. You post the requirements and freelancers will bid for your online store requirements. There are dozens of places to find designers and developers for hire but some really stand out:

Upwork.com

Upwork, former Elance.com, is one of the oldest and most popular places to find great programmers and designers from all over the world. There were around 150 000 contracts last year for creative work and around 212 000 contracts for development work.

Guru.com

Guru.com - a place to find creatives for your design or development work

Guru was founded in 2001 by Inder Guglani and now boasts more than 1.5 million members worldwide and $250 million worth of freelancing jobs processed through the marketplace.

How to use themes and plugins to improve your online store

All of the ecommerce platforms solutions listed in this post rely on themes and plugins to customise the layout and improve the functionality of your online store.

Both themes and plugins are offered by their respective developers either free or for a premium. You can think of plugins and themes as building blocks that you can attach to your online store and get it to either look or behave better.

You can find plugins and themes on special marketplaces as well as developer’s plugin shops.

The best places to look for themes and plugins are the following:

  1. ThemeForest.net (Features themes for all major ecommerce solutions)
  2. TemplateMonster.com (Features themes for all major ecommerce solutions)
  3. Shopify Themes and Apps
  4. Prestashop Themes and Modules
  5. Magento Themes and Extensions

When you’ve chosen the application you are going to use to manage your online store, contracted the right developers and designers and chosen the appropriate theme and plugins, you’re ready to implement your online store. If everything is set so far, the freelancers you’ve contracted will know what to do. The overall process will be, in a simplified manner, the following:

  1. implementing the basic software package
  2. implementing the chosen theme
  3. optimizing the theme or building one from the ground up to be the right fit for your brand
  4. implement the right modules (say a special CRM module to handle customer information storage better)
  5. implement payment gateways so you can process order payments
  6. integrate with shipping partners so there few to no shipping errors

Once the process is complete you will have an up and running online store, without any products or any type of content.

Adding content to your online store

Content is any text, image or rich media that you will be hosting on your online store. As a startup, great content can mean great sales. There are two converging reasons for this.

The first reason is search engine optimization. Many of the people that will be visiting your online store and hopefully buying, come via search engines. You probably know a bit about how Google works, you may have heard a thing or two about search engine optimization but the fact is content is king. Great content is better indexed by search engines and can provide you with visitors you can turn into customers.

The second reason you should pay great attention to content is the customer. The customer needs to get as much information on your products and on your company as possible. Upload beautiful images, write extensive product presentations and say everything you can about your company.

And go beyond …

Inspire your visitors to buy from your ecommerce platform

Here you’ll find three great strategies to conquer your market with content. Explain your customers how to use the products. Showcase the lifestyle around your products and brand. The more content you will be pushing towards your customers, the more credible your brand and online store will be.

When you’ve added all the products and the relevant content, don’t stop there. Optimize your product descriptions constantly. Start a blog and get people to send you their stories. Content is king and it will stay like this for a long time.

How to train my team in using ecommerce platforms

Once everything is ready to go live, you still need to do one thing: train the team. Segment your fellow team members and train them according to their responsibilities. For example order management personnel won’t be handling product information so there’s no point in  showing them how to use these features.

The main areas where you will find features that team members need to learn using are:

  • product management
  • customer relationship management
  • order management
  • order fulfillment
  • inventory and warehouse management
  • marketing and PR
  • financial management

Most of the ecommerce applications have their usage guidelines either online or can be provided to you when required.

So training should be done according to responsibilities, it should be done in an interactive manner and team members should be provided with a form of software manual or written guidelines.

Once the online store is set up and reflects your brand, the products are all online and the team members are familiar with the ecommerce software, you are ready to go live!

Top 5 Alternatives to Google Analytics, for Ecommerce

Say you’re running an online store. Chances are you are using or plan on using Google Analytics. It’s free, it’s popular and there are tons of info out there to help you get started and optimize your sales stream.

But there are downsides too. First one – Google already knows a lot about you and your customers. You might want to keep some things discreet, right?

Second – Google Analytics is an one-size-fits-all type of product. Sure, it has plenty of features but chances are you’re likely to get lost in some of those features. Even if you don’t get lost, you’re likely to spend a lot of time digging through somewhat useless data, while at the same time, missing out on very important bits of information.

Third – real time reporting is pretty limited, if you’re running the free version. Once you get over 10 million views you’ll have to switch to the paid version, costing you north of $150 000. But then you can also try some more advanced reporting tools.

Of course, there are plenty of traffic analytics tools out there. Some have really great interfaces and features. But as an online shop owner or manager, you have to look at what works best for your store. Have a look below:

1. Mixpanel

Mixpanel Funels
Mixpanel Funnels

Mixpanel is great choice for small and mid-sized business that sell. Whether we’re talking about an online retailer, a hotel selling reservations or an iPhone game developer selling game upgrades – it is a great tool.

Even the way Mixpanel tracks actions and charges users is a great fit for online retailers. Ecommerce sites don’t really need too much intel on page views. What really matter are actions – the number of times sometimes has clicked the “buy” button, the number of times users download a brochure or the number of Google Ad visitors that turn into customers.

Mixpanel calls these actions data points, and this is a great news for startups and mid-sized businesses.

It’s tailored around five basic functions:

  1. Segmentation – allows for better understanding of user behavior and splits user groups according to actions.
  2. Funnels – you might be familiar with funnels from GA. But once you get to know Mixpanel’s take on the funnels, it seems that something has dramatically changed. Funnels can be added on the fly and viewed retroactively, easily.
  3. Retention – it’s not just how much you sell, but also – who keeps coming back.
  4. People – unlike GA’s confusing take on users, Mixpanel builds profiles ecommerce store owners can understand. The system collects data that can be browsed individually or segmented. One great feature is the notifications option, where you can mail, send SMS or push notifications to users, based on automated or manually segmented profiles.
  5. Notifications – mentioned above, it is a great tool that improves the analytics platform, allowing you to also communicate directly to consumers.

Pricing

Pricing is free for less than 25 000 data points and it can go up to $2000 / month, for companies with more than 20 million data points.

 

2. GoSquared

The redesigned GoSquared app
The redesigned GoSquared app

GoSquared is a great piece of engineering and with its redesigned interface – easy to use. It serves over 40k businesses and it has a special area developed strictly for ecommerce owners.

When it comes to ecommerce, GoSquared packs a lot of power in a simple interface. Just like most other applications on this list, it puts a strong emphasis on the targeting users as potential customers and tracking their actions and behavior.

The Metrics work toward providing clear insights on how revenue is doing. The analytics tool provides info on social media influence on sales and data on best performing products.

One really useful set of tools is what GoSquared calls Predictive Analytics. Previously discussed on Netonomy.NET, predictive analytics can mix past and present data to determine possible outcomes in the future. It can be used to predict traffic, sales or best selling products, to name a few.

GoSquared also mentions their ability to send Differentiated Reports, based on specific team member’s needs. One for the CEO, one for the marketing team, one for the … well, you get the idea.

But if there is something that really sets GoSquared apart – this is the Developer API. Using this, developers can build truly dynamic online stores, that respond to customer behavior and profile. From info on previous purchases, location, language and others, online stores can be set to respond to specific customer needs.

Pricing

Pricing can be configured here and starts at $32 / mo for 100k pageviews and 100 transactions. It can go north of $640 / mo for more than 10 million pageviews and more than 10k transactions. You can test the application in a 14 days trial.

 

3. FoxMetrics

analytics-foxmetrics

Foxmetrics has some nifty features when it comes to ecommerce and online retail related options. It is light and easy to set up, it works on both web and the mobile and it is focused on helping you increase conversions.

Although Foxmetrics is not 100% focused on ecommerce related (they also provide support for online publishers), it does have some great features you can use:

  1. People – using this section you can understand customers and their actions and can sync this data into company CRM software;
  2. Ecommerce – Foxmetrics provides support for useful KPI’s and advanced reporting dashboards. Using customer data, it can build  product relationships, shopping cart reports and can respond with automated actions;
  3. Subscription is an useful tool for companies working with periodic purchases. The product can report user data, conversion and churn rate, as well as detailed info on separate plans;
  4. The Marketing and Triggers options allow for personalized marketing and response, based on referral and user actions.

Pricing

Although Foxmetrics does not provide a free option, it does provide a 14 day trial to test the features. Plans range from $50 to $120 per month and beyond, for enterprise users. However, as an ecommerce user, you’ll be stuck with the $120 plan.

 

4. Woopra

analytics-woopra

Woopra  is a great way to understand your customer and their history browsing your store. You’ll be able to get behavioral insights from customers, run advanced or preset analytics reports.

By tapping into Woopra’s Funnel reporting section you can discover bottlenecks in the conversion path.

The product also promises a good segmentation on best performing customer groups and even build segments based on funnels.

Pricing

The pricing starts with a free version that allows 30 000 actions (similar to Mixpanel’s data points). The small business plans range between $79.95 and $1199.95/mo.

 

5. KISSMetrics

analytics-kissmetrics

KISSmetrics follows a simple assumption: you must get to know your users … ahem … customers. That and the fact you should pay attention to their brand name.

The promise KISSmetrics makes is that all your data will be connected to real people, with real actions. Once setup, you can see where people are, what and why they buy your products and in some unfortunate cases, why they don’t.

Features include funnels, cohorts (groups with similar interests), revenue in real time and the metrics you’re familiar from GA. The things that really set the product apart is the data export feature for further analysis and its A/B testing options, both a great fit for customer profiling.

Pricing

Pricing for the KISSmetrics product starts at $150/mo for up to 500 000 events and goes up to $500/mo, when your webstore reaches more than 1 million events. Once you pass the upper threshold, just like all others, you get to negotiate your pricing.

 

Prestashop 1.6 Review – A Great Choice for Small Ecommerce Startups

Ecommerce startups need flexible, easy to set up and cheap solutions when it comes to software. A few companies provide such solutions and probably the best known is Magento, which can accommodate a wide array of startups.

However, Magento does have some issues and when it comes to small ecommerce companies, it might not be the best choice. Issues ranging from bloated code, unreliable support when it comes to finding the right development team make it hard for small companies to implement it. As you’ll see below there is one contender to Magento’s reign that you should definitely check out if you’re planning on starting an ecommerce company.

Prestashop and Magento keep rising as the former leader, OS Commerce, seems to have its glory days behind it.
Prestashop and Magento keep rising as the former leader, OS Commerce, seems to have its glory days behind it.

That contender is PrestaShop, a flexible and easy to setup open source application.

A brief history of PrestaShop

prestashop-logoThe company that now develops the product was founded in 2007 by Igor Schlumberger and Bruno Lévêque. The duo thought they could bring a better open source solution to the market and they did just that. Bruno, having a background in both tech and business, developed the first version of PrestaShop, which was downloaded 1000 times in the first month. Now PrestaShop runs on more than 185 000 stores world wide and has more than 600 000 registered contributors.

As Bruno Lévêque, founder and company CEO was unavailable at the time for a statement regarding the company vision, I’ll just go ahead and assume that they’re planning on increasing the install base and further develop the application. As they’re pushing forward with the new version, it’s becoming obvious that the two main opensource applications that small and medium companies will be able to chose from in the future will be Magento and PrestaShop. So it’s probably a good thing to know a thing or two about the upcoming champion.

PrestaShop’s Business Model

When deciding what platform to run your store on it’s important to think about the company developing it. How is it organized, why does it exist and of course – what’s the business model? What keeps the company afloat? That way you can know whether it’s here to stay or not.

Fortunately – PrestaShop is developed by a growing company, with offices throughout the world and a very interesting business model: they give out the application as open source but they charge for special modules and themes in the … aham … PrestaShop shop.

The company also charges for support and training services, which might come in handy when the online store or the development team evolves. If you’re more into online documentation – there are plenty resources out there, starting with the Developer Guide.

PrestaShop Version 1.6 has a great back-office design

Well – enough with the talk about the company – let’s get busy reviewing the new PrestaShop v 1.6. I’ll just stick to the back-office but you can have a look at the default responsive frontend theme.

What’s really outstanding about the PrestaShop’s new back-office is that it’s designed for humans. It’s uncluttered (looking at you, Magento), it’s responsive (great for quick use both on the Desktop and mobile devices) and the team managed to arrange the dashboard elements in a way you can quickly access what you need.

The PrestaShop Dashboard
The PrestaShop Dashboard

The top most used reports (such as sales, orders, cart value and others) are displayed on the dashboard and users can quickly check, refresh or change settings for them.

It’s not just the dashboard – all back-office sections are redesigned to provide quick access to data, in a beautiful interface:

orders-prestashop

With the new version users can get access to PrestaShop’s best features without any hassle. My two favorites are:

  • the customers area – there’s a great benefit in having all customer data in one place. With the new version you can get all kinds of info on the targeted customer – previous purchases, groups he’s in, internal memos about the customer, vouchers and more. Back-office operators can thus have access to a birds-eye view on the customer interactions;
  • the stock management – a great feature in PrestaShop is the fact you can also use it as a starting point for inventory and supply chain management. It’s light interface does the job when keeping track of inventory, inventory movement, stats and supplier orders.

PrestaShop is probably a very good choice for small and medium companies that look for open-source solutions. With the new version you’ll have an uncluttered view of your ecommerce operations and you’ll be free to upgrade your system with the help of a growing contributors community.