11+ Most Popular E-Commerce Platforms for 2024

Updated 03 Jul 2024
Published 14 Nov 2022
Satyam Chaturvedi 4122 Views
popular e-commerce platforms

Are you looking for the best ecommerce platforms to create an ecommerce website to transform your business offering and revolutionize the experience of your customers? Then you’re in the right place.

Ecommerce platforms offer all the necessary capabilities and tools to develop, manage, and sell your products online and grow your enterprise by reaching out to some unprecedented territories. These platforms make it very easy for anyone to establish an e-commerce store from scratch without having much knowledge of coding.

Choosing a suitable e-commerce platform is certainly not an easy task for any enterprise. You must always keep in mind that developing a website is not that difficult, but if you select the wrong platform, then things can go haywire anytime soon.

In this blog, we will walk you through some of the most popular e-commerce platforms in the market. We will explore their prominent features, their advantages and disadvantages, and their business use cases. It will give you deep insight into these platforms and help you choose the right e-commerce platform for your business.

11 Most Popular E-Commerce Platforms

1. Shopify

It is among the most popular e-commerce platforms available in the market. It’s a fully hosted and all-in-one platform that is known for its wide range of 3rd party tools and integration abilities.

shopify most popular e-commerce platforms

Shopify was launched in 2006 and it was among the first companies to offer an end-to-end solution for store owners to develop their online stores without having much Shopify development knowledge.

It takes a few minutes and a couple of clicks to develop a fully responsive online store for you. You can avail of the capabilities of site builder and exceptional theme catalog to customize your store to meet your business needs.

Shopify offers a bouquet of plugins and 3rd party applications, which could be integrated into your web store to give it a much-needed edge. These apps could be installed from Shopify App Store to provide desired higher flexibility and scalability to your e-commerce solution. You can simply install Facebook Channel or Dropshipping store to post your product catalog on Facebook and Instagram.

Shopify – Features

  • Wide range of One-click upsells and post-purchase sales tools.
  • Offers an on-the-go store management mobile application
  • Live chat integration feature for visitors.
  • Supports 3D models and videos of products.
  • User tracking and In-depth analytics
  • Integrated coupon and discount engine
  • In-built email marketing tools

Shopify – Pros and Cons

Pros Cons
  • Powerful and highly flexible
  • Wide range of integrations
  • In-built mobile application for on-the-go management
  • Slightly weak SEO capabilities
  • It’s a costly solution
  • Lack of customization

 Shopify – Pricing Plans

Shopify offers the following pricing plans.

  • Basic ($29 per month) – It offers basic capabilities to develop your online store, process payments, and ship products. 
  • Shopify ($79 per month) – It offers additional capabilities of more staff accounts and in-depth analytics.
  • Advanced ($ 299 per month) – It offers all the capabilities along with lower transaction charges and custom reporting.

2. BigCommerce –

BigCommerce is one of the most popular and widely used e-commerce platforms, that offers a drag-and-drop page builder to build an enchanting storefront without any technical efforts. 

BigCommerce popular ecommerce platforms

All you need to select a template or theme, add some elements, make some customizations, and launch your online e-commerce store idea. You can always tweak the CSS and HTML code without messing up the overall design and code.

It also provides some capable built-in sales and marketing tools to assist your business to drive more sales and revenue. It allows single-page checkouts, image optimization, automated shopping cart recovery, and many more.

BigCommerce also offers numerous SEO features including robot.txt access, customizable URLs, and support for a blog, which will help you devise a brilliant SEO strategy to drive better organic search traffic on your website.

You can also integrate it with popular marketplaces such as Facebook, Google, and even Amazon to reach more potential customers.

BigCommerce – Features

  • Website Customization
  • Application Integration
  • Inventory and Payment Management
  • SEO and Analytics Optimization
  • Single-Page Checkout
  • Less downtime
  • Unlimited products, bandwidth, and file storage

BigCommerce – Pros and Cons

Pros Cons
  • Scalable and Flexible
  • Strong SEO performance
  • Exceptional multi-channel selling
  • No single-click selling
  • High-volume store costs more
  • Inconsistent loading speed

 BigCommerce – Pricing Plans 

BigCommerce offers the following pricing plans.

  • Standard – ($29.95 per month) – Offers basic capabilities to build an online store.
  • Plus – ($79.95 per month) – Offers various tools and web builders to launch an online store in less time.
  • Pro – ($299.95 per month) – It offers Product filtering and faceted search capability, less payment processing fees, and Custom security options.
  • Enterprise – (Customized plans for businesses) – It offers B2B capabilities, Consultancy, Real-time analytics, and many more features.

3. Magento (now Adobe Commerce) 

Magento Commerce is an online e-commerce platform, which has been taken over by Adobe in 2018. Adobe integrated it into the Adobe Experience Cloud, and now it is known as Adobe Commerce.

Magento online e-commerce platform

It could be used to develop an online storefront of any size in a few clicks. It also lets you customize your e-commerce store’s functionality, themes, and integrations with 3rd party tools to enhance the capability.

Apart from the usual hosting and domain name services, it offers advanced SEO and marketing tools and various other extensions, that can enhance the overall functionalities of your online store. It also offers point-of-sale (POS) providers, which can help you execute in-person sales as well.

It allows you to use advanced drag-and-drop tools to develop captivating content and compelling shopping experiences without having much knowledge of coding. You can create content, personalize it for specific client segments, and update the pages in real time. Moreover, with headless Magento, you can seamlessly deliver content across various platforms, along with faster loading times and improved performance, leading to better customer engagement and higher conversion rates.

It has been duly supported by Adobe Experience Platform and is well integrated with other Adobe products such as Real-time CDP, Experience Manager, Analytics, and more, which offers you deep analytics, up-to-the-minute profiles, and the capability to serve relevant commerce and marketing events.

Magento – Features

  • Flexible 3rd party integrations
  • Advanced search engine optimization
  • Mobile-friendly configuration
  • Customizable security permissions
  • Spacious and Sturdy
  • Versatile content management
  • Multiple language support

Magento – Pros and Cons

Pros Cons
  • Compliance with GDPR and other legal frameworks
  • Omni channel support and Mobile friendly 
  • Highly customizable and flexible
  • It is very expensive
  • It has less number of developers
  • Inadequate product support

Magento – Pricing Plans

  • Adobe Commerce Pro (Price available on request)- It is an all-in-one solution for businesses of any model and size.
  • Managed Services (Price available on request)- It reduces downtimes and business risks with the help of advanced-level managed services.

4. NopCommerce

NopCommerce is an open-source and ASP.NET-hosted e-commerce platform available for all business types and users. NopCommerce offers a customizable shopping cart, administration management, and monitoring tools, and Catalog fronted for business owners.

NopCommerce e-commerce platforms

Its open-source architecture is equipped with best practices of software patterns and security practices. It offers a higher level of flexibility and customization that can easily cater to your business requirements.

It uses the latest microsoft technologies, that ensure high performance, security, and stability. It is completely compatible with Web farms and Azure Cloud services.

It let you rapidly create and scale your e-commerce store with its built-in functionality and features. It offers seamless integration with shipping and payment services, SEO, and marketing tools. warehouse management, and mobile-friendly themes.

It uses multi-vendor (B2B) and multi-store (B2C) functionality, which let you avail the state-of-the-art enterprise-level performance. It offers features that can fit into your business scope to fit your demands, such as multi-language support, multi-currencies support, regional taxes, and laws support, international store management, and integration with local suppliers and services.

NopCommerce – Features

  • Multi-channel marketing support
  • Wide range of plugins
  • Advanced SEO capability
  • Responsive platform
  • Supports a wide range of Payment methods
  • Supports PostgreSQL and MySQL databases
  • Enjoys support from a large developer community

NopCommerce – Pros and Cons

Pros Cons
  • It is freely available
  • It is PCI DSS compliant
  • Extensible e-commerce platform
  • The upgrade process is slightly complex
  • Costly solution
  • The themes are not good 

NopCommerce – Pricing Plans

NopCommerce is based on ASP.NET and it is available free of cost.

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5. WooCommerce

It’s a free WordPress plugin that allows sellers and merchants to transform their WordPress websites into full-fledged online stores without any hassles. It also offers supplementary integrating options and paid features to simplify the functionality of your shopping cart.

woocommerce development

It is an open-source platform that has become an ideal solution for small and medium-sized businesses with its highly customizable WordPress development resources. WooCommerce leverages the capabilities of its highly secure payment processor to ensure secure communication and PCI compliance between your server and customers.

However, you must be very careful with anything you install while using this plugin, as this can adversely impact the performance of your online store. WooCommerce can certainly slow down your website as it can face challenges while working with other plugins, themes, or product listings. 

Hence you must plan and choose a suitable hosting environment that can keep up with the scalability of your website in the future. 

WooCommerce – Features 

  • Unlimited price table anywhere
  • Wide range of themes
  • More than 400 official extensions
  • Built-in blogging
  • You can create pricing in any language
  • Each type has unique customizable parameters
  • 24/7 technical support

WooCommerce – Pros and Cons

Pros Cons
  • Suitable for SEO 
  • Highly extensible with the help of 3rd party plugins
  • Complete Flexibility and Control
  • The learning curve is tough
  • Can’t be used on websites not hosted by WordPress
  • Difficult to set up Wishlist functionality and configure multi-currency

WooCommerce – Pricing Plans

  • Personal – $10 per month
  • Businesses – $20 per month
  • Developer – $30 per month

Read Also: – Top 10 eCommerce Trends to Look Out For in 2024

6. Sellfy –

It is another hugely popular e-commerce platform among small and medium-sized online stores for its unprecedented simplicity. It has been used by over 2,70,000 creators across the world and it has been appreciated by small business owners and content creators.

 Sellfy e-commerce platform

Sellfy was developed to cater to the requirements of content creators, photographers, music producers, video makers, and various other creators who want to sell their products and services online.

You can utilize this platform to sell eBooks, subscriptions, audio files, photographs, PSD files, videos, video streaming, and numerous other digital file types you can think of.

It allows you to create your online storefront in less than 5 minutes, past that you can make necessary customizations to match your brand, setup up your shopping cart, connect with your domain, and start selling your products.

Selfie could be used to embed ‘Buy Now buttons onto your corporate or social media pages. It allows you to integrate your product cards on your YouTube channel and monetize the traffic generated by video offerings.

Sellfy – Features

  • Beautiful Storefront
  • Complete Product Hosting
  • SEO and Marketing tools
  • Secured Payment facility
  • Report and Tracking
  • Wide range of Integrations
  • Wix App

Sellfy – Pros and Cons

Pros Cons
  • Suitable for selling digital subscriptions and goods
  • Offers in-built POD sales tools
  • Comes with robust Email marketing functionality
  • Lack of flexibility
  • A smaller number of integration options
  • It supports only 2 Payment Processors

Sellfy – Pricing Plans

  • Starter Plan – $29 per month
  • Business Plan – $59 per month
  • Premium Plan – $129 per month

7. Squarespace

It is not just an e-commerce platform but an all-in-one content management solution that facilitates the development of online stores and websites. It comes with industry-leading website templates, which makes your task of hosting an online store very easy. 

best ecommerce platform for website

It offers cutting-edge designs, exceptional fonts, and a wide range of color palettes, which makes it the most suitable platform for showcasing visual products. These visually appealing templates come with all Squarespace pricing plans, which can address the needs of any business type.

All you need is to choose a template, thereafter the online store setup is just a breeze. Then you can list your products and services, customize categories, configure payment gateway settings, and create enchanting content via the website builder.

Squarespace also offers numerous SEO and email marketing tools, that can help you drive your website traffic and enhance sales figures.

Squarespace – Features

  • Offers complete support for sales of digital goods and subscription
  • In-built tax tools
  • Robust fulfillment options
  • Abandoned cart recovery
  • Seamless integration with renowned shipping services and payment processors
  • Online and Offline sales channel synchronization
  • A Squarespace application for customer communication and mobile inventory tracking

Squarespace – Pros and Cons

Pros Cons
  • Wide range of website templates
  • Built-in taxation tools
  • Built-in SEO and email marketing tools
  • Limited integrations
  • Lack of advanced marketing tools
  • Lack of phone support

Squarespace – Pricing Plans

  • Personal – $16 per month
  • Business – $23 per month
  • Basic Commerce – $27 per month
  • Advanced Commerce – $49 per month

8. Weebly

It is a multi-faceted e-commerce platform with an in-built website builder. It offers an ideal and affordable solution for small and medium-sized businesses to develop a low-cost online platform that could be scaled further in the future.

choose the right e-commerce platform for your business

Weebly may not offer advanced and sophisticated features and tools like its competitors, but it covers that up with its exceptional simplicity. It is known for offering some of the most affordable pricing plans for the end users along with a free version.

Weebly provides utilities and tools your business requires to start your online storefront, including smart marketing tools, an instinctive drag-and-drop website builder, abandoned cart recovery, customizable welcome, in-depth analytics, inventory management, and real-time shipping rates.

It also offers some additional tools like gift card builder, coupon management, product search, and support for product badges, which assist your business to outclass its competitors.

Weebly – Features

  • Seamless HTML and CSS Access 
  • Publishing and Blogging 
  • Robust SEO capabilities
  • Effective Page Management
  • Wide range of Web design tools
  • Full-fledged Hosting and Domains
  • 3rd party application integration

Weebly – Pros and Cons

Pros Cons
  • Captivating and Adaptive Layouts
  • Affordable and Easy to use
  • In-built coupon engine
  • Restricted Intuitive customization
  • No ADI (Artificial Design Intelligence) choice
  • Lack of support services

Weebly – Pricing Plans

  • Free Version
  • Connect – $5 per month
  • Pro – $12 per month
  • Business – $25 per month

Read Also: – Top 7 Payment Gateways in UAE for your eCommerce Websites

9. Volusion

It is an all-in-one e-commerce platform that currently powers more than 180,000 online stores across the world. It’s not renowned like BigCommerce and Shopify, but it still offers robust in-built analytics and marketing features that can give tough competition to its rivals.

e-commerce platform

It offers basic e-commerce platform features such as a shopping cart module, a website builder, and full-fledged online marketing and analytics suite to cater to your business needs. 

Volusion enables you to create and manage your marketing campaigns across multiple channels (Social media, email, and SEO) from a single place.  Its robust SEO features provide you best opportunities to improve search engine rankings and drive organic traffic to your online store. It also allows faster loading of your web pages, while enabling web owners to manage metadata with ease.

It is equipped with a wide range of Admin social management tools, that allows you to connect your Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram accounts with your online store. It allows you to manage your social media stores and publish social posts from the Volusion dashboard.

Volusion – Features

  • Easy to use Editor
  • Faster returns and refunds process
  • In-built SEO tools
  • Customizable storefront designs
  • Exceptional Email marketing tools
  • 99.9% guaranteed uptime
  • Robust and Secure Hosting

Volusion – Pros and Cons

Pros Cons
  • In-built Customer Relations Management
  • In-depth Reporting and Analytics
  • Robust SEO and social media marketing tools
  • Lack of customization
  • Bandwidth limitation issues
  • Insufficient API calls

Volusion – Pricing Plans

  • Free Version 
  • Mini – $15 per month
  • Plus – $35 per month
  • Pro – $75 per month
  • Premium – $135 per month

10. Wix –

It is another popular e-commerce platform, that provides a multi-purpose website builder to build an online store in no time. It is unarguably the most beginner-friendly e-commerce platform available in the market. It offers an affordable, hassle-free, and cost-effective solution for solopreneurs and small businesses to get started quickly.

best ecommerce platform for website

It comes with the powerful Wix Editor and a plethora of powerful in-built automation features that can set up your online storefront in a matter of a few minutes. All you need to use its revolutionary drag-n-drop feature, select a suitable store template, and then customize them with absolute design freedom. 

It lets you transform your website with captivating video background, beautiful animation, and parallax scrolling effects. You can use its Wix Artificial Design Intelligence (ADI) to make necessary customization without hassles. 

All you need to address a few questions and then Wiz will create a personalized e-commerce store for your business. It also lets you run automated Instagram and Facebook advertising campaigns to boost the visibility of your online store on social media. 

Wix – Features

  • Advanced Design Features
  • Optimized for Mobile
  • Enthralling templates
  • Advanced SEO tools
  • Total design freedom
  • Beautiful Media Galleries
  • Powerful app market

Wix – Pros and Cons

Pros Cons
  • Offer powerful automation tools
  • Wide range of themes and templates
  • The learning curve is easy for beginners
  • It is not a dedicated e-commerce platform
  • Proprietary and Closed source coding
  • Wix branding is obligatory on all free sites.

Wix – Pricing Plans

  • Free – Free version with basic functionalities
  • Combo – $16 per month
  • Unlimited – $22 per month
  • Pro – $27 per month
  • VIP – $45 per month

11. Shift4Shop –

It is another brilliant e-commerce solution that is equipped with a robust website builder, an order management module, and an efficient marketing tool that can help you transform your e-commerce website. However, the biggest difference between Shift4Shop and its competitors is that it provides everything free of cost. 

b2b ecommerce platform

Shift4Shop has re-invented the e-commerce platform business model by offering an enterprise-grade solution at $0 per month, which can otherwise cost you around $100+ with other vendors. It also gives you a free domain name, an SSL certificate, and a built-in payment processor.

You can select from numerous industry-specific and professionally designed templates. The templates are SEO optimized, highly customizable, and mobile-friendly as well.

It let you customize your online store with its intuitive web design tool, which let you edit the CSS and HTML while accessing the community of web design professionals to develop your online shop.

You can also access many features such as SEO tools, social media marketing tools, order management, product management tools, and much more.

Shift4Shop – Pros and Cons

Pros Cons
  • Free version available with basic features
  • A wide range of Integration opportunities are available 
  • Offers enterprise-grade features at a lower cost
  • The templates are slightly outdated
  • It’s freely available only with Shift4 Payments
  • Lack of maintenance and support

Shift4Shop – Pricing Plans

Shift4Shop Free – $0 per month, an enterprise-level plan with unlimited users, products, bandwidth, and features.

12. Big Cartel

It is a simple, yet effective e-commerce platform developed specifically for artists. It was launched in 2015 and since then it has been adopted by over a million creators. 

Big Cartel e-commerce platform

Big Cartel platform understands the requirements of independent creators, who need an e-commerce store for different use cases. It offers the adequate capability to design flexibility, prioritize ease of use, and precise pricing.

It lets store owners choose suitable free themes and templates from a given selection. You can tweak and customize them to cater to your business needs and change the look and feel to offer an enthralling interface to your customers.

It let you sell your products and services in both offline and online modes. It also offers robust inventory tracking and shipment, automated sales tax, real-time analytics, and support for promotions and discounts to name a few.

Big Cartel – Features 

  • Inventory Management
  • Full Fledged Catalog Management
  • Efficient Channel Management
  • Advanced SEO Management
  • Social Media Integration
  • Mobile-friendly online store
  • Coupons and Discounts

Big Cartel – Pros and Cons

Pros Cons
  • Precise pricing structure
  • Flexible and efficient front-end site builder
  • Suitable for artists
  • Doesn’t offer advanced features
  • Lack of stability
  • It limits the maximum number of products you can sell to 500

Big Cartel – Pricing Plans

  • 5 Products – Free version
  • 50 Products – $9.99 per month
  • 500 Products – $19.99 per month

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Critical Factors to consider before selecting an e-commerce platform

The above-mentioned e-commerce platforms come with different prices and features. You must consider the following aspects while selecting the platform and building your website:

  • The platform must support constant website upgrades and management.
  • Set up the website foundation diligently
  • Your online store must offer a seamless user experience and customer service
  • Ensure you offer robust security for your website and customers’ data
  • Select a reliable web hosting service
  • Integrate seamless and Intuitive shopping cart and payment processors

Conclusion

Ecommerce platforms offer a set of tools to develop and manage an online storefront, which allows you to sell your products online. They make it seamless for anyone to create an e-commerce store from scratch, that too without knowing coding.

However, all e-commerce platforms come with unique features and functionalities. Most of the time, it is difficult to find a suitable platform for your business, as selecting the wrong one can be challenging. We hope this blog will help you determine the best e-commerce platform for your business.

If you are still in dilemma, then please feel free to contact our e-commerce consultants. Arka Softwares, with its decade-long experience in e-commerce development services, can help you transform your unique idea into a successful online store.

E-Commerce Platforms – FAQs

  • What are the 5 most important features of any eCommerce site?

    Following are the five most important features every e-commerce site should have:
    1. Mobile-friendly and responsive design
    2. User-friendly search, navigation, and product filtering ability
    3. High-quality videos and images
    4. Appealing product descriptions
    5. In-depth FAQ section

  • What are the constraints of e-commerce?

    Here we have some constraints of e-commerce:
    Here we have listed out a few factors, that create limitations of eCommerce
    1. Enormous technological cost
    2. Security-specific requirements
    3. Upfront employee cost
    4. Massive advertising cost
    5. Warehousing cost
    6. Marketing cost
    7. High shipping cost
    8. Packaging Cost

  • Should we use an eCommerce platform?

    It doesn’t matter if you are running a B2B or B2C business, you must you an e-commerce platform to streamline your day-to-day operations. An E-commerce platform offers you a convenient way to organize and sell a wide range of products online to potential customers virtually in any corner of the world.

  • What are the 3 distinct stages of e-commerce?

    We have 3 distinct stages in e-commerce:
    Stage 1 – Start-up and accelerated growth
    Stage 2 – Growth consolidation
    Stage 3 – Revived growth by applying change (new features, platforms, strategies, people, and other resources)

  • What are the 3 elements of e-commerce?

    e-Commerce is consisting of 3 primary elements. If combined adequately, these elements ensure that your e-commerce website can connect and convert the potential customers who are visiting your online platforms or stores.
    These three elements are:
    1.Customer experience
    2. Back-end integration
    3. Digital Marketing

Satyam Chaturvedi

Satyam Chaturvedi is a Digital Marketing Manager at Arka Softwares, a leading app development company dealing in modern and futuristic solutions. He loves to spend his time studying the latest market insights.

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