Ecommerce is quickly becoming a standard in today’s online economy. The eCommerce market in the UAE has grown over the past few years, with consumers spending billions of dirham every year making it one of the fastest-growing markets. As almost 99% of the population in UAE has access to the internet, now it is effortless to make a visitor your regular customer. According to a survey, almost 60% of all the online purchases were from websites outside the UAE, mostly in north America and Asia. This means people are still going outside UAE for online shopping. One of the many benefits that you get by having an e-commerce website is that enables you to earn money while you are asleep.
If you have decided to make an eCommerce website then you should hire an e-commerce web development company so that you can get a better website for your online customers.
As compared to a physical one it is very easy to set up an online store. Select the product you want to sell, choose the e-commerce platform, and hire a well-reputed web development company to develop your store. Now choosing an e-commerce platform is one of the most important factors as there are so many options for you to decide from. You need to observe all the pros and cons of each platform before choosing the right one. Below, we are going to list some of the best e-commerce platforms.
E-Commerce Platform That you Can Select As Per Your Requirement.
1. Magneto – Magneto is one of the most reliable and best e-commerce platforms for online businesses. Magneto is known for scalability and performance which is why it holds almost one-fourth of the e-commerce market share. Brands like burger king, Liverpool F.C., and Huawei have their stores on magneto. Some unique features magneto has:
- Open source very easy to customize
- Over 8000+ extensions are available for all sorts of functionalities
- Easy to manage and use
- Large online community
- Free community version
Magneto is considered the best e-commerce platform for enterprise-level online stores. If you want to set up a small store you can go with the free version but if you see yourself expanding over the years then going with the enterprise edition is the best choice.
2. Shopify – When it comes to the best e-commerce platform Shopify tops the list. It was founded in 2004 and now over 1 million dealers around the globe are using it. It is very rapidly risen to popularity because of its very easy and clean-to-use interface. Shopify, unlike magneto, is a monthly service of subscription also known as Saas (software as a service). Hosting is also done on Shopify’s servers. Some of the features of Shopify are as follows:
- Insert product images, details
- Manage your inventory
- Into categories organize your products
- Discount code
- Creating blogs and web pages
- Order details and customer track
- Accept payments from 70 different payment processors in different currencies
- Set up customers account
- Manage multiple staff login
Shopify is a good choice for small and medium-sized businesses. The most important thing to remember is that Shopify is not an open-source platform and it is written in its own language known as a liquid.
3. Bigcommerce – This platform currently hosts almost 55,000 online stores. Bigcommerce works on the same fundamentals as Shopify but the difference is between the tools and themes both of them provide. And also bigcommerce does not charge any fee for use of any payment system. The features are mentioned below:
- The ability to sell a wide range of digital goods, in categories of using shipping rates of your choosing
- Full content management functionality
- Geed search engine optimization
- Discount coupons and gift vouchers as standard
- Product review functionality
4. Woo-commerce – Woo-commerce is a WordPress plugin, which statically changes your WordPress site into an online store. Despite being a plugin, woo-commerce is very powerful, providing almost all the ingredients that any other platform offers. Woo-commerce is used by 3.8 million online dealers worldwide which makes it the most used e-commerce platform.
The unique feature woo-commerce has is that as it is a WordPress plugin, you will have all the benefits of WordPress. Some other features of woo-commerce are as follows:
- Sell digital products, physical products, software, and even affiliated products from a marketplace
- Multiple payments
- Tax handling on sales, and calculations of automatic tax
- Multiple product categories
- Control on stock
- Geo-location support
- Hundreds of paid and free woo-commerce extension
This is available free of cost and it is also open source. You need to have a wordpress site set up to use woo-commerce. Woo-commerce is good for small to medium-sized businesses, but if you are for an enterprise-level this might not be a good choice. One thing to keep in mind is that woo-commerce is not out of box solution that you can set up in one day.
5. Opencart – It is also a free e-commerce solution that is written in PHP. It is free to use, upgrade and own. It is basically based on the core-plus model, where you have the basic structure and add extensions for extra functionalities. There are more than 14,000 extensions available for opencart which covers almost all aspects of the online store. Some features are listed below:
- Unlimited categories
- Sell digital products
- Unlimited manufacturers and products
- Multi-currency available
- Multilingual
- Product ratings and review
- More than 20 payment gateways
- Multiple tax rates
Opencart is also one of the best suited for small to medium sized businesses. It is out of box solution that is very limited and you need to buy an extension for every crucial functionality. If you do not need any customization then opencart can work for you very nicely but as you want to add some specific functionality, the development cost can be s huge hurdle.
We hope that you would know about the famous eCommerce platforms and select the best platform for yourself. Being the best eCommerce development company in Dubai, We suggest you go for a custom development service so that you can take control on everything. If you have any issues or queries feel free to contact us.
