Choosing an Ecommerce Platform
When you are thinking about getting into the online shopping world, choosing an ecommerce platform to suit your business is a big decision. With recent growth in the industry, there are now 100’s of options available. There is a lot of stuff that you will have to take into consideration. We will try and cover some of those points in this blog to get you thinking about what option is best for your business.
- The first thing you need to do is look at your business and think about the following questions.
- How many lines you will be selling?
- What sort of products will you be selling; will they be digital downloads or physical items?
- How experienced are you?
- Will you be able to handle the platform and complete any required maintenance?
- Will you need to hire someone to do this or a team of people?
- What is your long term plan? Will your platform be able to handle growth?
- Most importantly what is your budget?
The first fork in the road you will come across is whether you will want a hosted or self-hosted platform. A hosted platform on something like Shopify is a good start if you want a platform you can set up and get running quickly. However long term it may end up costing you more as there are monthly costs. They have inbuilt gateways for credit card payments but you will pay a percentage and a fee to Shopify. On hosted platforms you don’t have as much control over the platform. You won’t be able to make big changes other than the appearance.
Self-hosted platforms are more expensive and harder to set up but long term will be cheaper to run as there are no monthly charges and fees. The control you have over the platform is much greater and the ability to get the store looking how you want much stronger. There are many self-hosted choices available, here at DNA Web we focus on Woocommerce which runs on the WordPress platform and the business enterprise platform Magento. We feel these 2 choices cover almost anything a business could need in an ecommerce platform.
An important factor that needs to be taken into consideration is how easily your chosen platform can be configured for SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Where does every purchase begin? If you live in Australia you will most likely be one of the 98% that will begin with a search on Google. If you are not taking SEO into consideration at every step how do you expect people to find you. Woocommerce running on WordPress is easily configurable to set up for SEO, Magento takes some more work but is still able to be set up with SEO in mind.
Whatever decision you make for your business make sure that you talk to an expert and do your research. If you would like to talk to someone at DNA Web Development, fill out a contact form and we will get back to you as soon as possible.
What platform are you going to use? Contact us to arrange a meeting to discus your needs.
Written by David Stansfield - 7 September 2016