Which features should one consider while evaluating an e-commerce builder?

Since a decade, online shopping has gained an immense popularity that has created an excitement amongst the shoppers but at the same time competitive for online retailers. To standout in the world of e-commerce, online retailers should always consider the best inventory management software and order management system while evaluating an e-commerce builder. A number of essential features need to be incorporated in your e-commerce store that can attract, enlarge, and keep hold of a huge, satisfied customer base.

If you are planning to start your own web store and looking for the best e-commerce features and software to use, this article will educate you on this subject.

Now, when you think of starting an online store, many questions arise like, how to build a web store, how to upload products, how to integrate with channels and much more.

There are two ways of building an e-commerce store:

1. Self-hosted open source carts (more advanced)
2. Hosted carts (user-friendly)

Self-hosted carts are more technical and confusing at times, hence one has to be a real tech-savvy. If you think you are non-technical, then I would recommend you to opt for a hosted shopping cart.

Getting a self-hosted cart is challenging as using drag and drop website builder is more technical. The main benefit of this cart is its flexibility and its drawback is that one has to be real tech-savvy to install, set-up and configure them. “Magento” is one of the open source cart that has many advanced features that you can use and configure, but useful only if you are technically sound or have a technical expert to help you here.

Hosted shopping cart are more reliable and user-friendly that an open source cart. The main advantage of this cart is that it gives a complete e-commerce package and takes care of all technical aspects and creates a simple interface for you to create your own website, upload your products, and connect your website to payment processes so that you are well equipped for online sales. The only drawback of hosted shopping cart is that you will not have flexibility as compared to a self-hosted cart.

Let us consider few platforms that hosted shopping cart include:

BigCommerce

BigCommerce is one of the leading e-commerce builders that allow you to build a web store without any hindrance of technology. BigCommerce offers a comprehensive set of tools to help build your store, allows multi-channel integration to help you boost sales and the best part is that you can add tools that are more advanced from their app store.

Shopify

Shopify is known to be the best one-stop ecommerce platform in the market today. It simplifies the challenges of building a web store, allows extensive number of apps for you to add to your store to extend functionality, and offers a 24*7-customer support.

Therefore, finding the best features and software is a daunting task. So the first thing you consider while evaluating an e-commerce builder is whether you are technically sound or not. If you are, then self-hosted open source cart will offer the utmost flexibility as you can configure your web store the way you want.

If you are not technically sound and looking for a quick and easy set-up so that you can start off with sales, then hosted shopping cart is the best way to proceed with no hassle of technology. Hosted shopping cart offers a full time support so to answer your questions anytime.