The Best And Worst Website Features for Online Shoppers in 2023

Shipping is another feature that Shopify has locked down, with tons of ordering options. For example, Shopify’s carbon-neutral shipping option is great for businesses watching their environmental footprint. Wix isn’t too far behind, but you’ll still need some apps to help you with taking payments from across the world. If you want to get selling quickly, there is no better choice available. All featured platforms in the table above allow for the sale of physical products online, so we’ve only noted whether or not the platforms allow you to sell digital or service products. An integrated accounting system designed for Internet retailers will take orders placed on your website, adjust inventory counts, and use the sales data for accounting purposes.

Wix is a beginner-oriented website builder and an all-in-one tool that’ll equip you with everything you’ll ever need to build a beautiful website. It comes in the package with a web hosting service and a domain name, free or paid. Mailchimp is another email marketing software option — but it handles more than just email campaigns and audience analytics. You can also use it to build a branded website and schedule social media posts. Later lets you schedule posts for Instagram, Pinterest, and TikTok, allows you to link Instagram posts to your product listings, and tracks engagement metrics.

Keep Your Ecommerce Website in Check

Marketing tools like email marketing, retargeting, and social media help you reach more users and turn them into loyal customers. For brick-and-mortar businesses already using Square’s POS, the platform offers an automatic synchronization feature. That means any in-store sale will instantly reflect in the online inventory and vice versa. Shift4Shop, formerly known as 3dcart, is an ecommerce platform that caters to businesses of all sizes. Wix also offers product categorization, discount promotions, payment processing, and customer reviews.

• Platforms like BigCommerce, Shopify, and Zyro are all easy to set up.
• Design-wise, Squarespace is THE king when it comes to template quality and versatility.
• So, if you have a developer or the budget for one – and want something truly customizable and powerful – Adobe Commerce is a solid choice.
• This will pay dividends as your business grows, because managing your stock and analyzing your sales performance will be easy.

This category concentrates on the logistics of managing transactions and financial accounts. Inventory management is examined, along with the availability of out-of-the-box solutions or the flexibility to implement your own. Details such as transaction fees, support for recurring payments and availability of physical POS options for in-person sales also fall under this category.

Ways to Improve Conversion Rate of Your International Store

Upgrading to the $79 (around £61.80) Shopify account cuts online credit card charges to 1.9% + 20p, and in-person ones to 1.6%. You also get gift cards, professional reports, up to five staff accounts, and five locations. The most expensive tier is the ‘Advanced Shopify’ cloud ecommerce solutions at $299 per month (around £234). This cuts the online credit card charges down to 1.6% + 20p, in-person charges to 1.5%, gives you up to 15 staff accounts, and can handle 8 locations. Shopify also offers a free 14-day trial, with no credit card details required.

Nevertheless, that open-code allows extensive integration with couriers, payment gateways, accounting, warehouses, ERP, and more. About half of the traffic to ecommerce stores come from mobile devices. Mobile ecommerce is growing so fast that you need to not only think about responsive design but also the best possible experience. One way to go about this is the Google Mobile User Experience Score. If you’re running a self-hosted platform, you can optimize it for speed, but again that takes time and effort.

Popular Features

If you’re a beginner to coding or your platform doesn’t allow much for developer re-coding, you need to choose a theme that meets your needs and suits your customers. In picking the right theme, look out for the one that’s best for your niche and what other ecommerce sites are picking. Load time is a pretty straightforward indicator of how fast your site is. Simply put, it’s the measure of how long it takes a page (or pages) on your site to fully load. A slow site is a killer in ecommerce – potential customers run away from slow sites, and as we mentioned earlier, each second you gain in site loading speed translates directly into sales gained. APIs, engagement tools, experience managers, and an IT team are all required for headless commerce.

This integration eliminates the need for disparate systems and promotes seamless data flow and real-time visibility across the organization. WooCommerce is a plugin that enables you to transform a WordPress website into an online store. Its basic version is available for free, but it is highly customizable with its large array of extensions.

WordPress + WooCommerce

Shopify is an eCommerce software with all the tools and features you need to start, run, and grow your online business. Start by buying a domain or use an existing domain for your Shopify store. Built-in marketing tools promote your products on Facebook and Google searches.

And we look at user reviews to ensure that business owners like you are satisfied with our top picks’ services. We use the same rubric to assess companies within a particular space so you can confidently follow our blueprint to the best e-commerce platform of 2023. Its partnership with Printful makes Squarespace Commerce Advanced the best e-commerce platform for selling custom merchandise. Printful’s print-on-demand service doesn’t require any upfront payment.

Tests You Should Run Before You Publish an Ecommerce New Page

The main downside is that Volusion limits the number of products you can have in your store, and the GMV you can sell, on its Personal and Professional plans. As with all CRM software, the most important aspect of your ecommerce CRM will be how you track your customers’ data as well as interactions you’ve had with them. Almost all systems will feature a customer contact profile that keeps track of this information for each contact, like the one below.

The Facebook pixel helps sellers track product clicks and conversions driven by their Facebook Ads, so they can optimize their ad content and audience targeting strategy. Visitors can easily compare your product to similar options side-by-side, then click through to your product listing to make their purchases. Google is among the first places consumers look when they shop online. Running Google ad campaigns allows your business to compete for millions of views with some of the biggest brand names in the world.

BigCommerce

Signing up and building a store with the platform is remarkably straightforward. No tech skills are required to build an impressive ecommerce website with Duda. This platform is a drag-and-drop builder where businesses can build off of various templates for the specific niche represented. Duda equips users with effective SEO, 40+ payment providers, and mobile-friendly experience capabilities.

Big Cartel is one of the most affordable platforms for building an online store. So affordable, it offers free plans that very uniquely allow you to connect your own domain name and sell up to five products. It’s geared towards online sellers in the creative industries, but any online seller can use it to easily and affordably build an online store to sell products. Shopify is one of the best e-commerce platforms for its advanced feature set designed for selling online. It stands out for its wide range of dropshipping integrations that makes selling online without an inventory easy.

Duda Ecommerce Website Builder

Many providers will set up a time with you to walk you through the product, offering a catered approach that focuses on the features and capabilities you need from the platform. Start your buying journey by learning what your company needs from an e-commerce platform. Doing this will help you set a budget and pick out your must-have features. However, users need to upgrade to a more expensive package for international currency support, a built-in loyalty program and product reviews. Shopify’s Shopify plan costs more than competitors’ unlimited packages, and its three-day trial falls short of the 14 days Squarespace provides.