eCommerce platforms are software solutions that act as management tools to manage your eCommerce business from maintaining the catalog of products to increasing sales and revenue for the eCommerce through improving customer experiences.

If you’re an entrepreneur kick-starting your eCommerce journey, this blog post shall walk you through various eCommerce platforms for small businesses and help you identify which website platform works the best for you. Before we get into this, let’s understand why small businesses need such platforms and eCommerce solutions and what major types of eCommerce platforms you may need.

Why should your eCommerce business need a platform?

To eliminate capital costs whilst building an eCommerce website from scratch.
To run the business operations with cost-effective, ready-made, and already-built eCommerce for small business.
To improve customer experiences on the website through various plug-and-play tools.
Easily track customer behavior, sales, marketing efforts, and revenue under one umbrella.
Get seamless integrations and migrations without even having the coding knowledge.

Types of eCommerce platforms for your business

Software as a service (SaaS): A cloud-based service for which you have to pay a monthly fee or charges.
Custom eCommerce: This is the most effective and best type of website you can build with the help of a custom eCommerce solutions provider or agency.
Open source: You can get the source code from the community and customize it based on your e-commerce business requirements.
Headless or CaaS (Content as a Service): In this type, the front and back end of your e-commerce website operate independently.

Besides, other Best eCommerce platforms exist based on your business model, like B2C, C2C, D2C, B2B, etc.

Best eCommerce website platforms for your small business

As far as small business is concerned and as per the latest trends and updates, the below listed 5 platforms are flagged as the best website eCommerce platforms.

Shopify

Being in the industry for almost two decades, they host more than five million eCommerce stores online today. When compared to other platforms, this is quite effective, user-friendly, popular, great UI/UX, and has a comprehensive range of tools and technologies that you can make use of, like Yandex, Product reviews, Free slide cart drawer, After Ship, Smart SEO, etc.

Be it the integration of tools, generating reports, or scaling your business, they cater to all your eCommerce needs.

Woocommerce

This is a WordPress solution suitable for WordPress websites. Of course, like Shopify, you can customize your website With this solution, you can access thousands of wordpress plugins. If cost is a concern, you can choose this eCommerce solution. However, you must undergo a learning curve to understand the ins and outs of this platform.

Squarespace

When it comes to the best eCommerce website builder for small business, this is the one. Because they have stunning and impressive website themes and templates. The only drawback with this platform is that they have only limited third-party tools for integration and value addition. Small businesses can rely on this platform without a doubt and then migrate when pivoting or scaling up.

Square

This platform is very suitable for those small businesses running offline with a Square POS. Though eCommerce platforms like Shopify offer solutions to these kinds of businesses, Square makes it much easier for them to step into the online space with flawless integrations, and local business-promoting third-party plugins.

Wix

This platform combines the strengths of Shopify and Squarespace—user-friendly and attractive themes or templates respectively. Moreover, they have leveraged the power of AI and have come up with a variety of features that small businesses can integrate, use, and grow. Thus, it stands as one of the best eCommerce websites for small business.