The 4 E-Commerce Platforms And When You Should Choose Them

15 years of successfully providing E-Commerce solutions has given us the experience to make recommendations that minimize costs and get solutions right. Below in a nutshell is the basis of our thinking for choosing E-Commerce software to help you minimise your costs when starting to sell online.

1. Hosted solutions like Shopify or Volusion are the best solutions when you are setting up a new simple business or exploring the E-Commerce waters. They allow you to start selling without installing, customising or hosting software. Don't think these systems are low on features because they are cheap, they are loaded with marketing add-ons that will help you market your products and their beautifully designed templates mean you can be online and selling quickly. Plus you can export the data you enter to more sophisticated solutions as your needs grow.

Don't think these systems are low on features because they are cheap

2. Hosted solutions fall short when you need to extend their behaviour. If you have custom shipping processes, unusual product displays or you need to add rich content management then you will need your own hosted software. Solutions include Magento and nopCommerce.

3. If your content requirements are particularly rich, you may consider a content management system with an E-Commerce add on such asWooCommerce for WordPress or uCommerce for Umbraco. However, E-Commerce packages for these CMS systems often don't have the power of the E-Commerce features in Shopify or Volusion so watch out!

4. If you are an existing business that stores its data in enterprise resource planning software (ERP) such as SAP or Microsoft Dynamics, or a complex accounting or point of sales system, you are likely to require a custom E-Commerce solution. Only custom solutions will provide deep ERP integration that perfectly models your business and doesn't force you to change your business processes. Custom E-Commerce software means that custom pricing, product displays and purchase processes can all be modeled 100.0% accurately.

Only custom solutions will provide deep ERP integration that perfectly models your business