Lets get straight into the point, this article would be helpful for you if you are looking to start an e-commerce business and you
- Doesn’t have much technical knowledge.
- Don’t want to depend others to set up your e-commerce store (a web designer or programmer).
- Want to setup a good looking e-commerce store.
- Should need a support team to help so that there wont be any troubles to the stores and can be maintained easily .
- Ready to spend a small amount (say 10-20$ per month or more ) for setting this up.
Well, if you are some one related to the points mentioned above, you should definitely be looking on to hosted shopping carts.
What are hosted shopping carts ?
Hosted shopping cart softwares unlike Magento, Opencart, OSCommerce etc, are those ones which you doesn’t need to worry about hosting , code, installation and all. You need buy their subscription on a monthly basis(dependent) so that they will take care of all your tensions, what you need to do is to manage your products and other stuffs from the administration panel.
So which all providers are the best in the industry? Well there are many, of which I would like to list the best 3 out of it.
Rank 1 – Shopify
Alexa Traffic Rank : 765
Shopify would be your best option if you are looking for a hosted shopping cart software .So what all are the advantages and disadvantages of shopify? Have a look.
Advantages
- Over 90000 online shops are built using shopify, so its definitely trustworthy.
- Pretty big app store with around 250-300 apps , free and paid. You can choose them and install to extend your store functionality as per your wish.
- Theme availability – The theme store of shopify is very elaborate. Shopify do have plenty of themes in different niches, which helps your e-commerce store to look very attractive. A lot of free themes are also available here, average price of a shopify theme will be around 80$. Shopify do welcome the theme developers to upload themes in their market place so that the probability to find good themes in shopify theme store is pretty high.
- Shopify provide great customer support.
- Abandoned checkout cart recovery service for higher plans- 70 percent of people adds items to cart gets into the checkout page and for many reasons (other distractions,internet failure etc)they doesn’t complete the checkout. Shopify helps you to track these people and to send notifications to them that they can complete their checkout.
- Do have mobile version.
- Starter plan of $15.
- Built in blog.
- Good seo support.
Disadvantages
- 1-2$ commision for each sales
- Shopify is built in their own templating language called liquid, even though liquid is not that hard to learn ,you need to learn a pretty new templating language for the customization.
Shopify Video Review
Rank 2 – BigCommerce
Alexa Traffic Rank : 2496
Bigcommerce is one of the other popular hosted shopping cart, tilll now bigcommerce 50000 bigcommerce stores have collectively sold more than $2750000000. Bigcommerce is used in 65 countries. Have a look at the advantages and disadvantages of Bigcommerce.
Pricing
Advantages
- Over 50000 customers use Big Commerce.
- Great customer support 24/7.
- Easy to use – Bigcommerce do have great reputation for its easiness of use. Even the least technical person finds it very comfortable.
- Easy integration of 3rd party applications like mailchimp.
- Unlike shopify, you dont need to pay commission for sales . You will be saving a lot of money if your sales volume is high.
- Drag and Drop functionality.
- Smallest plan of 100 products and 1gb storage.
- Provision for facebook/ebay/amazon store(Higher plans).
- Coupon system for basic plans.
- Provides mobile version.
- Abandoned checkout cart recovery service for higher plans.
- $100 adwords voucher for basic plan.
- Built in blog- Content is king, so a blog is inevitable.
- Seo Friendly.
Disadvantages
- High starter plan of 24$ (this is hard for small business).
- Few template availability compared to shopify.
BigCommerce Video Review
Rank 3 – Volusion
Alexa Traffic Rank: 3032
Rank 3 goes to Volusion, with its very much user friendly interface and pretty interesting features like deal of the day and descent price plans make volusion very much worth for the money.Volusion have generated more than 14 billion in sales(collectively, combining all the stores of volusion) So what are the pros and cons of volusion? Lets have a look.
Pricing
Advantages
- Ability to track fraud orders.
- Cheaper starter plan – 15$ per month.
- Great pack of templates.
- Provides mobile version.
- Abandoned cart tracker.
- Easy Instillation.
- Unlike shopify and very much like bigcommerce, you dont need to pay commission for sales . You will be saving a lot of money if your sales volume is high.
- Support for facebook/ebay/amazon store(Higher plans).
Disadvantages
- The reporting and the data export features of volusion are not up to mark.
- You need to pay more for high bandwidth, if your store is dealing with a good amount of traffic ,you may need to spend some additional bucks to buy more bandwidth.
Video Review Volusion
Rank 4 – Weebly
Alexa Traffic Rank : 220
Rank 4 goes to weebly, weebly is assumed to have the highest traffic of all these four hosted shopping cart. Have a look at the advantages and disadvantages of weebly.
Pricing
Advantages
- Over 89000 stores are built in weebly.
- Drag and drop website building process – This makes your e-commerce store design more under your control and according to your wish.
- All the normal shopping cart features like, multiple products, product variants etc.
- Easy support for popular payment gateway integrations (paypal,Authorize.net) etc.
- Store front page feature – You can select multiple products and list them in the front page that you can attract the customers on time of offer sales.
- Easy setup- Compared to other shopping carts, weebly ecommerce is less complex that it can be setup very fast.
Disadvantages
- Not advanced as other self hosted hopping carts, the all in all features will be very less.(Anyway if you are looking for a minimalist setup, you can give a shot for sure).
Weebly e-commerce video review
