List of 5 CMS Platforms For E-commerce Websites

 Digital buyer penetration amounts about 50% of overall Internet users in 2018. This has opened numerous opportunities for e-commerce businesses to expand and evolve.

Over the last year, over 1 billion people have purchased commodities and services online and the numbers are continuously growing. Its the best time for entrepreneurs to jump into the lucrative e-commerce business and launch their products online.

An online business requires a good e-commerce platform and a robust CMS to get started, which indeed is a lot of hard work. Other than being visually appealing, your eCommerce website should be functional and cheap.

Here are the top 5  e-commerce CMS platforms of 2019

• Shopify

 It is said to be the best eCommerce platform for small to medium scale businesses who are just starting with an online store. Many ready-to-use templates are available and yet they can be customized to meet business requirements.

The system facilitates selling physical or digital goods. The platform is quite flexible, easy-to-use and allows you to expand with required features using add-ons or third-party apps.

Pricing – 14 days Free trial  

• Shopify Lite – $9 per month
• Basic Shopify – $29 per month
• Shopify – $79 per month
• Advanced Shopify – $299 per month
• Shopify Plus’ – NA

• BigCommerce

It is a cloud-based, user-friendly software which helps the user to build beautiful, responsive web store without any design knowledge. BigCommerce has the capability to handle everything from products, payments, shipping, checkouts, coupons, integration and more.

BigCommerce platform has a collection of more than 320 add-ons, some of which are at low cost and others are free.

Pricing – 15 days of Free trial

• Standard –- $29.95/month
• Plus –- $79.95/month
• Pro –-Starting at $249.95/month
• Enterprise – NA  

• Volution

It is one of the best e-Commerce CMSwhich offers fully cloud-based solutions to their users. Volusion’s built-in features can be found in the dashboard (you don’t need to buy an add-on from any app store).This factor is what sets them apart from their competitors.

It also includes interesting features such as “deal of the day”, MyRewards program, Amazon and eBay integration and more that helps in customer retention and brand building.

Pricing – 14 days of Free trial

• Mini – $15 per month
• Plus – $35 per month
• Pro – $75 per month
• Premium – $135 per month

• Wix

This platform is focused to help you build a functional online store for selling your products. The biggest advantage of Wix eCommerce is its ability to easily integrate with advanced eCommerce tools in the store such as social media, marketing, promoting, third-party apps etc.

Wix has numerous ready templates and drag-and-drop editor which makes your store look professional without any design experience. This is the best platform for small level enterprises who are looking to keep their online store simple, clean and straightforward.

Pricing – Free

• eCommerce – 485 rs per month
• Unlimited – 372 rs per month
• Combo – 247 rs per month
• Connect Domain – 122 rs per month

• Magento

Magento is arguably the best eCommerce CMS platform that you will come across if you are a pro in web development. This eCommerce has the highest level of flexibility and command over developing the store with splendid add-ons and extensions.

This platform is highly scalable, which means you would never want to move on once you are familiar with Magento. Magento has a community version which is free and more than sufficient for small and medium-sized businesses.     

Pricing – Free Community Edition

• Enterprise – NA

• OpenCart

OpenCart is a lightweight eCommerce platform. It is free to use an upgrade. OpenCart is best suited for people with some web design and development expertise. It is good to start off with OpenCart, but might not be perfect to scale.

Some of the interesting features which make OpenCart eCommerce solution effective include – Unlimited categories, products, and manufacturers, Multilingual, PCI Compliant, more than 20 payment gateways, reporting and more.

Pricing – Free  

Conclusion

You should know that there are many other open-source software which I haven’t mentioned in this article.

The best thing about these platforms is that they are mostly free and constantly in development. That’s a huge advantage if you are looking forward to saving a little money in the short term and scale up easily in the long term.

All open-source e-commerce platforms have their own unique advantages, you should seriously try out a non-open source solution such as Shopify, Bigcommerce, or Volusion. These platforms charge a meager monthly fee, in return for that you no longer have to maintain your site as before or look for hosting and always get dedicated customer support.

Observation tells, this type of e-commerce frameworks work great for rapidly scaling companies that are willing to hire a developer (or a team of developers) to run their entire website. But if you don’t have the budget for this type of employee, you should prefer scaling up with something like Shopify.

If you have any questions about this take on open source e-commerce platforms, let us know in the comments below.