How to Choose a CMS Platform for Your Ecommerce Store

1. How to Pick a CMS Platform for Ecommerce Website

2. Introduction • There’s no secret that online store is one of the best ways for boosting sales and getting more customers. And no secret at all that not every e-commerce website gains popularity and brings its owner sales and traffic. There is many reasons for this and the choice of a platform is one of those factors that defines a website success. • Finding the best possible platform for your business is not an easy task. You should make a research to find what platforms can be a good base for your e-commerce website. But in most cases at the end of this research you’re getting confused even more because of the number of platforms and the services they offer. How to choose the best one that meets all your requirements?

3. Characteristics of CMS Price Ease of Use Support Templates Hosting Responsiveness

4. Price When considering the pricing, you should take into account what features do you get for those money on different platforms. Some CMSs require monthly payments, others will charge you once for the entire package and offer you regular updates for free. It’s up to you choosing the best pricing option for the business you run.

5. Ease of Use You can ask a designer to build a website for you on any platform you choose or try to make it yourself. But in any case, you will be using it often, adding content and managing your sales. You may choose a CMS handful of features, but if you can’t use them – what’s the difference? Finding a platform that is easy to use is essential for a business owner.

6. Support High-quality and easily accessible customer support is essential for a good e-commerce platform choice. If you decide not to use web designer services for creating your website, you will definitely need some help from time to time. The best support offer you may have – is a free 24/7 support available on phone, live chat or email.

7. Templates Custom-made design is a great choice, as I already said. But you can significantly lower your expenses if you chose a template that you (or your designer) can customize for your needs. Pretty every e-commerce platform offers ready-made templates for creating a website. Choose one with an opportunity to customize it entirely and easily.

8. Hosting Many modern CMS platforms offer hosting services to their clients. This means you don’t have to look for a hosting provider for your future website like in case with self-hosted platforms. The drawback: you should pay pretty high monthly fee for hosting without an opportunity to change provider.

9. Responsiveness One of the most important factors today. E-commerce website should definitely be mobile and responsive to allow people that use mobile devices shop easier and at any time. If the platform doesn’t offer you responsive website version, it may be the reason to look for another service provider.

10. Different Kind of CMS for Ecommerce Website WooCommerce Drupal Magento Shopify Bigcommerce Opencart

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12. Woocommerce In fact, it’s not exactly a platform, but a plugin for WordPress, the most popular CMS platform for now. If we speak about DIY websites, WordPress justly holds the first place. It allows creating easy-to-manage websites from tons of beautiful paid and free templates. You can use WooCommerce-optimized themes to provide the entire website and your store with the same design. Since WooCommerce is the open source software, you are not bound with monthly fees. You pay once for the theme you choose for your website and then customize it as you like. And customization is really one of the strongest points for this platform. You can tweak all the features like you do it inside the WordPress including all available plugins and services.

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14. Drupal Drupal is one of best open source platforms, which satisfies all such needs aesthetically and produces utmost outcomes. Here are the 10 benefits that make it easy to use CMS Flexible Payment Modes Option To Set Versatile Price Slabs Product Highlighting Protected Page Module With Secured Checkout & Login Easy To Control SEO, CRO & Website Analytics Role Management & Great Community Feature Integrate External Systems Order Management Tools No Existence of Premium Plugins/Modules WYSIWYG Editorial Manager

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16. Magento Magento is especially popular among larger companies, but even small business can benefit from it… if they manage to puzzle out its admin panel. The truth is that Magento, despite its popularity and feature-load service, is not user-friendly at all. It seems to be more a platform created by developers for developers. Learning path is quite long and web design amateur will be hardly able to use all the features to customize the website to the full extend. Many features require complex coding knowledge so you must better hire a professional developer to complete your online store. As for the rest, Magento offers a really powerful solution for business being mobile- and SEO-friendly. It is secure with no third-party access, so your and your customers’ data will be completely safe.

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18. Shopify One of the best-known solutions for e-commerce, Shopify is used by big companies as well as by smaller and local online retailers. Most smaller brands praise Shopify for its ease of use, low price plans (from $29 per month), and beautiful designs. However, larger stores often look for more developed services and more advanced functionality that Shopify can’t boast. Being more focused on e-commerce options it is pretty limited in managing blog and similar forms of content. The checkout page also offers not so many options you can change. In fairness it must be said that Shopify provides its clients with the widest range of various add-ons and apps you can install on your online shop to extend functionality.

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20. Bigcommerce Most users note the close similarity between Bigcommerce and Shopify. But the former seems to lack the freedom of control over functionality that Shopify offers. Like Shopify, Bigcommerce offers services to various business sizes – from giant retailers to private entrepreneurs. Its prices start around $30 per month that is also not too far from Shopify’s fees. As for the rest, there’s no too big difference in features and add-ons of both platforms. There are some features that Bigcommerce may lack but you’ll find there other services you cannot get with Shopify. Since Bigcommerce is a hosted solution, it fits perfectly to small business. Clean and simple admin panel also makes it easier to manage to non tech-savvy people.

21. If you do build a great experience, customers tell each other about that. Word of mouth is very powerful.

22. Drupal, the open source content management system (CMS) that runs WhiteHouse.gov, MTV Europe, and The Economist, is a very powerful system that can be used for large, complex sites, and it’s the best platform that exists today.

23. Let’s review some Advantage of Drupal Functionality Drupal includes lot of functionalities which make it possible to create simple or advanced websites, blogs, discussion boards, social networking pages, etc. Page content management Drupal allows you to categorize your content through URL addresses, paths, making your own lists. Content Types Drupal is famous for allowing to create and manage content types, like: videos, polls, user management, blogs, podcasts, statistics, & more. Plugins The script has several thousands of plugins available on its website. Since Drupal is an Open Source, you can use as well as create your own plugins. Advanced users management Users can be divided into groups and can be given assignments. Support On the Drupal homepage, there's a documentation, well developed discussion board, chat, mailing list, etc.

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