With the advent of internet, digital commerce is gaining a lot of momentum wherein everyday new ventures are emerging. This has eventually, enlarged the digital commerce market and created a global competitive environment. With competition on the rise, digital commerce enterprises are maneuvering and innovating their digital commerce platforms to fulfill their customer requirement.
Mobile devices have practically transformed our lives. They are used in nearly every aspect right from sending emails, messages or social media posting. With these increasing popularity of mobile, digital commerce enterprises are exclusively focusing on providing an excellent mobile shopping experience to customers. If your digital commerce enterprise is not mobilizing the shopping experience, you might want to rethink upon your strategy.
Social commerce is another emerging trend making waves. According to industry experts, enterprises who have incorporated social commerce paradigm with their platform are successful in gaining a new customer base from various social networks. Social commerce enables customers to shop directly using the chosen social media platform instead of separately buying from the website.
Hence it is evident that in coming days mobile and social commerce are going to drive the digital commerce industry.
This modern business is encouraging a lot of non-technical entrepreneurs to start with their own digital commerce platform. Below, I have provided comparison of 5 digital commerce platform that are going to stay for a while and are most effective in the coming year.
- Benefits - Shopify offers lot of advantages and emphasizes upon social commerce and mobile shopping. It has more than 100 store templates for businesses to choose from and also over 1500 apps to augment the store functionality. It provides an ability to connect your platform with Facebook for selling purposes and has an in-built mobile friendly shopping cart. In addition, it provides 24/7 live chat support with tutorials and has a Shopify forum to solve the business owner queries.
- Drawbacks – While using Shopify platform, it is must to use Shopify payment option or else you will have to pay an additional fee for every transaction. Also, there are lot of functionality which are not available for free and hence if you are looking to buy those functionalities it can be quite costly. Plus, it has its own coding platform known as Liquid making customizations a bit difficult.
BigCommerce:
- Benefits – BigCommerce is one of the most prominent online commerce enterprises. It compromises of stores ranging from small to big ones. BigCommerce is best for those who don’t have technical knowledge or have no time in fidgeting with the code. It is comparatively cheap as compared to Shopify and has built-in features which include newsletters, coupons, shipping, analytics and beyond.
- Drawbacks – There is only one drawback of opting to BigCommerce is that it has very less options for free themes. BigCommerce for now offers only 7 free themes whereas other platform offers at least 20.
- Benefits - Magento is mostly known for its reliability and scalability and it is used by various major brands. Magento is considered the best platform for building ecommerce sites for its user experience and easy navigation. It is an open source platform wherein customizations can be done easily. It has over 9000 plugins and extensions and it facilitates to social media selling too.
- Drawbacks – Unlike any other digital commerce platform Magento has various pricing versions. Only the basic community version is free and the advance Enterprise version is paid and expensive. The basic version offers less amount of features compared to the Enterprise version. Furthermore, owing to its flexible nature, it requires highly skilled developers for the role of customization.
- Benefits – YoKart is best when it comes to features and also has best pricing options. It is mainly developed to help startups for building digital commerce applications effortlessly. It offers a multi-vendor version which is flawless. With YoKart you can have access to the source code and the customizations are seamless. It is a mobile-friendly platform tailor-made for Android apps.
- Drawbacks – YoKart, being a freshly launched digital commerce platform, doesn’t offer any third-party extensions for now. Although, it offers analytics tool and supports various payment gateways. YoKart does not offer any social commerce capabilities as of now.
- Benefits - BigCartel platform is very simple and a hosted system especially designed for artist and other creative professionals who are willing to set their foot in digital commerce system. It also facilitates Facebook shopping feature and offers attractive themes. Its WYSIWYG editor is best to customize your HTML/CSS codes.
- Drawbacks - Though BigCartel is simple, it offers a limited functionality which is certainly a drawback for those who are willing to do more than just selling product. Its themes are just limited to 12 from which only 2 are responsive.
