Best Ecommerce Platforms: Top 5 Solutions Compared for 2017

📚 Table of contents:

• Round 1: Who wins the popularity contest?
• Round 2: Features
• Round 3: Designs available
• Round 4: Customer support
• Round 5: Ease of use
• Round 6: Pricing
• Final verdict

👉 This guide will assist you in finding the best ecommerce platform for your individual needs. We’re going to look at a number of characteristics and features offered by the top leaders of the ecommerce industry, and then point out what is going to be the best ecommerce platform for different types of users.

Round 1: Who wins the popularity contest?

While Shopify is probably the first name most people think of when they hear “ecommerce”, it’s not actually the biggest ecommerce platform out there, and the actual leader of the ecommerce space is WooCommerce (chart by Visualizer).

This is BuiltWith.com data and, according to these numbers, WooCommerce has ~25% market share overall – across the entire web – making it the biggest ecommerce platform of them all.

(Side note; did you know that Amazon’s market share of the US ecommerce retail space is estimated at around 37%.)

Does this mean that WooCommerce is, perhaps, indeed the best platform of them all to make your ecommerce plan a reality? Things might not be that simple.

Regardless of what I’ve just said, pointing out the winner of the popularity contest isn’t actually as straightforward as it may seem. While WooCommerce indeed is the most widely used and biggest ecommerce platform out there, is it also the most popular among the cool kids?

Having a quick glance at Google Trends over the past 5 years- which I admit isn’t a 100% spot-on source of insights – we can see a couple of interesting things:

First off, despite being first in market share, WooCommerce isn’t the winner in Google’s metric of “interest over time”. It’s been behind Shopify (currently holding the crown) and is neck-and-neck with Magento (the leader in 2014).

When we zoom out a bit, we can see that the ecommerce space has been dominated by Magento for the better part of the decade, with Shopify being able to overtake it around ~2014 and WooCommerce pulling ahead of Magento in ~2017. Magento’s position might look surprising to you if you’ve been in this space for a couple of years only, but it’s in fact been one of the top enterprise ecommerce platforms out there – if not the very top one, and surely among the biggest ecommerce platforms available.

* We didn’t include Wix eCommerce because it’s impossible to differentiate between people searching for the general Wix website builder and its ecommerce functionality.

Okay, but what does this tell us?

Everyone has their own way of looking at Google Trends, but the thing to keep in mind is that Google’s “interest over time” metric only relates to search term popularity – as in, how often people search for something – it does not reflect, however, what happens afterward, or which one is the best ecommerce platform.

In other words, it doesn’t tell us much about the numbers of signups, numbers of users, numbers of live sites, none of that.

The only thing it basically says – at least how I see it – is how popular the idea of something is on the web. Shopify just gets more and more popular in this regard constantly. They promote themselves in multiple places, new people get exposed to the brand every day, and they then research Shopify on the web. Undoubtedly, Shopify wants to be the biggest ecommerce platform on the market.

It doesn’t make Shopify the best ecommerce platform out there, but it surely makes it one to pay attention to and examine more closely. Which we’ll do.

You may also be interested in:

• 7 Best WooCommerce Hosting Plans for Any Online Store
• Ecommerce Stats: 60+ Facts Shaping Online Retail
• 6 Best Cheap Ecommerce Platforms for Starting Your Online Store

Round 2: Features

You’re trying to find the best platform for you ecommerce website? Let’s start by looking through the more noteworthy features of each of our ecommerce solutions. Although you can find all this info on each platform’s official website, being able to glance at them in one place is always good. Hence the following comparison. For starters, you’ll be glad to hear that you can sell unlimited products with either of these platforms.

The thing to realize right away is that each of these ecommerce solutions offers basically the same set of “crucial ecommerce features” – features that are essential for every online store.

The devil is in the details, though, so when picking the best ecommerce platform for yourself, you should probably focus on things that are more niche in their nature, yet can mean the world to your online business. And the complete list of those can be huge, so I urge you to do your own research and in-depth comparison once you have a general idea of the platform you’d like to try out.

For instance, Shopify has their POS (point of sale) system that allows you to sell your physical products and digital products on the go or in your brick-and-mortar store without any additional ecommerce tools or machinery – like external cash registers, etc. This can reduce your overall costs of running a store hugely.

Note. I don’t feel like I should make statements like, “I enjoy WooCommerce’s product management more than I do Shopify’s” here because it doesn’t actually bring much value into the discussion. I’m just a guy. A user. And my opinion on the best ecommerce platform is not any more important than the other person’s. Inevitably, the way WooCommerce does a given thing, for example, is going to be better for some of you than how Shopify does the same thing. And vice versa. So the key here is to check all those features out by yourself and compare which platform just feels better.

That being said, when it comes to the best ecommerce platform based on the overall richness of features that each platform has to offer, I would rate it as such:

I know this might not look that useful right away, but please bear with me. This verdict comes down to the overall focus of Shopify on delivering basically every feature that a store owner may benefit from, and not only devoting 100% to the online side of things. Quite simply, Shopify is the only player here that’s equally suitable to work for you online and offline. But again, that’s just me.

Round 3: Designs available

Next, let’s talk about the best ecommerce platform when it comes to design customization.

(Not only ready-made web designs, but also the overall abilities of the platforms when it comes to customizations and adjustments of what the final store looks like.)

Let’s take this one by one:

Designs in Shopify

The designs available in Shopify are very impressive, modern-looking, and should be able to cover pretty much any niche or type of business.

The only downside is that there is just a handful of free Shopify themes available at the moment. Shopify seems to be cutting down on the number of free themes. I’m pretty sure there were more available just a couple of years ago. When it comes to the paid Shopify themes, the price tags on those hover around $160-$180 a piece.

Just a note; when you’re looking for a design, you don’t need to pay as much attention to the specific type of products showcased in the design demo – those are just example and they don’t define the purpose of the theme.

After you select a theme, they are easily customizable, including things like the header, footer settings, typography, colors, presets, and more. Of course, you can also set backgrounds and images right how you need them.

In the end, Shopify is geared at giving you a partially pre-filled design that you only need to adjust to fit your exact needs most of the time. It’s not a blank canvas where you’re just thrown into and don’t know what’s next.

Designs in WooCommerce

As you probably already know, there’s no such thing as web design in WooCommerce per se. Under the hood, WooCommerce is a WordPress plugin, and as such, it puts its content and information – your product listings – through your current WordPress theme.

This has both its advantages and disadvantages.

On the one hand, you get to keep using your current theme and the whole thing should be able to work just fine. So less hassle on your part if you already have a working WordPress website.

But on the other hand, you might also stumble upon some difficulties with certain areas of the store not being displayed like you want them to. In extreme scenarios, you might be even forced to change the site’s theme altogether to make everything fit (but this doesn’t happen often).

That being said, getting things to look exactly like you need them might require some work, and you will rarely get the perfect result without doing some manual tweaks in the theme’s CSS or via some other means or plugins.

Here’s what my test store looks like on the default WordPress theme at the moment:

Usable, but not perfect.

Overall, when building a completely new online store with WooCommerce, it’s advisable to opt for a specific WooCommerce-optimized theme rather than going with a general thing.

Here’s what the same store of mine looks like on the official WooCommerce theme – Storefront:

Just to be 100% honest, though, we have to mention the thousands of WordPress themes available on the web … and most of them being capable of handling a WooCommerce store setup. So WooCommerce is probably the best ecommerce platform from a design flexibility perspective.

And most importantly, many of them are completely free themes, so this will minimize your initial setup costs, but more on that later on.

In the end, where Shopify’s theme selection was great for its out-the-box quality, WooCommerce’s gives you much more in terms of the customizations possible, but it also requires more work.

Designs in Magento

Although I don’t have much experience with the platform – despite its popularity in my country – from what I see, Magento is not very strong in the design department.

First off, the company behind Magento doesn’t offer any themes of their own, so you just get the main software. This means that you have to go to third parties to get anything.

The two most popular sources of Magento designs are the Magento Connect community and … you guessed it, ThemeForest – they have a Magento section there.

However, all those themes are simply not that stunning (at least in my opinion), maybe apart from a couple of themes on ThemeForest, and you get a lot more variety and modern-looking designs from the other ecommerce solutions on this list.

The thing with Magento’s lifespan overall as it relates to design is that being one of the top enterprise ecommerce platforms, in most cases, it’s agencies that built Magento sites for clients. They also handled the design side of the equation in the process. Therefore, Magento itself wasn’t ever required to deliver good designs in the box.

Designs in BigCommerce

The way BigCommerce approaches themes is kind of similar to Shopify’s strategy. What you get is a set of nicely-designed online store designs that follow a specific style and only need to be adjusted here and there.

BigCommerce gives you access to both free and paid themes, although the free department is even smaller than Shopify’s – just seven themes at the time of writing. If you turn your attention to paid themes, those can get quite expensive – often $145-$250.

Once you pick your theme, the customization is very good. There’s a lot of settings to play with. You get general color settings, headers, footers, buttons, section titles, sliders, and more. Overall, a nice and powerful interface.

It’s also worth pointing out that all those themes are optimized for mobile users.

Designs in Wix eCommerce

Wix advertises 800+ pre-made templates that you can choose from, but only around ~100 are really optimized for ecommerce. Still, you can always take a non-ecommerce theme and add store functionality.

And even with the ecommerce-dedicated themes, you get plenty of choice. For example, you’ll find different niche themes for t-shirts, makeup, technology, etc.

Once you choose a theme, you can edit it via Wix’s visual drag-and-drop editor. And you can also enter a Dev Mode if you want to make direct code edits, which is convenient for more advanced users.

The verdict

Overall, BigCommerce seems to be offering a bit more design customization possibilities than Shopify. There are just more elements that are customizable or that can be fine-tuned – to get your store to look and feel how you want it. Wix eCommerce also does well here with its Dev mode.

At the end of the day, though, I still consider Shopify’s interface a bit more friendly, and I get the impression that Shopify’s designs need slightly less work before you get them looking 100% right.

But then, there’s also the big elephant in the room, WooCommerce, and its compatibility with thousands of WordPress themes. For this alone, I need to put WooCommerce first here. So my final verdict re design is:

Round 4: Customer support

Running an ecommerce store is a complicated thing, and there might come a point where you need help with whatever platform you choose.

When that happens, how you get help is going to vary radically between the different platforms. For example, because the core WooCommerce plugin is a free open-source tool, there’s no single “support” source for WooCommerce itself. Instead, you’d need to reach out via other means.

Keep those important differences in mind as you make your decision…

Overall, Shopify, BigCommerce, or Wix eCommerce are probably the best ecommerce platform options if you value being able to easily get support, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves!

Customer support with Shopify

When it comes to the Shopify platform itself, Shopify offers 24/7 support. There are a few different ways that you can get in touch:

• Live chat
• Email
• Phone
• Twitter (yes, Twitter is an officially listed support channel)

Shopify also offers a detailed knowledge base that you can use to help yourself.

However, not all the tools that you’ll use at your store will be official Shopify tools. That is, you’ll probably be using some third-party Shopify apps (from their own app store), as well as maybe a third-party Shopify theme.

In that case, you’d need to reach out to the developer of that product for support, which can be hit or miss depending on the developer.

Customer support with WooCommerce

The core WooCommerce plugin is a free open-source tool (it’s an open-source ecommerce platform). That’s good for keeping costs low, but it also means there’s not necessarily dedicated support for the core free tool.

Now, that doesn’t mean you’re out of luck. First, WooCommerce does maintain a public knowledge base that you can use to help yourself. Additionally, the WooCommerce team does offer support for all the paid extensions that they offer. According to them, “We only support our Products, sold on WooCommerce.com”.

Beyond that, you can find lots of community help because WordPress/WooCommerce is so popular. There are tons of tutorials, social media groups on FB, etc, all of which can help you find answers. Or, you can pay for a WordPress maintenance service, some of which offer dedicated WooCommerce support plans.

Finally, like Shopify, you can also usually get support straight from the developers if you purchase a third-party theme or extension.

Customer support with BigCommmerce

Like Shopify, BigCommerce offers 24/7 support for the core ecommerce platform. You can get support via:

• Live chat
• Email
• Phone

These support staff can help you with more than just the technical stuff, too, as BigCommerce advertises them being able to help with “anything related to selling on BigCommerce and growing your online business”.

BigCommerce also has a big knowledge base if you prefer helping yourself.

Customer support with Magento

Magento is kind of like WooCommerce when it comes to offering support. While I’ll talk about pricing in more detail in the next section, Magento comes in two packages:

• A free open-source tool that you can install yourself (called the Community Edition).
• A hosted (and paid) enterprise ecommerce platform from the Magento team.

If you use the free Community Edition, Magento does not provide support. Instead, you’ll need to rely on community support or pay for a third-party support service.

However, if you pay for the Magento enterprise ecommerce platform, then you will get dedicated real-time support via phone and email.

Like the others, Magento also maintains a knowledge base that you can use.

Customer support with Wix eCommerce

Wix eCommerce offers a good array of options to get help.

If you prefer the self-help route, Wix has a detailed knowledge base that you can consult.

If you want help from a human being, you can get 24/7 English support via the phone via Wix’s callback service. Wix also offers phone support in French, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish, though those languages are not available 24/7.

You can also open a ticket if you don’t want to use the phone.

Round 5: Ease of use

There are two key characteristics that come into play when examining the ease of use aspect of our best ecommerce platform:

1. How easy it is to get started and build an online store from scratch.
2. Can the user reliably handle everything on their own, without any outside help.

Let’s see how our contenders compare:

Ease of use in Shopify

The signup process in Shopify is very nicely optimized and user-friendly. It takes you step by step and doesn’t ask for too much information at each stage.

To get started, all that’s needed is your email address, password, and a name for your store. After that, Shopify takes you by the hand and asks a couple of questions to get a better understanding of where your business is at. All this info helps them optimize your store better from the get-go.

After the signup, you get access to the main dashboard. It’s very neat, and does a great job at pointing you in the right direction and to all the most important tasks that you can do while managing your store.

There are your orders, products, customers, reports, everything to improve the potential online shopping experience.

Also, Shopify takes an interesting approach when it comes to the placement of the online store itself in the user panel. Basically, with Shopify, the online store is not the be-all-end-all of your selling tools, and as you grow, it can become just one of a handful of sales channels working for you.

That’s why all management tasks that are purely related to the online store are handled in the “Online Store” section under “Sales Channels” (you can see the sidebar link in the image above).

Apart from the online store, Shopify also lets you use a simple buy button, Facebook selling module, or their famous Point of Sale system (to sell in a real-world location).

All this is really cool, and the overall lack of noise in the UI makes everything very easy to use, not only when you’re first setting up the store, but when dealing with it on a daily basis as well.

Even the somewhat more boring things – like the main store settings – are presented in a friendly, not confusing way.

Overall, I have to give it to Shopify in the ease of use department – 10/10.

Ease of use in WooCommerce

Launching a WooCommerce store is more than simple and user-friendly … but only provided that you already have a working WordPress website.

First of all, let’s keep in mind that WooCommerce is ecommerce software, while Shopify and BigCommerce are ecommerce services that don’t require any installation per se. To get started with WooCommerce, you first need to find a good host, install WordPress on your account, and only then you can proceed to the WooCommerce part of the deal. Luckily, these days all good web hosts offer one-click installs for WordPress. (For that, we recommend WooCommerce hosting with Bluehost.)

Once you have WordPress, basically all you do is install the main WooCommerce plugin, activate it, and you’re good to go.

WooCommerce will then take you through their on-boarding wizard, and help you set all the operating details of your online store.

During which, the purpose of each page within the store is explained, you get to set the store’s locale (currency, location, default units), taxes, online payments integration, and other things.

The only downside in all this is that you somehow need to get your hands on a WordPress site in the first place. And okay, I know this is not particularly a problem for you maybe, but we have to remember that WordPress can be quite confusing to a beginner, and the need to first set up a WordPress site and only then a WooCommerce store is far from intuitive.

Even after you do manage to install everything, the ongoing work with your ecommerce site isn’t as clear as it is with Shopify, for example. Even looking at the main WordPress sidebar, it becomes clear that the ecommerce components get a bit lost among all the other WordPress-proper stuff:

Okay, perhaps I need to cut WooCommerce some slack here. Everything that I’m calling “a problem” here is basically only a problem for the first couple of times when you learn to interact with the whole setup. After that, it’s pretty much smooth sailing, and the administrative tasks can be done very efficiently.

Also, if you already have a basic understanding of WordPress as a platform, you’ll find that managing products or product pages works very much like managing posts in a regular site builder – turning it into a perfect marketing tool.

Overall, I’d say that WooCommerce is just as easy to use as Shopify … if it wasn’t for the initial setup and the fact that it’s not a standalone tool. For me, that’s 8.5/10 for ease of use, and especially once you work through some of the WooCommerce FAQs available on the web.

Ease of use in Magento

Getting an online store launched on Magento from scratch is even more problematic than on WooCommerce. First off, there are two versions of Magento, which we briefly mentioned before: the first one is the free community version (which is software that you can download and then install on a server – kind of like WordPress+WooCommerce), the second one is a hosted service that’s part of Magento’s enterprise ecommerce platform (one that you can just sign up to – kind of like Shopify).

Let’s cover the free plan here, for reasons that I’ll explain in the pricing section.

So to launch anything on Magento, you first need to either get the main Magento software pack and install it on your web server by hand, or use a one-click installer with your host. Most of the popular hosting choices give you that option – SiteGround, GoDaddy, Bluehost – they all have Magento installers.

I don’t recommend installing the platform manually. Even though there are the official docs and a lot of tutorials, it’s still a rather technical process that you don’t need to deal with.

After the installation, the main dashboard is rather clear and gives you all the main features in a neatly organized menu.

That being said, the look and feel of all that is much more technical than it is in Shopify or BigCommerce. Magento is more geared at giving you all the ecommerce features possible and then letting you decide how much of it you really need. The reports are awesome, so are all the stats and insights you get about the state of your store, but overall, this is more of an enterprise ecommerce platform, and perhaps not that easy to grasp for someone who’s just getting into their ecommerce journey.

Overall, Magento has its learning curve that’s slightly steeper than Shopify’s or WooCommerce’s, but most of it is in the initial setup and getting your store operational. Still, I give it 7/10 mostly due to the difficult installation.

Ease of use in BigCommerce

Under the hood, BigCommerce is similar to Shopify – they’re both cloud-based ecommerce platforms, and they’re both something that you sign up for, rather than something that you download and then install yourself.

Because of that, BigCommerce setup is very easy too, just like Shopify’s. After providing the usual: email address, password, etc., BigCommerce asks a couple of additional questions about the nature of your business and then lets you into the dashboard.

This dashboard is nice, no particular issues with it, but it’s a tad bit less user-friendly than Shopify’s. I do admit, it might just be me and my own preference towards certain UI choices over the others.

Either way, everything that needs to be in an ecommerce dashboard is all here.

The only apparent downside is managing and adjusting your store design. This one is a bit cumbersome and not as intuitive as dealing with WooCommerce themes or Shopify designs. Other than that, managing your offer (physical products or digital products), customers, number of products ordered, etc. it’s all great.

In the end, I have to give BigCommerce 9.5/10 for ease of use.

Ease of use in Wix eCommmerce

Wix eCommerce is easy to use in some ways, but it can take a little time to get used to how the interface functions.

Getting up and running is easy enough. You’ll first choose your Wix site template, which you saw above. Then, you can open the Store Dashboard, where you’ll get dedicated Store Products and Store Orders areas to manage the ecommerce parts of your site:

Adding a product is pretty simple, and you can also set up advanced details like Product Options (size, color, etc.) and inventory/shipping details:

To configure nitty-gritty details like taxes and payment options, you’ll work in the settings area. Because Wix has its own dedicated payment processing service, it’s super easy to start accepting credit card payments. Wix also gives you tools to help you calculate your tax rates.

All in all, it’s pretty easy and non-technical once you get the hang of the interface.

…

When it comes to the overall summary of the ease of use round, I have to give it to Shopify, Wix eCommerce, and BigCommerce as the best ecommerce platform when it comes to ease of use. As great as WooCommerce and Magento are, a beginner user will simply not be able to set those platforms up on their own.

Round 6: Pricing

Now the best part. Or the worst part? One that is definitely important if you’re a representative of small businesses or startups.

I guess it’s the best if you’re with the out-the-box version of WooCommerce, and the worst if you’re with Magento … but I’m getting slightly ahead of myself. 🙂

Here’s the full pricing table comparison:

One important thing to point out is to not get overly excited with WooCommerce’s seemingly attractive pricing. While, yes, the platform itself is free, and all the components needed to make it operational (including PayPal payments, etc.) are free, you might need a number of paid extensions to get some helpful additional features. This will grow your bill, requiring you to pay more at the checkout.

For example, and I know that every business is different and needs different elements, but I think we can assume that these extensions will prove useful for most:

• Product Add-Ons – for additional product personalization options. For example, you can ask your customer what sort of text they’d like to have printed on their t-shirt. $49.
• Print Invoices and Packing lists. $79.
• Product Bundles – offer kits or other kinds of product bundles. $49.
• USPS Shipping Method – get quick shipping rates from the USPS API. $79.
• UPS Shipping Method – the same for UPS. $79.
• Order/Customer CSV Export – export order and customer data to a CSV file. $79.
• And let’s not forget about the Yoast WooCommerce SEO plugin. $49. You’ll need this one since Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is always key for ecommerce platforms.

When we add all that up, that’s $414. And if you want support for more than one year then consider this an annual payment.

Of course, in all honesty, all those backend add-ons can be purchased as you go along and exactly when you need them, but it’s still an investment that you have to be ready to take on.

Also, the hosting thing. In the table above, I’m saying that it’s around $100 / year. I got that number from Bluehost. Out of the three tiers available, I wouldn’t recommend going below Plus, which starts from $5.45. Pro plan is $13.95 if you go for a three-year plan. Hence, this adds up to $65.40 for the former and $167.40 for the latter annually. You’ll get an SSL certificate included free of charge as a bonus.

Doing the maths, let’s say that you need just half of the extensions mentioned above, so around $192 of additional investment required to get those. Plus the hosting – $65 – and we have $257 for the first year. Still very – very – attractive pricing, but far from “free.”

(Just for comparison, the top ecommerce plan at Shopify – $29 – adds up to $348 per year, though you also might want to purchase some additional paid Shopify apps on top of that.)

And we’re not done yet.

Another thing to keep in mind when picking the best ecommerce platform for yourself is to check the transaction fees and credit card processing rates.

Usually, you can expect around 2.5-3% + $0.30 per transaction when using a payment processor. However, depending on the payment gateway you use, you might get double-charged with some ecommerce platforms.

For instance, Shopify charges 2% per transaction at the checkout if you want to use an external gateway such as PayPal or Stripe instead of Shopify Payments (alternatively, if you’re a Shopify Plus user, you’ll be charged 0.15% per transaction here). On top of that, PayPal also charges their own fee, in the range of 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction. Those things can add up, and especially if you’re just getting started when every penny counts.

BigCommerce and WooCommerce don’t put any fee on top of your transaction as far as I know, so the only fees you pay are those by your payment gateway.

Overall, for me, it comes down to this:

I love WooCommerce for the fact that you can get the bare-bones working setup only for the price of hosting, and I love Shopify for their $9 Lite plan. Both of these will be a great solution if you’re among the small businesses or startups. That’s why they both get 10/10.

Best ecommerce platform: Final verdict

If you’re looking for a reliable ecommerce platform provider, here’s how things stand considering all that’s been said above:

If you don’t have an ecommerce site yet, and you’re a small- to mid-size business – go ahead and try out Shopify. It’s the easiest to use interface, the simplest setup of all the platforms featured, and gives you the full package of features needed to build and run a successful ecommerce store.

If you have a WordPress website and you simply want to start an online store to sell products as an addition to it, there’s very little point in choosing anything other than WooCommerce. Under the hood, it’s just a WordPress plugin that you can install and keep everything under one admin panel. WooCommerce doesn’t lack in any crucial ecommerce area. You’ll be thrilled using it as the pillar of your online store. Plus, it’s the biggest ecommerce platform of them all – with the most users and live sites.

Here’s one more look at all the characteristics rated when searching for the best ecommerce platform:

What about all the other ecommerce platforms that are out there?

Okay, so the first thing everyone realizes when they start looking for the best ecommerce company for their next project is the overall abundance of software in this market. In case you’re not up-to-date with the topic, just to show you how crazy it is, here are all the platforms that I considered for the title of best ecommerce platform:

• Wix, Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, Magento, Jimdo, LemonStand, Volusion, OpenCart, osCommerce, Spark Pay, Shift4Shop (formerly 3dcart), Big Cartel, Squarespace, Selz, Gumroad, Storenvy, Weebly, E-junkie, SendOwl, Ecwid, X-Cart, PrestaShop, FoxyCart, ZenCart, MoonFruit.

Those are all popular ecommerce platforms that all have their communities and devoted users. And, of course, they all call themselves the best ecommerce platform in the market … but that’s just how things are, I guess. 😃

Still, when building a comparison like this one, we have to narrow things down so that they’re easily digestible and focus on the true leaders of the industry. This is what where doing here.

But of course, that’s just me and my own opinion, and I fully respect that you might have another favorite on this list. Feel free to share in the comments. What’s the no.1 most important feature that the best ecommerce platform needs to have?