In spite of a rocky year for the economy, eCommerce sales are continuing to grow at a confident rate. In fact, they now account for 14.3% of all global retail sales. This implies that now is a prime time to get into the eCommerce space. However, eCommerce stores can’t exist without a decent content management system (CMS). So if you’re planning to open an eCommerce store this year, you should be aware of the best CMS options out there.
Magento
An open-source CMS is one that gives users complete control over the website’s functionality. One of the best-known examples of open source eCommerce solutions is Magento. Magento is owned by Adobe and currently supports over 260,000 online stores around the world. It offers a diverse extension marketplace that includes integrations with CRMs, ERPs, chatbots, and other enterprise-level software. Magento caters to various merchants, but it’s best suited for fast-scaling and larger businesses because of its extensive setup, pricing options, and development requirements.
Magento is not self-hosted, so it requires you to find a web hosting provider. The best hosting for Magento sites is one that offers scalability and flexibility to accommodate its many features.
BigCommerce
As a prominent eCommerce platform, BigCommerce has over 60,000 merchants of various types and sizes, catering to the eCommerce sector’s full spectrum. It offers an overabundance of built-in features and CMS capabilities. It’s also powerful enough to promote the growth of fast-scaling eCommerce businesses while being intuitive enough for complete beginners to operate with ease.
BigCommerce features advanced SEO integration and flexible APIs just like the ones mentioned in the GreenGeeks review that allow merchants to connect to other CMS solutions and leading software. It also offers a shopping cart on the backend.
BigCommerce is self-hosted, so you don’t need to find your own hosting provider. It is also PCI compliant and available on a monthly subscription basis.
WordPress
While WordPress is the dominant CMS player in the industry, it isn’t an eCommerce platform in itself. To make WordPress into an online store, you have to use its WooCommerce plugin.
WooCommerce is an open-source platform that offers a huge variety of themes and extensions, many of which are free. What’s great about these plugins is that they help fill in WooCommerce’s core product gaps. However, the addition of so many plugins can lead to unnecessary complexity and impact your site’s performance.
BigCommerce also has a WordPress plugin that can be integrated into the CMS platform. It allows you to take advantage of the flexibility of WordPress and the backend benefits of BigCommerce, such as abandoned cart recovery, coupons, and discounts.
WordPress is not self-hosted, so you will have to find a web host provider. The best web host for WordPress is one that comes with a one-click WordPress install.
Shopify
Shopify is perhaps one of the best-known SaaS eCommerce platforms. It features a simple interface and affordable pricing, making it a popular option for small businesses and startup merchants. However, it can also be used by more prominent brands.
The number of features available with this CMS depends on the type of plan you choose. For this reason, it’s essential to study the list of features carefully before signing up. However, all plans come with 24/7 support, a number of free store templates, and a separate POS system.
Shopify is self-hosted, so you don’t need an external web host.
Wix
As the leading drag-and-drop website building platform for online business, Wix is not technically an eCommerce CMS. However, website owners can add the commerce module if required. Wix offers a variety of templates, built-in features and doesn’t require any coding. For these reasons, it’s extremely appealing to beginners and non-coders. It’s also ideal if you have a limited range of products and want to get things going quickly. However, once you choose a template for your store, you can’t change it in the future.
Wix offers free hosting on a global content delivery network (CDN) that automatically directs users to their closest server for fast page loading.
Conclusion
When choosing an eCommerce CMS, you need to consider everything from marketing to design to technical capabilities, as well as your future needs. You should also consider your own abilities and how quickly you want to get your store up and running. Lastly, compare features and pricing, so you know you’re getting the best deal for what’s being offered.