With the intense competition and the ever-increasing demands among online, only the right combination of business model and eCommerce platform will survive. So, you have to choose a platform that meets your e-commerce store requirements as appropriate and as unique as your individual business model.

If you are planning to start an eCommerce platform, there are plenty of options available but choosing the right among all to streamline your e-commerce business to generate ROI is important. Also, it’s very important to choose the right one that can deliver robust user experience, should be SEO friendly to outshine on search engines, easy to use and can help you in achieving the desired e-commerce goals.

Here are the list of top 4 e-commerce platforms that will surely transform your ideas into a reality:

Magento

Without any doubt, Magento is the market pioneer in e-commerce development platforms with its reliability and scalability. This framework made its debut as Magento Go and later launched an updated version Magento 2.0. Magento acquired almost one-fourth over 29% of the market share.

It is an open source e-commerce platform that gives the highest level of flexible and versatile e-commerce store along with a complete customization of the content, functionality, and a feel of a web portal.

Acclaimed as the fastest growing platform amongst all, with several advanced features with

splendid add-ons and extensions. And it's ideal for enterprise-level businesses with the best user experience, and strong SEO support.

Many prominent names such as Liverpool F.C., Huawei, Burger King and Pepe Jeans have their e-commerce site built on Magento.

As it is fully packed with features sometimes it becomes clunky and resource-hungry. Therefore, you might have to allocate money and time for optimization.

If you don't know programming, it’s important to have a developer who knows the code in your team or else need to invest in third-party programmings.

Magento Pricing:

Community Edition – Free

Enterprise – NA

Woo commerce

WooCommerce is a free WordPress plugin with seamless and easy integration. It comes along with a secure payment gateway and a shopping cart. WooCommerce is a user-friendly e-commerce solution with a large number of plugins and themes available. It also has one of the largest communities available for the e-Commerce platform.

WooCommerce is fundamentally a WordPress plugin, so you'll have to install WordPress on your host, then install the WooCommerce plugin onto your e-commerce site. It automatically turns any WordPress website into a fully functional eCommerce store, with inventory management, product pages, and coupons.

If you are developing a content-based website, or you need to publish blogs on daily basis about your products and discounts, then WooCommerce is the best platform when compared with Shopify or Magento.

All WordPress themes technically work with WooCommerce, but it's not worthy unless you get one made just for WooCommerce. Another downside is only an expert can handle certain tasks, especially like SEO, security, hosting, and caching.

Installing WooCommerce is free, but integrating the shopping cart completely into the store requires additional investment on the WooCommerce theme, extra extensions, hosting, and domain name. Moreover, if you don't know WordPress, it’s difficult to use WooCommerce. And it lacks scalability, so it will slowdowns your e-commerce store functions as your business grows.

WooCommerce Pricing: Free

Shopify

Shopify is the best e-commerce platform with easy integration, quicker loading speed, ease of use, secure payment portals and comprehensive SEO friendly options. It offers essential functions like domain name set up, design customization, adding items, shopping and payment settings to dispatch their site in less time.

Not only this, with Shopify you can directly integrate your Facebook account in order to convert into your e-commerce store. Alongside you can able find out many ready-to-use custom templates to meet e-commerce store requirements.

In addition, Shopify delivers everything that is expected to launch a site straight from domain name to ship integration. So, you won't require any development team, Shopify support team is enough to get your work done.

Even with all the advantages of Shopify, the most noted downside is the additional transaction fee that you’ll need to pay even though you don't use Shopify Payment. Shopify's own coding language Liquid is another pitfall, as it needs extra pay for the customization.

Shopify Pricing:

Free trial of 14 days

Shopify Lite – $9/month

Basic Shopify – $29/month

Shopify – $79/month

Advanced Shopify – $299/month

Shopify Plus – NA

Opencart

Compared to others, OpenCart is fairly an easy to use and lightweight open source platforms. It's free and there is a decent community to turn to if you have problems when designing your store. If you are looking for a simple and easy to set an e-commerce platform with lack of technical knowledge, then OpenCart is for you.

Some of the best features of OpenCart e-commerce solution includes easy to use backend, feature-rich plugins, PCI Compliant, more than 20 payment gateways, reporting, a lesser load on server and more. Along with it offers a good set of highlights, which offers an organized way for order processing and a robust inventory functionality.

It has a user-friendly interface and furthermore packs its own 'How to utilize' manual for developing your e-commerce store more conveniently.

Because of the ease of use, the themes aren't expensive, and you definitely don't need any plugins so the overall cost of setting up a store typically decreases. And performance is not at all strong with OpenCart, so sometimes you need to get an extra plugin for this.

OpenCart Pricing: Free

The Verdict

For Enterprise level eCommerce stores with a huge volume of products, Magento is the right platform. Because of its complex store setup, cost and high technical management requirements, Magento isn’t recommended for SMBs.

WooCommerce is an easy option if you want to stick to WordPress websites and don't anticipate having a large, high-volume store.

If you’re a beginner level and needs a conventional e-commerce solution then you can benefit from Shopify. As it offers packages that range from $29 to $299 per month it’s easy to choose according to your requirements and your budget.

If you’re beginners, OpenCart is recommended as it doesn't take too much time to customize the e-commerce store from scratch. An experienced developer would rather avoid OpenCart also the customization options are less.