If you’re planning to sell online, you’ll most probably need an ecommerce platform to do it. Depending on how much you’re selling, and how big your business it is and will grow, you have different options where more than a single “buy now” button is required.
When setting up an online store, it’s not simply about handling lots of products, but the ecommerce platform is required to take care of users and customers, work with third-party shipping companies, and manage payments.
It will depend on the nature of your business as well. You may want to build a dropsurfing or dropshipping business. The benefit of dropshipping is that you want to avoid handling the inventory and shipping of products.
One option is to develop your online store from scratch. But this will involve you to do all the coding of your website. Or you’ll have to hire a web developer to create your ecommerce website. Building something from zero up always takes time. Even after that you’ll spend hours and hours of testing until your website is bug-free.
A second option to use an existing platform. This is what many business owners do nowadays.
WordPress can be good choice of platform if you’re already familiar with how it works and how to set up a website. All you need is to add a few plugins (such as Woocommerce) to convert it an ecommerce website. Another plugin Yoast SEO would help to make your web pages more search engine friendly, because eventually you want your online store to show up in Google’s search results pages.
Another platform is Shopify. It’s a cloud-based website builder that let you quickly launch your online store without knowing how to code. If you’re into dropshipping, one of the suppliers where you’re going to source products from is Aliexpress. Shopify has this Oberlo app that can semi-automate the process. You can import products in bulk from Aliexpress to your store with this chrome extension Oberlo. This extension lets you use the Oberlo app button in Chrome web browser. You’ll want to get familiar with other Shopify apps because your ultimate goal is to increase your store’s sales or conversion rate. There are apps that would help with cart abandonment recovery by getting the “almost lost customers” to complete their purchases in the checkout process.
Of course there are a lot more platforms out there (including OpenCart, Magento, OScommerce, Zencart, and more). Many options would be suitable for building online stores. The choice usually would depend on how familiar you’re with that specific platform so that you can quickly launch your ecommerce store.
