Are you searching for the best social ecommerce platform for your business? It’s a big decision and one that’s going to have a long-term effect on your venture going forward. It’s also a tough decision, with a lot of different variables. You need to consider a wide variety of factors and functionalities before choosing which social ecommerce platform is right for you.
Here are some of the top eCommerce platforms in the market:
Wix
Wix is a flexible, drag-and-drop website builder. It can adjust to any of your website creation needs.
The best part about using Wix as an ecommerce platform is its simplicity. Your ecommerce site will get the same drag-and-drop benefits as a traditional Wix website. You just need to choose an ecommerce plan to accept payments online.
For those of you who are already using Wix, you can always upgrade your plan to activate the ecommerce functionality.
Your Wix store manager makes it easy to manage inventory, track orders and communicate with your customers. With its integrations with bookkeeping software like Quickbooks, Wix really shines as an ecommerce website builder.
Wix has more than 500 ecommerce templates for you to choose from. You can customise your storefront with collections, galleries, related products and a customer wishlist.
You’ll also be able to set up global shipping rules from multiple carriers. As of right now, Wix does not support dropshipping. But their website says a dropshipping platform is coming soon.
Unlike other social ecommerce platforms, Wix doesn’t take any transaction commissions. So the only fees will come from the payment processor.
Wix offers four different ecommerce plans, all of which accept online payments:
- Business Basic — $23 per month
- Business Unlimited — $27 per month
- Business VIP — $49 per month
- Enterprise — $500 per month
All plans come with unlimited bandwidth. You’ll get extra storage at each pricing tier.
Wix is new to the ecommerce market, so the platform isn’t perfect yet. But they’ve definitely made improvements as of late. You’re able to do things like target abandoned shopping carts, which wasn’t always on option.
One such improvement is Corvid by Wix. This is a web development platform that allows you to develop apps using the Wix editor. This might result in better integrations with CRMs in the future.
Squarespace
Squarespace is another popular website builder. It has one of the best social ecommerce platforms built-in to every plan except for the entry-level option.
With Squarespace, building a beautiful website is easy. The templates are modern and fully customisable. You can even install multiple templates to one website and switch between them at any time.
Squarespace may be an option for new ecommerce shops that are unsure of what the future holds. That’s because this platform makes it easy for you to scale or pivot the direction of your sales strategy.
Squarespace has a lot of ecommerce benefits. Here are some highlights to give you an idea of what you’re getting:
- Unlimited products
- Flexible product variants
- Sell physical and digital products
- Manage subscriptions
- Multiple payment methods
- Mobile-optimised checkouts
- Gift cards
- Abandoned cart recovery
The drawback of using Squarespace is that there isn’t an app store to add any other integrations or extensions; what you see is what you get. You’ll find that the most popular and useful apps are already built-in, but just make sure you check the full feature list if you need or want something specific.
These are the Squarespace plans and prices:
- Personal — $12 per month
- Business — $18 per month
- Basic Commerce — $26 per month
- Advanced Commerce — $40 per month
As mentioned earlier, the Personal plan does not have ecommerce capabilities. You can sell online using the Business plan, but you’ll pay an additional 3% in transaction fees to Squarespace and won’t get all of the useful features of social ecommerce platforms.
In case of the Basic Commerce plan, there are no transaction fees, and you’ll benefit from customer accounts, checkouts on your own domain, ecommerce analytics, social media selling, POS and other features that you’d expect for an ecommerce shop.
For gift cards, abandoned cart recovery, subscriptions and a few other higher-level features, you’ll need to sign up for the Advanced Commerce plan.
3DCart
3DCart isn’t nearly as popular as some of social ecommerce platforms like Shopify or BigCommerce. However, 3DCart is a great option to consider for advanced ecommerce users.
3DCart could be an option for those who have built online stores in the past. If you have experience in the ecommerce industry, 3DCart has capabilities that you can take advantage of.
They don’t offer a drag-and-drop builder, so you’ll need to have a basic understanding of coding and development to customise your themes and templates. But this makes 3DCart a strong choice for any company that has the resources for tech or development departments.
3DCart stands out as one of the best social ecommerce platforms with built-in SEO tools. Here’s an overview of the pricing for its plans.
Similar to BigCommerce, each plan has restrictions in online sales before you’re automatically upgraded to the next tier. Those limits are $50k, $100k, $500k, and $1 million, respectively, for each plan.
Other top features and benefits of 3DCart include:
- No transaction fees
- 24/7 customer support
- 200+ payment gateways
- Integrations with third-party online marketplaces
- Unlimited bandwidth
- Web hosting
- Free domain for one year
One of the drawbacks of 3DCart is that the admin dashboard for managing your site isn’t that user-friendly. Lots of themes and designs are outdated as well.
All 3DCart plans come with a 15 day free trial and are backed by a 30-day satisfaction guarantee.
WooCommerce
WooCommerce is a bit different to the other social ecommerce platforms. It’s an ecommerce plugin made for WordPress, as opposed to an all-in-one ecommerce platform.
But with nearly 80 million downloads, WooCommerce is the world’s most popular ecommerce solution. Nearly 30% of all online stores across the globe are powered by WooCommerce.
With WooCommerce, any website running on WordPress can be turned into an ecommerce store.
WooCommerce is free to download and install to your WordPress site. But it requires you to have your domain, hosting and WordPress account already set up. Then it’s just as simple as installing any other WordPress plugin.
You can customise your store by adding 300+ extensions from the WooCommerce Extensions Store.
This is where you’ll integrate payment processors, subscription tools, and store management features. Lots of these extensions are free, but others are priced up to $300 per extension.
Since WooCommerce is run via WordPress, the customisation and capabilities for your online store are virtually limitless. You’ll only need to add features that you plan to use, so you won’t have to worry about anything else cluttering your dashboard.
It is a good option for content-based websites, meaning the primary function of your site is not the ecommerce capabilities.