
Best E-commerce Platforms
When it comes to business in today’s world, e-commerce has become a very integer part of buying and selling as transactions valuated at billions of dollars are being made online every single month. Certainly, you cannot be left out of this trend as every single brick and mortar businesses are finding a way to tap into the power of the internet.
S today, I am going to be telling you some of the most preferable and capable platforms today that you can use to successfully run and effectively manage your e-commerce store.
Thanks to technological advancement, you do not need to be a tech guru or have a huge budget to take your business online, all you need is the right information.
So basically, the e-commerce website we should have in mind is something that have the ability to display out products: whether a physical or digital product, or a single product or a catalogue of products.
Secondly, we should be able to receive order and also payments from the website.
These are the two major things that we need from an e-commerce website, however, there are other things that will come with it like the ability to store customer information as well as encouraging upsells at checkout.
So how exactly do we build such websites, I would be taking about the three most common software you can use to
do so.
WOOCOMMERCE
Woocommerce is a wordpress plugin that can completely transform your wordpress website into a fully functional e-commerce store.
Oh yes, woocommerce is often rank by experts as the theird most power engines for running e-commerce websites in 2020.
With woocommerce, you can built a store as complex as amazon or that as simple as any sales page you have seen.
It comes with a fully customizable options as well as other add-on that can increase the capability and features of your website.
For instance, there is a packing slip add-on that automatically generates a packing slip whenever an order is made, so all you have to do is to print it out. The packing slip can also be pre customized to fit your brand perfectly.
Certainly, there is no bound when it comes to running and e-commerce website with woocommerce.
GETTING STARTED
To start building an e-commerce website using woocommerce, you will need a domain name as well as a web hosting plan.
Once you got to two things ready, you can then install wordpress which is a free content management software and then activate the woocommerce plugin.
For a great and smooth user experience, it is best you get an expert to set things up for you.
One great advantage of using woocommerce is that it has a user friendly backend dashboard, meaning you can easily manage your stocks without any technical experience.
SHOPIFY
Shopify is an online system built to help people set up their e-commerce stores within minutes. It is virtually as powerful as woocommerce or any other store builder in the world and is already and established brand as you may have heard of it in the past.
To get started with shopify, all you need to do is visit their website and sign up for a package that fits your needs.
They also offer a free trial just in case you want to be sure of what you are going into.
Once you sign up, you are taken through a survey type of setup that will instantly be used to build your e-commerce store.
One of the great advantage of shopify over woocommerce is that you will not need to think of any technical stuff or hiring a web designer as the companies takes care of your website to give you the best experience.
FLUTTERWAVE STORE
This is an option you will not see anywhere. Flutterwave is a payment gateway for Africans and just recently they gave their customers the ability to create catalogue of their product right on the flutterwave website.
This means that if you selling just a few items, you can create a fully functional store on flutterwave and use their payment gateway to receive payment.
In this case, you do not need to speed a dime as everything is made available for free. All you need is to visit their official website and create a flutterwave account and you can start selling immediately your account is approved.
Conclusion
So that we be all, from prostechnologies, we strongly advice you find every way possible to take a part of your business online because as bill gates would say, in the nearest future, there will be two classes of business, Those that are online and those that are out of business.