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Best E-commerce platforms to make money with
We regularly get this question from our clients, “What is the best E-commerce platform?”. That is the wrong question. Which E-commerce platform will make you the most money? We tend to see clients make the same binary decision over and over again between their legacy E-commerce system vs what the new expensive shiny option that their main competitor just moved to.
Here are a few questions to debate with your team:
If you just wanted to test our assumptions what would we look at: Shopify ($79 monthly), BigCommerce ($79 monthly), Woocommerce ($69 once plus hosting monthly), Squarespace ($40 monthly).
If you had more complex needs or need to connect to an ERP/manufacturing system we would look at Magento or Salesforce/Demandware.
If your organization needs to connect to SAP/Oracle than take on that level of pain.
What if you did not have time or did not want to build an E-commerce site: Amazon ($39 monthly +fees), Ebay (10% of sale), Etsy (8% of sale +25 cents), Walmart (15% of sales for most).
What option has the lowest ongoing costs? We see lots of debate around the setup costs of a new E-commerce system but if it costs 30% of your margin in ongoing fees it is no better than FBA by Amazon.
On which option is it cheaper to acquire a new customer ? We are seeing some clients introducing 80%-90% of their net new customers on Amazon and then upselling them to their .com site.
It is hard to predict the future so how easily can you cancel or change or upgrade?
Do you need to own/manage your data (cookies, email, addresses)? Or is it better for Shopify and Amazon to help manage CALOOPA and GDPR?
Which is better for you to build your brand on? For example, if your brand does a lot of video. Video + Shopify makes for a slow experience for users.
Each company has different needs but after serving 500+ clients we see four leaders again and again:
Shopify – Pros: Low cost and lots of functionality through marketplace apps. Cons: Can be slow, fees for 3rd party gateways, and upgrading to Shopify Plus will run you $1,200+.
Woocommerce – Pros: Integrates extremely well if you already have your marketing site on WordPress, low cost, open source, self hosted (so you can make it fast/high load) and great community. Cons: Self hosted, you need a developer, can be less stable when WordPress makes updates.
Amazon – Pros: This is where your best customers are, conversion rates are typically double digit (12%-24%), they drive traffic for you via SEO and media. Cons: Support is horrible and confusing, you need to watch metrics and fees closely, selling fees are higher.
Magento – Pros: You can do anything with it, open source, great community, free out of the box, now owned by Adobe. Cons: Complex, SEO is poor, needs good developers, can be more expensive to maintain over the long term.
Test and challenge your assumptions that you need to spend $250,000 dollars on a new E-commerce platform. How could you live with Shopify for $948 a year? Then you could use the rest to expose 830,173 people to your brand on Amazon for 30 cents a click. Which at low range 12% Amazon conversion rate would be an extra 99,620 new sales this year! Now that makes for a happy boss/team/year
Want more E-commerce sales this year?