Meta description: Find the perfect ecommerce website development services platform for your business. Discover a range of reliable options tailored to meet your unique requirements, from flexible customization and scalable growth potential to seamless payment integration and intuitive user interfaces. Maximize your online business’s success with the right ecommerce platform

Now that you’ve researched, it’s time to choose your Ecommerce Website Development Services, build your store, and launch your small business.

Most new online stores today choose to go with a SaaS solution. And yes — that includes B2B businesses!

This is because there are:

• A low cost to entry,
• No costly development or technical headaches, and
• A scalable framework that’s designed to help you grow.

Look for a platform with a great community of people running it and using it who will testify to their success on the solution.

What is an Ecommerce Website Development?

An Ecommerce Website Development Services platform is a software application that allows online businesses — small or enterprise — to easily manage their website, marketing, sales, and operations. Think of it as the central hub or home base of your business.

The future of Ecommerce Website Development Services.

As ecommerce technologies continue to advance, on-premise technology is falling increasingly behind, and open SaaS ecommerce platforms, are leaping forward.

As brands demand more native user experience (UX) features and product or backend optimizations, a massive shift has occurred to SaaS and headless commerce.

Brands can market materially faster with SaaS and headless commerce in an average of 55 days.

SaaS Ecommerce Website Development Services

SaaS Ecommerce Website Development Services remove much of the complexity from running an online business, such as:

• Product updates,
• Security,
• Hosting,
• PCI compliance, and
• The SaaS platform manages every other task of managing your software.

Headless commerce is an ecommerce solution that offers online businesses more control over their storefront.

Woah — what does that mean exactly?

Instead of running your entire website on an ecommerce platform, you can use a content management system (CMS), like WordPress, to design your website experience. Then, you plug in an ecommerce shopping cart solution, to serve as the cart.

This option gives your store more customization and personalization options — all while being powered by the best ecommerce platform.

Web Hosting

There are only two ways ecommerce sites can be hosted: self-hosted and cloud.

Both options are different from the platform in and of itself.

Self-hosted ecommerce platforms.

Running an Ecommerce Website Development Services using a self-hosted solution can be costly, as it often needs the developers to maintain and update the website. In addition, you may need external help to make updates or edits, which essentially strips away control of your online store.

While the learning curve is steep with this option, there are benefits like:

• More control over your online retail platform,
• Greater visibility of your data, and
• A better understanding of data security.

If you have a very complex business, look at this option.

If that’s not you, shift your focus to cloud-hosted solutions for your ecommerce store.

Cloud-hosted Ecommerce Website Development .

In simple terms, cloud-hosted ecommerce platforms manage your store’s uptime — the period a service (or a website, in our case) is available online.

Cloud-hosted ecommerce platforms manage 99.9% uptime annually and have had four years of zero downtime during Black Friday and Cyber Monday, the highest-trafficked times of the year.

5 Tips To Help You Choose an Ecommerce Website Development

Every online shop has unique needs, and your ecommerce platform should reflect that.

There are, however, some native, out-of-the-box ecommerce tools and features that should come with your platform:

• An in-product Ecommerce Website Development Service with free, user-friendly site themes and drag-and-drop functionality.
• Extensive app store with pre-built integrations and add-ons (e.g., social media, email marketing) with best-in-class service providers.
• Mobile-optimized site or mobile app with a UX-friendly checkout.
• PCI compliance.
• Visibility into your inventory management across all sales channels.
• SEO tools and fully customizable URLs throughout the site (so you can rank on leading search engines).
• Built-in basic ecommerce features, including promotions and discounts, analytics, catalog management, etc.
• Great customer support.
• Abandoned cart recovery tools.
• Ability to sell unlimited products (e.g., digital or physical products).

To be competitive in the market, you’ll want to make sure you choose Ecommerce Website Development software with advanced features native to the platform — at no additional cost.

Considering this, let’s dive into the five tips to help small business owners find the right platform for their ecommerce business.

Ask the right questions and start a free trial.

Like most steps in starting an online business, you’ll want to be prepared with questions to help you make the right decision for your store.

You can connect with sales and support staff to get your burning questions answered or test out features yourself .

Either way, make sure you go through the following Ecommerce Website Development and planning checklist for each platform you consider:

Ecommerce Platform Functionality Checklist

When evaluating solutions for your business, confirm the ecommerce platform:

• Has everything you need, including drop-down menus or an editor.
• Is it easy to use — and, most importantly, do you feel comfortable using it?
• Offers a reliable hosting solution. That means no worries about your store crashing on high-traffic days!
• Offers incredible support — at no extra cost.

Even after you get the answers to these questions, ensure you take the ecommerce solution for a spin before signing up for a plan.

The remaining steps are some of the top concerns for new store owners when looking for an ecommerce platform.

Compare the cost of platforms.

Ecommerce platforms are not free.

Each ecommerce platform organizes all of this on the backend for easy access.

However, Ecommerce platform pricing models differ, and you must research your options. Pay special attention to what is included at each price point to ensure you capitalize on the most value for your spending.

For instance, it costs roughly $6,000–$20,000 more per year for Shopify merchants to achieve feature parity with the out-of-the-box functionality.

Determine which platform is best for your store’s design.

Your site’s design is a fundamental part of your business.

It is your first foot forward with your consumers. And today’s consumers are used to excellent web design and UX.

When starting up an online store, finding a theme or template that best represents your brand is important. There’s no need to have to learn advanced CSS or HTML coding.

You’ll want to find a theme or template that is customizable enough for immediate differentiation at launch and for long-term growth over time.

Test store functionality and ease of use.

When it comes to ease of use, you want to be able to do your job (typically marketing your brand) without having to learn a crazy amount of coding and greater technological knowledge.

This means the platform must be easy to navigate, set up properly, and used over time.

Setup Flow

Does the platform offer an easy setup flow, explaining everything you need to do before you launch, including loading in products, setting up taxes, domain name registration, payment processing, and the like?

Product and SKU Management

Bulk uploading products from CSV files is a much faster way to add products to your catalog once you have the basics. You’ll also want to keep tabs on an unlimited product or SKU count.

Be sure the platform you are on allows this, especially if you have a large or growing catalog.

One-Click App Marketplace

You’ll want many one-click apps or built-in integrations to help you grow without hiring developers. Use your platform’s app store to browse and integrate tools you want or need to use. Making sure these tools connect and update in real-time is essential.

Centralized Channel Management

The current state of ecommerce thrives on omnichannel strategies. Whether you realize it or not, today’s customers are shopping everywhere and anywhere –– Instagram, Etsy, Facebook, Amazon, you name it –– and your product must be exposed to your audience across various channels.

Once you launch and see sales, you’ll likely want to expand quickly into additional channels.

Determine the scalability and customizability of the platform.

Because you’ve planned your business so well, over time, you will grow. And as you grow, you’ll need additional support from your ecommerce platform.

What kind of support?

Well, that is hard to predict. Every business is unique. Many brands use APIs to customize and automate their stores based on their needs.

Businesses just starting are still at this point, but you want to plan for it if you intend to scale (and if you’re reading this, then you probably do).

Plan well for this stepping stone and look for platforms with trusted and fast APIs.