Online (e-commerce) stores are a very popular viable business now a days. These stores can bring some great benefits to new business owners who want to offer their products to a wide audience. Among these e-commerce solutions, woo-commerce is most widely used platform with almost covering 28% of the online stores, has undoubtedly smashed its top.
According to Forrester report, since 2012, the e-commerce industry has projected its raise by 62% up till 2016. With this much chances of growth, it may be the best time for a Product owner to consider taking business online. Fortunately, there is a vast range of excellent e-commerce platforms which are alternatives to woo-commerce that offer best comprehensive setup tools and other benefits. But of course, all platforms are different and selection depends on the particular needs. Here, we’ll discuss some of them.
- Shopify
Shopify is one of the most popular e-commerce platforms used by Ecommerce businesses and Shopify Web Agencies. With an easy to use interface, it is a stable platform that helps the designers to design an eye catching website which runs efficiently on all devices. Shopify is often believed as the most efficient e-commerce platform. With a handy dashboard, one can customize the look of a website accordingly and can upload unlimited number of products. Moreover, this platform comes with an online app store, which offers more than 1,000 useful, free and paid apps.
Shopify facilitates developers through easy integrations for drop shipping companies and shipping carriers. The built-in mobile app lets the e-commerce business owner to easily receive payments and manage the store.
If you are thinking to begin an online business, Shopify is one of the best options to take a start and a big alternative to Woo-Commerce.
Pricing: Starts with $29/month (Basic Edition)
- SquareSpace
SquareSpace is one of the best platform to design a complete online store. It lets an online store owner to run the business from home with zero technical knowledge. SEO friendly support, website analytics and stats are among the best features of SquareSpace. It provides store owner with a comprehensive set of marketing tools to engage with his audience, get found across search and social, and grow his following. Here one can add unlimited products, discount codes, rich product description and upgrade pages, galleries, and blogs with unlimited bandwidth, storage, and contributors. SquareSpace gives easy Drag and Drop site builder which makes the navigation even smoother throughout the website. Its strength is in the design templates, which are mobile responsive and beautifully crafted, making a store clean and beautiful.
SquareSpace also works as an IT department, unlimited hosting, top-of-the-line security, an enterprise-grade infrastructure, and around-the-clock support. All those features and services are a huge help from SquareSpace for an entrepreneur to start his business online.
SquareSpace is an ideal platform to choose for those who are already in the e-business and also to the new comers.
Pricing: $12/month (Personal Plan)
- Miva
Miva is another enterprise e-commerce platform, heling users with the facility to modify the whole system. It is fully convenient for a small/medium business with modern enterprise methods and incredibly stable, remarkably backed platform. With Miva, a web developer can entirely customize the site according to the need. It allows the designers to create modern e-commerce websites with the dazzlingly creative user interface. It offers some great features like order processing, shipping fulfillment, customer relationship management and multi-channel marketplace inventory.
This platform is getting widely recognized and can be an alternative of woo-commerce.
Pricing: Starts with $79.95/month (Starter)
- CrateJoy
CrateJoy is another unique platform trending globally, which runs a subscription e-commerce business. It is a complete solution for those online store owners, who are interested to develop an online subscription based business. CrateJoy allows business owners and web developers to design a customized website accordingly to sell subscription boxes. It offers subscriptions for every life-style. Moreover, with CrateJoy, online business owners can easily do email marketing, ad retargeting and affiliate marketing in the marketplace.
CrateJoy is exclusively tailored to deliver products swiftly using subscription box services worldwide. If an entrepreneur is running a website and intend to switch into an online store for a subscription based business model, CrateJoy is an ideal and most trusted choice that helps switching the current website into an online store or migrating an online store to this platform.
Pricing: Starts with $39/month (Community Edition)
- LightSpeed
LightSpeed is a very easy to use e-commerce platform to develop an online business. It is designed for real life goals to deliver customers a consistently pleasant shopping experience. It comes with a handy dashboard which offers a good variety of customization and SEO tools that ranks an e-commerce business higher and faster in search engines.
LightSpeed makes inventory management processes faster and simpler, from purchasing inventory to monitoring stock to moving items and more. Users can also generate high-level sales reports or customizable in-depth data reports, which give them high quality information they can use to make smart and well-informed business decisions.
LightSpeed surprise its users with the exciting tools such as LightSpeed Onsite for desktop, LightSpeed POS for restaurants, the LightSpeed retail system, and LightSpeed e-commerce system. With LightSpeed, online business owners get the tools they need to perform operations, including quoting, ordering, and invoicing.
Pricing: $99/month (Small Plan)
If you are looking to start an online business or researching for a solution, then go over all these platforms and observe which one suits better to your business as an alternative to woo-commerce. However if you want to get your store up quickly then my personal recommendation is to get with Shopify or CrateJoy as these platforms are incredibly stable and certain Apps connected to add appeal and success to your e-commerce business.
