How to Choose the Most Suitable E-Commerce Platform For Your Business

Ownership

Full ownership. Your e-commerce business will be bound by few technical/product constraints. However, full ownership also means that you are responsible for developing, designing, and later maintaining your e-commerce solutions, sitting atop the open-source platform.

A separate tech team will be required to support and maintain the day-to-day side of your operations.

Shared ownership. SaaS e-commerce platforms provide you with all the basic tools to launch a web store – hosting, design templates, integrated checkout andpayment gateways, CMS/CRM systems, etc. Most of them arelow to no-code, meaning that you don’t need an IT team to set up a store.

The provider takes care of infrastructure optimization and your service fee also covers different levels of support from their end.

Customization

Virtually unlimited. Most open source e-commerce platforms have few constraints in terms of UX/UI design and user-flows. You can code a fully custom check-out experience or add a customERP moduleto support your operations. Same goes foradvanced real-time customer analytics solutions or ML-powered recommendation engines.

Constrained. Even the best e-commerce platforms in this category offer limited customization options beyond the store design. You do not have direct access to the platform’s source code. Thus, you cannot implement fully out-of-the-box changes such as custom navigation or on-site search experience.

Integration/Flexibility

High. You can select between pre-made open-source extensions/integrations and custom ones, created through external APIs.

Bounded. While SaaS-based e-commerce platforms do offer an array of plugins, extensions, and integrations with the most popular business services via branded marketplaces, in most cases, you cannot develop any custom integrations.

Customer Data Collection & Ownership

Complete. Collect, store and operationalize an endless volume of transactional and on-site customer data. For instance, you can deployadvanced big data analytics solutionsto predict product demand, suggest personalized cross-sells/up-sells, customize discounts and mine other insights to improve your store’s conversions and profitability.

Note: you will also be responsible for informing the customers about your data collection processes and securely storing sensitive data in your systems (in line with the local industry regulations).

Partial. Most solutions come with pre-furnished customer, sales, marketing, and financial analytics suits. Integrations are possible with more advanced tools. But again, these are limited. Plus, the majority of customer data resides in the company’s servers. Thus, deploying any advanced analytics solutions can be problematic since you won’t have access to complete records.

Hosting

Not included. You are responsible for finding the optimal hosting provider, developing a supporting infrastructure and performing housekeeping tasks to maintain high service levels. Most likely, you’ll need a separate tech support team to handle monitoring, storage and cloud resources, cost-optimization, etc.

Check our previous post for a quick comparison between AWS, Azure and Google Cloud as cloud hosting providers.

Includedin your monthly bill. Typically, you get charged a different rate depending on your monthly visitors’ count, and number of listed products or sales.

Such e-commerce platforms also take care of ensuring stable website performance, high page loading time and low speed. However, since you’ll be sharing space with a bunch of other stores, issues may arise whenever you are experiencing a major traffic spike.

Case in point: Shopify could not sustain a major load during a recent, viral, product launch orchestrated by Jeffree Star Cosmetics, resulting in poor customer experience.

Support and Maintenance

Your Responsibility. As mentioned above, you will be fully responsible for ensuring stable performance of your online storefront and performing updates/upgrades.

Shared Responsibility. The SaaS company releases regular patches and updates to the platform. However, it’s your responsibility to install them and make other necessary adjustments to your store as per their recommendations.

Security and Compliance

Also Your Responsibility. You will need to conduct comprehensive audits to ensure that all ends are protected.

Fully Managed. SaaS providers assume all the responsibility for cybersecurity and PCI compliance.

Payments Costs and Experience

Owned. All of the best open-source e-commerce platforms let you select among several premade payment integrations and add new payment gateways. This lets you offer a variety of local payment options to your customers and avoid costly lock-ins with a single provider.

Plus, you can customize the payment experience to optimize conversions and support innovative payment solutions such as pay-later services/instant financing (e.g., Klarna), support mobile wallet payments (Apple Pay, Google Pay, WeChat Pay/AliPay) or payments in cryptocurrency.

Pre-made. A SaaS provider will let you choose among several payment integrations and will charge a fixed fee per each transaction. In most cases, you won’t be able to negotiate a high payment volume discount directly with the payment services provider.

Also, you will have to settle for the payment flow and checkout experience designed by the SaaS provider since customizations are rarely possible.

Time-to-Market

Moderate. To get your store up off the ground, you’ll need to invest in e-commerce development services as open-source platforms require a lot of upfront design and development work. Every custom feature and integration will require more development time.

A reasonable launch period for a small e-store is between 4-8 weeks.

Fast. SaaS e-commerce platforms for small businesses let you set up a simple shop in a day or two. You can use pre-made templates and UI elements to drag & drop the key store pages, integrate payments in a few clicks and use different extensions and plugins to add extra features.

A reasonable launch period for a small e-store is between 1-5 days.

Best Suited For

Enterprise clients

SMEs and startups

Some of the best open-source enterprise e-commerce platforms are:

• Magento Open Source
• Workarea Open Source
• Shopware
• OroCommerce
• Reaction Commerce

The best in class PaaS e-commerce platforms are as follows:

• Optimizely Commerce Cloud – the choice we recommend to our enterprise clients.
• Oracle Commerce Cloud
• Magento Commerce

The popular SaaS e-commerce platforms include:

• Shopify and Shopify Plus, adapted for enterprise clients.
• Big Commerce
• Big Cartel
• 3dcart