The World of Online Businesses

With 44% of the global population becoming internet users, this year in 2016, and an expected annual growth rate of this percentage of internet users by 25 %, the world has seen the emergence of many online platforms through which businesses across the globe have successfully traded and facilitated trading of their products and services. It is predicted that the business-to-business e-commerce industry is valued at $1trillion and on the other hand the business-to-business e-commerce industry is estimated to be valued at $1506 billion in 2018.

The world of online businesses has, although, vastly widened the reach of businesses and made transactions hassle-free and convenient for buyers but it also faces issues such as decreased speed of loading with huge traffic, occurrences of errors, online theft and user-unfriendly interfaces and workflows of an e-commerce website, which eventually drives customers away and furthermore, drops revenues. In addition to customer satisfaction challenges, the online merchant faces revenue deficits when his/her e-commerce website development and maintenance costs outdo sales.

Such challenges makes it imperative for potential entrepreneurs,wholesalers,entrepreneurs wanting to shift or expand to online stores and existing owners of e-commerce websites to know the most suitable platforms for their businesses and make use of the most ideal e-commerce website development services.

Here is a description of each of the prominent e-commerce platforms and their suitability to different kinds of business setups.

Shopify- Since Shopify hosts e-commerce platforms, the process of e-commerce development becomes relatively hassle-free for a business owner who is in the nascent stage and does not want to worry about site hosting and safety. With five different plans namely, lite, basic, pro, unlimited and plus, Shopify caters to merchants with different needs and budgets. For a more customized theme, a developer can tweak the html and css code for a theme and can incorporate third party integrations, giving additional functionality.It has a good seo reputation as well.

Magento- An e-commerce platform which is highly scalable, implying no platform migration in future for players who have expansion in mind. It can handle stock keeping units as large as 700k and even 1m.The platform is an open source software but its complexity demands professional help from a magento store development company.Its high seo reputation at a time when 44% of online purchases begin with an online search, is a boon.The platform can be integrated with other CMSes such as WordPress too.

Drupal- Drupal is a scalable and highly customizable platform, offering as many as 16000 modules, which render functionality such as meta tag for better search engine rankings and much more. These modules are relatively free or of low cost. Drupal cannot be integrated with older content management systems such as WordPress since it is not compatible with most of them. Drupal also takes less loading time for large sites.

Joomla-The platform is comparatively easily customizable and less expensive to be built and maintained.Though its less complexity offers intermediate safety (ie not as good a safety as provided by the more complex, Magento), it demands low maintenance costs making it ideal for small businesses.The platform offers 8000 plugins, providing additional functionality to a basic Joomla site.

Prestashop-The platform is easily customizable and comes with 300 features and offers 1000 modules for additional functionality.The modules, although are relatively expensive. It offers minimum scalability, making it ideal for small and medium businesses.

So, a business must look at its own current needs and future plans in order to choose the most ideal e-commerce platform which can prove to be both, beneficial and suitable for the business.

The author works for a leading web development company and is an expert in rendering professional website design for all types businesses.