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Coming back to the age old discussion on how to choose a platform to build an ecommerce platform. Ecommerce websites are more intuitive and need more care and research unlike building a representational website.

Apart from the user experience that drives your sales. You have to plan for the functionality that you require now and the budgetary constraints inherently involved in setting up your own ecommerce website.

There are multiple tools and platforms for the Ecommerce stores to choose from. Gone are the days when majority of the users line up in front of a shop for their daily necessities. With the Advent of Digitization in India after the de monetization , many ecommerce businesses have sprung up to meet the shift of consumer mindset. Bigger players started focusing on the Indian market and the opportunities this country avails. Alibaba and Amazon have grown their operations substantially in the past few years. New Payment Gateways have taken charge of the hassle free transactions between the vendors and consumers.

So, How do you start an Ecommerce business in 2020 with so many opportunities at your disposal ?

1. The Amazon Way

The company that has been ruling the ecommerce world is obviously your first option. In the last year Amazon’s website has gobbled up 30.7% of  the world’s total internet traffic is a measure of their sheer dominance. Amazon provides great benefits:

• Humungous sales potential, Amazon India clocks a 281Million user visits in the past 6 months . You gotta be where the market exists. Many users mentioned that they have an amazon shop despite doing well on their website.
  Trivia : Jio Mart is doing 250,000 orders per day, Big Basket and Amazon pantry are doing 220,000 and 150,000 orders just in the grocery sector.

2. Woocommerce
   WooCommerce is the market leader in the ecommerce industry , it powers 22% of online stores across the globe.
   One factor to consider woocommerce is that, it has a huge community of developers and creators giving it the edge over any other ecommerce development platform for the ease of getting plugins and themes which are functionally superior. You can essentially do anything and everything on a woocommerce powered store. Owing to the plethora of developers in this space and the customization flexibility wordpress provides marketing automation is very fluid and easy to setup in woocommerce.
   Pros:
   • It is highly customizable
   • It is free of cost
   • Best platform to handle the SEO of your store
   • 1-Click Selling Apps Available
   • Huge community of developers and support available
3. Cons:
   • It’s not plug and play and you would probably need a developer or agency to handle it for you.
   • security concerns loom over woo commerce every now and then
4. How To Choose An Ecommerce Platform
   What to consider when you look at a Ecommerce platform
   • Server side loading times
   • ease of use
   • community support
   • customization support
   • SEO friendliness
   • upselling & cross-selling
   • product page functionality
   • integrations and apps
5. Since wordpress and woocommerce are free . I need not pay anything to get my store live and run it ?
   Not really, You still have to pay for the hosting monthly to your hosting provider. Hosting is the web space that you use to place your website . You would also need to pay an annual fee to acquire the domain .
   If there is any specific functionality that you need which you or your developer cannot create. Then yes, a subscription or one-time purchase of that would be necessary. But, there is a high chance you will find pretty much any plugin that you need in wordpress that is free of cost with a few tweaks to it, you can get what you want.

Features

• It is pretty easy to setup your Email campaigns for abandoned carts and to send drip campaigns through mail chimp integrationss

• Easy to set up sendpulse integrations for the much needed push notifications , as easy as embedding the code in the pages.

• Ideally you would need a chat bot to answer queries in your support page

• Plethora of payment gateway integration options with payment gateways like razor pay, amazon pay, instamojo etc

• Like all pages on wordpress, access to an easy page builder like elementor or wpPagebakery

• Up-sells and cross-sells at any point of time in your customer journey flow

•Plethora of SEO tools like google analytics, just install Google sitekit and you are good to go with the analytics part. You have to set up all the tools within it though.

• Shipping categories

• tax rates are easily adjustable

• You have thousands of products that you have to upload ? No worries. Just import a csv file and woocommerce does the work for you.

• Also maintain customer advocacy through user ratings and reviews.

• Integrating coupons with woocommerce is a very easy task. It opens up the options of affiliate marketing for your store and drive more conversions.

• Wanna leverage display ads by adding pictures to your website which is already geenrating a good traffic . Add them to a widget and you are good to go.

Conclusion :

Many people avoid woocommerce for the ease of use that shopify or bigcommerce provides. Not knowing the right developer or unable to maintain or unwilling to maintain a team can be the reasons. If you do not want to put in the time to learn woocommerce or delegate it to someone. Shopify or squarespace might be the way to go. But research shows many ecommerce companies do need management services as owners are swamped with orders and other managerial works, going with a trusted developer to build and manage it for you is cheaper . One important thing to mention is 80% of the work in building an ecommerce website is during the initial phase and doesn’t need much customization later.