The number of online businesses is increasing every year making the use of eCommerce CMSs expand globally. Having the right CMS helps build a strong foundation in setting up your online business. A good CMS can help boost sales and ensure business success. Before we look at the top eCommerce CMS platforms, let’s briefly define CMS, its main features, and benefits.
What’s CMS?
Content Management System (CMS) is a tool used to manage the creation as well as the adjustment of digital content. Owners of online stores use a content management system to place and manage content easily. Some of the content that is placed in CMS includes videos, images, text, marketing materials, documents, and others.
What Are the Features of CMS
There are many features of a content management system and the common ones you would find in a majority of the CMSs are SEO, integration of audit logs, wizards’ installation and upgrading, template customization to change designs, and collaboration platform. You may also find features like:
- User and group functionality
- Modularity and extensibility – being able to add modules and extensions
- Version management
- Reduced need for doing code from scratch
The Benefits of CMS
Content management systems present many benefits to users. CMSs are the foundational tools for powering online business websites. Among the benefits of CMSs are:
- User-friendly: Content management systems are designed to be user-friendly allowing admins or people in the backend to upload data and files easily. There is no complex process in content optimization.
- Easy integration: Content management systems offer a simple, fast, and easy process of integrating content through the website. The tools are integrated with dynamic content that allows the store owners to update and publish information as required.
- Work for different business sizes: Regardless of the size of the business, you can find a CMS platform that serves your business needs. The content management system brings scalability, simplicity, and flexibility to various businesses – small and large.
- Access from anywhere: Administrators can access CMS platforms from anywhere as long as they have a computing device connected. Storeowners can do remove work and accomplish their goals while on the go.
Top Six eCommerce CMSs for Online Businesses
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Magento
A famous eCommerce platform, Magento is developed in PHP allowing storeowners to easily build their online businesses. Magento supports businesses of all sizes. It’s ideal for mobile commerce, Omnichannel, and B2B business needs. Users of Magento can now enjoy a faster, highly performing new platform – Magento 2 – by hiring professional Magento developers, like Dinarys, and migrating their stores to the new platform. Over $100 billion gross merchandise volume is realized every year by Magento.
The big Magento developer community of more than 300,000 developers allows store owners and users of the platform to get the support they need.
Placement Context – The ability to integrate third-party extensions and plugins with Magento enhances the digital experience of users. Reach out to the best Magento agency to start maximizing the potential of your ecommerce website.
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WooCommerce
An increasingly popular eCommerce platform, WooCommerce has been experiencing tremendous growth in recent years. According to Barn2 statistics, WooCommerce has a market share of 22 percent of the first 1 million websites using eCommerce platforms. WooCommerce is able to transform a WordPress site into an online store. It offers many extensions and themes. The massive user community of WordPress allows the users of WooCommerce to be able to get support. By using the plugins and extensions, the users can bring in features to the platform to enhance its usability and functionality or even performance.
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Shopify
It’s estimated that over 800,000 businesses utilize the Shopify platform, according to a report by Shopify. Being a flexible eCommerce platform, it has lots of features. In 2018, Shopify had a gross merchandise volume of $41.1 billion. The platform is considered an all-in-one tool where merchants are able to set up their stores, manage their products, as well as handle the orders from a single dashboard. It’s free to integrate Shopify with Amazon and eBay – you don’t need custom coding to do this.
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BigCommerce
A prominent tool for powering online business websites, BigCommerce has multiple built-in features as well as customization options. The platform has over 55,000 merchants of different sizes and famous brands like Matori, Toyota, and Martha Steward trust this platform and have used it for many years. BigCommerce is suitable for fast-growing and large businesses. The tool provides scalability for e-stores and offers advanced SEO tools and multi-channel integration. Using the platform allows store owners to easily create brand awareness on different social channels.
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OpenCart
An easy-to-use platform, OpenCart is an open-source platform. It allows users to build their e-stores without spending a lot of money. OpenCart offers the e-business community customizable plugins with no monthly charges. Users only need to install, choose their template, and add products.
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PrestaShop
An open-source eCommerce platform for online merchants, PrestaShop has over 300,000 e-businesses using the platform, according to PrestaShop Statistics. Store owners are able to install and customize the tool easily. As a user, you can select a self-hosted version or even a fully-hosted version. Depending on your preferences, you can determine what level of control you want by choosing the version that suits your needs and budget. Users can also extend the tool with themes and plugins.
Conclusion
There are among to best eCommerce platforms that store owners can use to set up and manage their stores online. Each of the platforms has its own pros and cons so when choosing one over the other, you have to understand its features and what’s it’s designed to serve. You may find that some platforms are designed for already established, big online stores with thousands of products for sale while others are designed to cater to the small and medium-sized storeowners who sell a small number of products.
Again, the features and level of security of the eCommerce CMS is another thing to check. You may also want to examine the hosting – so that you are not pigeonholed in a particular hosting plan just because you are using a particular CMS. If you plan to set up an online store, these are some of the eCommerce platforms that you can explore. Make sure you do your own research to see which one suits your needs. Get a CMS that allows scalability – you can downsize and upsize your platform depending on the prevailing online market conditions. Otherwise, a good eCommerce CMS should be easy to work with and has all the features you need for the store. The platform should also be easy to integrate with extensions from third-parties to help enhance the experience of the user (UX).
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