Summer Nguyen | 08-21-2019
The growth of e-business is increasing like never before, and it is expected to boom in upcoming years. To build an online website, considering an eCommerce content management software platform is a wise choice. From the article, we introduce the most outstanding platforms that are used popularly. Building a strong foundation from the beginning will help you boost sales and hit business success quickly.
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Everything your business needs for growth
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A commerce platform that’s endlessly flexible, extensible, and scalable
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Shopify is a flexible, most popular eCommerce platform with tons of stand-out features. The platform is trusted by millions of businesses worldwide, generating billions of dollars in gross merchandise volume.
Shopify is regarded as an all-in-one eCommerce platform. Merchants can set up their online stores, manage their products, and handle all orders in a single dashboard. Shopify also allows you to manage multiple sales channels, including your own store, online marketplaces like Amazon and eBay, social media, and retail locations.
This is also a blog CMS ecommerce platform by default - which is great if you want to drive traffic to your store with SEO.
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Shopify also offers 2 more plans called “Shopify Lite”(Shopify Starter) and “Shopify Plus.” Check out Shopify’s full pricing and features here. There is also a Shopify free trial, which lasts for three days. After that, you can pay $1 for the first month of full access to Shopify’s features.
So who should use Shopify?
Shopify is a great option for those who want to start a CMS eCommerce website in the fastest and easiest way possible. The platform is highly versatile, and it supports a wide range of businesses. Shopify development services can further enhance your store’s functionality and design, allowing you to create a truly unique and customized shopping experience for your customers. Even if you’re new to website development or have a start-up with a business idea only, Shopify is where you can build a well-functioned website without hassles.
Magento is famous as the leading open-source eCommerce platform. The system is developed in PHP, which enables store owners to build a Magento website with ease. The platform supports all business sizes and meets business needs for B2B, Omnichannel, Mobile Commerce, etc. Besides, Magento allows integration with multiple extensions from third parties, creating distinct digital retail experiences.
The world eyewitnesses over $100 billion in gross merchandise volume handled annually by Magento. Magento has built a thriving community with more than 300,000 Magento developers around the globe. Furthermore, it offers the large Magento Marketplace, where multiple extensions are available to download. If you own an online shop that sells goods, Magento is surely worth checking out.
Mageplaza is proud to be a partner of Magento (Magento 2 Premier extension builder) and one of the leading extension providers for the Magento 2 platform. Experience tons of Magento 2 extensions here.
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Pricing: Starting price: Custom (Contact the support team to know)
So who should use Magento?
It’s undoubtedly that Magento is suitable for large-scale online business. If you’re running multiple storefronts and want to manage all of them through a single backend, Magento is the best choice for you.
Among numerous eCommerce software suppliers, BigCommerce is a prominent star for you to start an online business. With multiple built-in features and customization options, BigCommerce has attracted over 55,000 merchants of all sizes. Specifically, famous brands such as Toyota, Natori, and Martha Stewart have trusted and used this platform for years. BigCommerce is a powerful platform to boost large and fast-growing businesses into the big leagues.
In addition to providing extreme scalability for e-stores, BigCommerce offers a built-in CMS, advanced SEO, and multi-channel integration. Store owners quickly raise their brand awareness across social channels. They also have the chance to access millions of potential customers worldwide. In case you need a comprehensive review of Bigcommerce, we’ve got it right here for you!
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Click here to learn more about BigCommerce’s features
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Check out BigCommerce’s pricing plans here
So who should use BigCommerce?
BigCommerce is good for both small and large businesses. If your big online business is growing, BigCommerce offers the scalability to grow with you. For small businesses, BigCommerce has enough impressive features to optimize and scale up the store without hurting the limited budget of small business owners.
WooCommerce is one of the best ecommerce cms platforms today. Following the statistics of Barn2.co.uk, the market share for WooCommerce in 2021 is 22% of the top 1 million sites using eCommerce technologies. The result shows the tremendous growth of WooCommerce in recent years.
WooCommerce supports transforming a WordPress website into an e-store. The platform has attracted a large number of users as it provides numerous extensions and themes for free. The notable advantage of these plugins is they can enable various features to the basic WooCommerce in a single click. Also, you are free to get support from WordPress’ massive user community.
See the comparison between Magento 2 and WooCommerce to find the best platform for your e-store.
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Pricing: Downloading and installing the plugin is free of cost
So who should use WooCommerce?
With ease of use, powerful features, and flexibility, WooCommerce is a great platform for new eCommerce merchants. Especially if you’re already familiar with WordPress, this platform will help you take advantage of all your existing knowledge about WordPress to create a robust store. And if you can afford self hosting, go ahead with WooCommerce.
OpenCart is a popular ecommerce platform because of its open-source and easy-to-use eCommerce platform. It is unnecessary to spend a massive amount of money to develop your new store. Also, OpenCart brings the e-business community a useful and customizable plugin without monthly fees. All you need is to install, choose the template, and add products.
OpenCart offers over 14,000 extensions and themes to e-businesses of any size. Moreover, it integrates with more than 20 payment gateways and over eight shipping methods. In short, even coming with a small budget, your store still thrives on the OpenCart platform.
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So who should use OpenCart?
Opencart is quite difficult for beginners or non-technical people to customize the site. Hence, if you want to build a simple website and can afford to hire a developer, you can go with OpenCart.
PrestaShop is a freemium, open-source eCommerce content management software for online merchants. According to the PrestaShop statistics, over 300,000 e-businesses worldwide use its technology. The platform is used commonly as stores install and customize the software with ease. You are free to select a fully hosted or self-hosted version. Hence, you can determine your level of technical control.
Aside from the built-in functionality of PrestaShop, business owners can extend the platform by using plugins and themes. However, PrestaShop consists of all the stores needed; hence, it is not essential to equip any additional extensions. With the aim to develop world-class eCommerce software through open-source innovation, PrestaShop is an ideal platform for you to achieve business success.
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Pricing: Free
So who should use PrestaShop?
PrestaShop is an ideal option for new online merchants, even without any existing technical experience due to its simplicity, user-friendly interface, and functionality. However, the fact that Prestashop’s features for online stores are limited makes it a default best fit for small and medium-sized businesses.
Pixpa is an all-in-one website builder platform for business owners, creative professionals, and freelancers. Pixpa can help you create feature-rich, professional websites complete with an online store, eCommerce galleries, blogging platform and more, without touching a single line of code.
Pixpa offers a wide range of features, including product and inventory management tools, abandoned cart recovery, shipping and discount management, built-in marketing and SEO tools, and more. What sets Pixpa truly apart from the competition is the stellar customer support, with an average response time of under 3 minutes.
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So who should use Pixpa?
Pixpa is perfect for businesses that want a versatile eCommerce website to sell products, services, or digital content. It is also a great business solution for creative professionals like artists, photographers, and designers who would like to sell images as prints or digital goods through their website. If you want an easy-to-use and affordable solution for your eCommerce needs then Pixpa would be a great choice for you.
WordPress is the best CMS for ecommerce websites today. It is widely used and supports millions of websites worldwide. While it’s famous for its blogging capabilities, it also helps to create various types of websites, including online stores.
WordPress is not an eCommerce platform, but you can turn it into one by using plugins. The most popular choice is WooCommerce, a powerful plugin that seamlessly integrates with WordPress to provide strong eCommerce features.
WooCommerce, an open-source platform, is highly popular due to its extensive collection of free extensions and themes. These plugins can easily enhance missing features and functionalities within the WooCommerce core. However, be cautious that adding too many plugins can create unnecessary complexity and affect site performance.
Furthermore, with WordPress, you can access a massive community that offers lots of plugins, themes, and various resources for comprehensive support. Therefore, WordPress is really an excellent option for small and medium businesses looking for a flexible and feature-rich eCommerce solution.
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While WordPress provides a strong foundation, achieving full eCommerce functionality requires additional plugins.
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WordPress is free to use. But you’ll need to pay for the hosting and domain name.
HubSpot is a pioneering CMS platform that combines marketing, sales, and customer service functionalities. It’s designed to help businesses grow by focusing on their customers. Although it lacks native e-commerce features, it seamlessly integrates with specialized e-commerce platforms like Shopify.
By connecting HubSpot to your online store, you can know about how customers behave, set up automated marketing, and keep track of your earnings using custom reports. Therefore, HubSpot helps companies attract visitors, convert leads, and close customers. Additionally, HubSpot also combines multiple software and platforms in one place, creating a complete CRM system.
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Joomla is considered a free and open-source content management system (CMS). It allows users to easily build, manage websites, and publish content online. It was first released in 2005 and has since become one of the most popular CMS platforms.
While e-commerce isn’t a built-in feature, there are free extensions available to transform a Joomla site into an online store. Joomla supports website creators by providing a flexible and extensible system for creating dynamic web pages.
Although Joomla has a learning curve, its flexibility and extensibility make it an excellent choice for businesses looking for a versatile CMS that can seamlessly integrate e-commerce capabilities.
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Pricing: $99 - $399/ year
Wix is an all-in-one website builder that allows you to create attractive websites without any design or coding experience. The platform consists of drag-and-drop functionality, helping to create a user-friendly and visually appealing eCommerce store easily.
While not dedicated to an eCommerce CMS, it allows website owners to add a commerce module if needed. With user-friendly templates, built-in features, and a no-code approach, Wix appeals to beginners and non-coders.
If you have a small product range and want a quick start, Wix could be a good option. However, keep in mind that once you select a template for your store, changing it later isn’t possible. Whether you’re on a tight budget or need a professional online presence, Wix offers affordable plans and a range of features.
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Pricing: Wix has different price ranges, so consider your budget when selecting a plan.
Volusion is a cloud-based eCommerce platform. This eCommerce platform focuses on building a no-code web store. It offers built-in inventory management, payment collection, and marketing features, making it suitable for mid-sized and larger businesses.
However, it’s essential to be aware that Volusion filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in July 2020. Although the platform continues to operate normally, it may not be the ideal long-term solution for your business.
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When operating a website, you need to consider both the external interface, including how posts, images, and videos are displayed, and the internal components, which consist of data and functionality running in various programming languages like PHP, Python, etc. Without CMS software, managing all of this can be quite challenging.
With a CMS, you can simply use a user-friendly interface to create categories, posts, and menus, and quickly edit product information, all with just a few clicks, saving you time and effort.
Open-source CMS provides essential features for users from the beginning. The advantages of open-source CMS are ease of use, cost-effectiveness, and time-saving, making them suitable for those with limited coding knowledge.
Some popular open-source CMS options include WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, HubSpot, and SilverStripe, among others.
With a custom-built CMS, you build everything from scratch and tailor it to your specific requirements. If you lack programming knowledge, you can hire a team, freelancer, or agency to develop it for you.
Compared to open-source CMS, custom-built CMS tends to be more expensive and highly dependent on your specific requirements. However, it’s valuable for those with long-term plans for their eCommerce store.
An optimal cost-effective approach to ensure quality content management is to use pre-built and paid CMS solutions. These eCommerce content management software are already designed and built by website design experts.
All you need to do is purchase the CMS and replace the content to have your own website. During operation, if you encounter system errors or require upgrades, the website design entities will provide direct and efficient support and solutions.
More and more types of eCommerce content management software are emerging, and with them, businesses have more options with customizable features to suit their specific needs and purposes.
For example, a CMS designed for writing blogs will require different features compared to a CMS intended for creating landing pages for companies. Therefore, when searching for a CMS for your upcoming eCommerce store, please take note that the CMS should have these features:
The admin dashboard should allow you to manage most essential tasks without having to navigate to too many different pages and is user-friendly.
The SEO features are the ‘launchpad’ that helps your eCommerce store reach more potential buyers through search engines like Google or Bing. Specifically, some SEO features that CMS should have include:
Similar to reaching potential customers through search engines, social media is an indispensable channel if you want to boost sales for your eCommerce store.
An eCommerce content management software or platform that provides readily available social media sharing buttons for key content without the need for coding, or ensures content optimization across different platforms, will undoubtedly make your customers more comfortable sharing on social media.
Regarding integrated measurement and analytics tools like Google Analytics, they are crucial features that allow you to continuously enhance content quality and outreach strategies for your store.
An eCommerce store typically deals with a lot of important data, so it’s beneficial if the content management software or platform provides features that allow you to revert to an old version of your content.
Moreover, automatic backups will naturally boost your confidence in using the system and alleviate concerns about potential interruptions in the information storage process.
The templates created by eCommerce content management software are great, but it would be even better if they allowed you to customize and create truly unique templates for your eCommerce store.
Features that support multilingual capabilities remove language barriers, allowing customers to access products in your store without worrying that they might not understand any details.
While it’s true that all CMS have publishing functionality, not all of them provide features that allow you to schedule posts for specific times, schedule multiple posts across multiple sites, or target different reader segments for different posts.
These features will categorize your potential customers into groups or segments based on common characteristics like age, gender, country, used devices, spending habits, usage frequency, and interest… to personalize content tailored to each group effectively.
The audit log is an important tool for tracking user and customer representative account activities, with time-stamped reports.
By using the audit log, users can review, verify, and analyze past activities, ensuring system stability and prompt response to any irregularities.
For eCommerce websites catering to sales, a cybersecurity breach can result in significant losses. You need to find a CMS that can automatically suggest updates when security vulnerabilities arise and has multiple layers of security to prevent unnecessary breaches.
Learn more: 11 Ways to Strengthen Your eCommerce Store’s Security
There are some vital benefits of using the content management system to power your business website:
In case you want to transfer your Magento 1 site to Magento 2 site, you can continue your research with Magento 2 Data Migration
To make full use of the robust growth of eCommerce, online stores need careful preparation for their performance in the extreme marketplace. Top 12 eCommerce content management software and platforms are introduced to help you find the most suitable platform.
It is hard to say what eCommerce content management software or platform is the best because your business needs will determine which feature benefits you the most. Just decide on the CMS that can lay a firm foundation for your online store and help you achieve business goals.
**Related Posts:** - [**Shopify Plus Vs. Magento 2: A Comprehensive Comparison**](https://www.mageplaza.com/blog/shopify-plus-vs-magento-2.html) - [**10 Best eCommerce Platforms for Dropshipping in 2023 (+ Pricing)**](https://www.mageplaza.com/blog/best-ecommerce-platforms-dropshipping.html)
Summer is the CMO and Digital Commerce Solution Expert with 10+ years of experience. She specializes in Magento, Shopify, ERP, CRM, AI, and Blockchain, delivering strategic solutions that transform businesses. With a deep understanding of digital commerce, she helps brands scale and stay ahead in a competitive market.
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