The ONLY 4 Ecommerce Platforms You Should Be Considering for Your Online Store!

in this video I'm going to go over my top four best eCommerce platforms to start your own online store depending on a number of factors such as your budget your level of tech savviness and what you sell and I'm going to be as comprehensive as possible hey what's up everyone my name is Steve Chu and I run a seven figure e-commerce store over at bumblebeelemonens.com selling handkerchiefs and a seven figure blog over at my wife quitterjob.com and I'm proud to say that I'm now a Wall Street Journal best-selling author of the book The Family First entrepreneur now I've been selling online for over 15 years now and if you are interested in learning how to start your own eCommerce store make sure you sign up for my free six day mini course below now I want to start out this video with some stats just in case you are wondering which platforms are the most popular in the world according to statista woocommerce has the largest global market share among e-commerce platforms followed by Squarespace Shopify and Wix but interestingly enough two out of my top four e-commerce platforms don't even crack this list at all now a lot of these top eCommerce platform lists are skewed by platforms with free plans where probably 90 of the customers never sell a single thing so with that in mind let's start with the 800 pound gorilla in the room Shopify Shopify is probably the number one recommended e-commerce platform by most gurus and YouTubers online and back in the day Shopify had an amazing affiliate program that paid out at 20 to 25 recurring Revenue which inspired almost everyone and their mother to promote the tool now this strategy worked Shopify went on to become a publicly traded company and the standard for e-commerce platforms today now personally I never jumped on the Shopify bandwagon because everyone has different needs and every e-commerce platform has different strengths and weaknesses which I'm going to share with you guys today and I would never blindly promote any platform because of an affiliate program now don't get me wrong I do think that Shopify is probably the safest solution for me to recommend for most people after all no one ever got fired for recommending Shopify but there are some downsides to consider as well first off Shopify is expensive one of the ingenious strategies that Shopify made early on was to make the out of the box shopping cart Bare Bones in terms of functionality and rely on third-party developers to fill out their feature set as a result Shopify has cultivated one of the largest third-party developer ecosystems out of any shopping cart in the world if you need a feature or a specialized app chances are someone has already created it on the app store if you need a developer there are tens of thousands of people ready to help you here's a recent example that I just encountered at my annual e-commerce conference the seller Summit now Walmart marketplace was a sponsor of my show and right now they are trying to get everyone on their platform to compete with Amazon so what did they do they created a Shopify app that automatically Imports your Shopify products onto the Walmart marketplace but they only support Shopify right now if you are on any other platform you are out of luck now the truth is is that most companies and developers will create apps for Shopify first because they have a huge market share and app store and they can make recurring revenue for every installation but this is bad for the consumer because you end up paying monthly fees for every little tiny feature for example if you want a more elaborate way to issue discounts you need to pay for an app that may run you an extra 20 to 50 a month if you want to be able to collect video reviews you might have to pay another fifty dollars a month all these fees add up to make Shopify one of the most extensive platforms to run on now the average Shopify store uses seven apps in my course that I teach the people using Shopify pay several hundreds of dollars per month on recurring app fees Shopify is the best and most flexible eCommerce platform out there but it's gonna cost you however the grand scheme of things the cost of Shopify should in theory become a very small percentage of your overall Revenue once your store starts taking off but in the beginning these fees can add up some other notable disadvantages to Shopify are that their blogging platform is pretty bad if you plan on launching a blog or creating content you are at a major disadvantage with Shopify also Shopify charges transaction fees if you do not use their built-in payments platform called Shopify payments now you might be telling yourself Shopify payments is good enough so why would I use anything else well I sincerely believe that almost every store today should be using PayPal in addition to accepting credit cards because of their one-click checkout feature but accepting PayPal on your Shopify store could potentially cost you almost five percent in fees with shopify's transaction fee penalty Shopify also has poor international support if you plan on opening a store in a non-supported country outside the US Canada UK Europe and Singapore you're out of luck now Shopify also has a sub-optimal SEO URL structure and unlike almost every other e-commerce platform Shopify does not allow you to fully customize your URLs and inserts extraneous terms in your url such as collections or products which is bad for SEO now on the product side I would avoid Shopify if you sell products with many variants on Shopify you can only offer three types of choices for your products that cannot exceed 100 total combinations and this is actually a severe limitation for products that have different colors sizes and varieties but outside of these disadvantages Shopify should be your top choice for most of you because it's extremely easy to use and expand upon as I mentioned earlier no one ever got fired for going with Shopify now the number two e-commerce platform on my list is shift for shop now when shift for shop first debuted in 2021 they offered a 100 free solution to anyone in the United States as long as you use their payment processing solution shift for payments and the fact that it was free made it a no-brainer for me to recommend it to my entire audience because shift Workshop was an amazing shopping cart even when it costs money unfortunately though shift Workshop received a ton of spam shops and people who were signing up just to create elaborate link Farms to game the SEO system anyway long story short shift Workshop eliminated their 100 free program and created a new rule that you have to process 500 in payments per month to make the shopping cart free now in my opinion this is still an amazing deal the shopping cart right now costs 29 a month until you start processing 500 in payments now if you were to just charge your own credit card 500 a month that would only cost you 2.9 or 14.50 so in reality you're getting a shopping cart that is way more powerful than Shopify out of the box for only 14.50 a month now personally I've run two stores on shift for shop and it is a fantastic e-commerce platform that is way more powerful than shopify's based offering now the biggest problem with shift Workshop is their user interface shift Workshop has so many features that they try to cram it all in the back end and as a result there's a much steeper learning curve than with Shopify but if you're willing to suck it up and learn the platform it's an amazing shopping cart with Limitless potential put it to you this way my teenage daughter picked it up in a weekend and was up and running with her jewelry shop over at renabee.com now the other problem with shift Workshop is that it has a very small developer Community as a result Cutting Edge features like the Walmart example I gave earlier don't make it to shift Workshop until way later but all in all Schiffer shop is a solid Choice with free email marketing built in that will support a store that makes seven figures and Beyond in fact there are many Enterprise stores on the platform that make eight figures and Beyond now the number three e-commerce platform on my list is woocommerce which just happens to be the most popular eCommerce platform on the planet but remember what I said earlier these numbers are skewed because woocommerce is 100 free to use and I'm willing to bet that a ton of woocommerce users fizzle out or don't sell anything in their first year so take these numbers with a grain of salt I teach a lot of my workshops based on woocommerce because it is literally the cheapest way to get started selling online and you can get started for only three dollars if you're interested in starting your own online store on woocommerce I put together a 20 minute free tutorial here and I even designed a custom theme that I will give you for free all it takes is 20 minutes and it's really that easy now the other benefit of woocommerce is that it's built on top of Wordpress which is the best blogging platform on the planet that powers over 20 of the web today now with woocommerce Azure shopping cart and WordPress Azure blogging platform this combination has the best search engine optimization out of any platform out there so what's the catch the catch is that woocommerce is kind of a pain in the butt to use and you have to understand more of the technical aspects of maintaining your online store for example your woocommerce store is free but it's just software and you need to get your own server in order to run the software as a result woocommerce requires a web host it's actually not as complicated as it sounds but the upshot is that you are responsible for maintaining your server and keeping it virus free if someone were to hack your website that would be your responsibility to fix now if you use plugins on your website it is also your responsibility to upgrade them and make sure that everything works properly now compared to Shopify and shift Workshop where they handle all this for you you can get into trouble with woocommerce if you are not tech savvy but because woocommerce literally the most popular eCommerce platform on the planet it is fantastic third-party developer support and it's really easy to find someone to help you out also because you own the source code you have full control and autonomy over your website let me give you an example of why this is important platforms like Shopify actually have a say in what you are allowed to sell for example during the pandemic Shopify literally shut down my friends online store for selling hand sanitizer because they felt his prices were too high you also can't sell drugs or any other chemicals on the Shopify platform and sometimes these restrictions are arbitrary there are no such restrictions with Wu you are in full control over everything so bottom line woocommerce is inexpensive but harder to maintain but for context my 9 11 year old kids started their first store kidincharge.com on the platform and they were fine now the final shopping cart I want to discuss is Bigcommerce Bigcommerce is kind of like a hybrid of Shopify and ship for shop for example Bigcommerce is this easy to use as Shopify and it offers a full feature set out of the box which means that you don't really have to pay for apps they also don't charge any transaction fees at all which makes it cheaper than Shopify and they have more third-party developer support than shift for shop now in terms of blogging they have an amazing integration with WordPress which allows you to have a WordPress blog and a Bigcommerce store on the same domain which gives you Superior SEO and blogging which is something that you just can't do with Shopify the only catch with Bigcommerce is that the amount you pay is based on revenue for example it costs you 29 for up to 50K in Revenue 79 a month up to 180k and 299 dollars a month for up to 400k in Revenue now to a certain extent I like this pricing scheme because your costs go up as your store becomes more successful unlike Shopify which settles you with all these app costs up front even if you aren't making much money but this pricing scheme can be problematic for drop shipping stores in general Drop Shipping carries very low margins so let's say your net margins after all overhead is only five percent with your Drop Shipping Store and your store makes 10K a year that means that your monthly fee of 29 will make up about six percent of your Revenue which is pretty high but overall Bigcommerce is a solid choice because it has a lot more features out of the box in Shopify with little or no plugins required they have better SEO there's low limitation on product options they have Superior international support no transaction fees and better analytics and Reporting their only weakness is third-party developer support which is better than shift Workshop but worse than Shopify now the million dollar question is which platform should you go with as I mentioned earlier you can't really go wrong with Shopify unless you don't have a large budget or if you want a good blogging platform with Superior SEO if you are not tech savvy go with Bigcommerce if your country is not supported by Shopify payments if you sell prohibited products if you require multiple variants or if you just don't want to get nickel and done by apps if Bigcommerce is out of your price range and you are not tech savvy go with shift Workshop if you live in the United States if you want the most complete feature set out of the box if you are a fast learner and if you don't mind a lack of third-party developer support and then finally if you are tech savvy and you want the cheapest and most flexible e-commerce platform in the world go with woocommerce but be prepared for the maintenance that goes along with it now that you know what my top four eCommerce platforms are watch this video here if you are on a budget and you want to start your online store for free

Channel: MyWifeQuitHerJob Ecommerce Channel

Views: 31,397

Keywords: best ecommerce platform, top ecommerce platform, ecommerce platforms, top ecommerce platforms, ecommerce platform, ecommerce business, how to start an online business, how to start an online store, shopify vs bigcommerce, best ecommerce platform for beginners, best ecommerce platforms, shopify vs woocommerce, best ecommerce platform 2023, ecommerce platforms 2023, ecommerce platforms comparison, best ecommerce platforms 2023, shift4shop, bigcommerce, woocommerce, shopify

Id: lJlYhc5k0sY

Length: 13min 16sec (796 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 03 2023