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With everything around the world around COVID-19, building your online business is more important than ever. The good news is that selling online doesn’t have to be complicated. With the right e-commerce platform, you can quickly pick up your products, receive payments, and handle shipping – all from the comfort of your office.
What makes a great eCommerce platform for small businesses?
For a small business just getting started selling online, I’ve highlighted four main features that every platform should have.
1. Easy to customize
Everyone should be able to easily create a beautiful, modern store that works with all devices with the tools and themes on offer. There should also be enough room for customization to fit intelligently into the existing brand. Platforms that assumed you knew nothing about the use of codes or offered only a limited selection of themes with no ability to make changes, were not tested.
2. Sell what you want
The platform had to allow you to sell what you want, where you want, how you want. This meant that they had to be able to deal with both digital and physical goods, integrate with various payment systems, and provide a way to deal with various domestic and international sales taxes. This last point is especially important for small companies, as you may be responsible for collecting and recording taxes if you own physical locations or plan to sell internationally.
3. Manage orders
The platform was supposed to allow you to manage orders, ship goods, track inventory, and otherwise handle the back of the store without the need to use spreadsheets or other programs. Instead of just complete e-commerce solutions, I was thinking of ways to simply load customers.
4. Many ways to integrate
The platform should offer opportunities for integration with other services, marketplaces, applications, etc. Either through a healthy market for add-ons and extensions or integrated functions. Businesses seldom care about everything with just software, so programs should allow you to automatically add new customers to your mailing list or sell them through social media.
All of these features had to be offered at a reasonable price. Fully customized, out-of-the-box solutions are great, but they cost thousands of dollars a month and are way beyond the budget of a small business just getting started with e-commerce.
WooCommerce is known as the best platform for eCommerce development
WooCommerce is the best e-commerce platform to add a shopping cart to your existing WordPress website. Most business solutions work best when you use them to create a complete online store, instead of adding payment processing to an existing website. This is only easier if everything is done smoothly from one sidebar and created with the same tools. So if you’ve already created a website?
Assuming you’re using a service like Squarespace or Weebly, these built-in tools should be your first choice. However, if you are using WordPress as your giant website, WooCommerce is your best bet. Instead of restarting on a different platform, this WordPress plugin integrates seamlessly with your WordPress site for easy sales.
Installing WooCommerce on your website is ridiculously easy. Log in to the WooCommerce website. When you have reached the last step of the linking process, select Automatic Install WooCommerce on an existing WordPress website. You will be prompted to log in and then configure the plug-in. If you are already downloading WordPress, this may be more convenient.
WooCommerce is also perfect for your existing backend program. You can use the WordPress dashboard to manage your orders, create coupons, and view sales reports. Adding new products is as easy as creating a typical post. Since WooCommerce is a WordPress plugin, it has the same user interface as WordPress, so you don’t have to spend time learning a new platform. The only difference between adding a new product and creating a new post is that you need to add certain information about your product, such as description, image, categories, and tags.
WooCommerce plugins and extensions
If WooCommerce lacks some of the necessary features, there is a serious market for extensions. WooCommerce offers many free and paid options that you can use to improve your business: with the USPS extension, you can receive real-time shipping costs, integrate various payment gateways, or add WooCommerce subscriptions so customers can order your product or service. You can even combine these extensions with some WordPress plug-ins to further customize your store. You can pair WooCommerce with Zapier with thousands of other apps, for example, to save orders in a spreadsheet or add new customers to your email marketing tool.
WooCommerce side cart
WooCommerce side cart is an interactive floating stroller for your WooCommerce shop. It slips as soon as the user can buy an item in the store or on the item page, change the quantity of the item according to the schedule update, remove the item from the cart, update the price and quantity. The WooCommerce sidebar is fully customizable with numerous customization options. You can change the position of the shopping cart icon, change the color of the shopping cart, and display the text in your language.
Concluding Remarks
Ecommerce platforms charge slightly different fees than many other services. Hence, it may take a little math to figure out exactly how much you are paying. First, the monthly fee. It can be anything from free to hundreds of dollars per month, with the standard price for the basic plan being around $ 30.
Then there are the entrance fees. Some platforms, such as Wix and Shopify, manage their payment gateways, while others rely on Stripe, PayPal, or some other service. By paying by credit card, you pay a fee for the lock; the standard fee is about 2.9% of the total fee plus an additional $ 0.30, although this decreases with volume and larger down payments.
Finally, there are transaction fees. These are a percentage fee that is paid in addition to all participation fees. Many services charge 0% transaction fees themselves, but this simply means that there is no additional charge. Other services cost 1% or 2% of the transaction if you do not use their gateway.
