Shopify is one of the most popular online commerce store platforms available today. What makes Shopify easy to use is that it is a platform that doesn’t require any technical knowledge to use the platform. Anyone can use the platform to host their online store, and setting up an online store in Shopify can be done in a few steps. Well, it indeed is a platform that suits first time users and small businesses and startups.

Shopify is a hosted platform, and it means that instead of focussing on coding and files, you can concentrate on creating a good design for your e-commerce website. It results in faster designing of your online store and less cost for the project when compared to other e-commerce platforms.

A set of wonderful free themes in Shopify enhances the look of your online store, and don’t let the word ‘free’ misguide you. Free of cost, yet high in quality, these theme can provide a more sophisticated look for your online store and rope in potential customers. Well, if you wish that for your store, you ought to create a theme of your own, then you can with Shopify. You can also purchase from a wide range of wonderful paid themes from Shopify, that would help keep your online store a class apart from your competitor sites.

With more businesses taking place through mobile devices, having a responsive site or mobile application is a necessity. Shopify platform is a responsive web platform making it easily viewable and accessible from any device, thereby helping in more sales. Shopify mobile application exclusively for mobiles, helps you to take the next step in mobile commerce and achieve more sales.

The integrated SEO feature and search engine friendly structure can help you have an online store that performs well in search results. A search engine friendly store that performs wonderfully even without having to work on it with technical knowledge makes this platform the best one to have in order to boost up your sales. An integrated blogging platform is another highlight of Shopify and it enables you to publish and categorise articles, encourage discussions on your Shopify blog.

Shopify is a platform trusted by millions across the world, and this trust is rewarded by providing those vendors with the best in class security from Shopify. Being an online store, the site certainly takes in valuable information of credit cards of the shoppers, and Shopify is obliged to keep the platform safe so that these types of information do not fall into unnecessary hands. Thereby, they always try to keep the platform as safe as possible and adhering to Payment Card Industry (PCI) standards. By keeping the online site safe and secure, Shopify ensures that no valuable data is lost.

A team that is always responsive to a distress call is an highlight of any project, and thus is Shopify’s support team. For any issues that your online store may face, you can contact their support team, no matter what time of the day it is. This ensures the proper functioning of the online store and flocking in of more customers.

And then comes a class of people known as Shopify Experts. These are people certified with having a deep understanding of Shopify platform, and how well to use it for your different purposes. These experts can help you with anything related to Shopify, ranging from designing and developing your online store from scratch to helping with its maintenance and support and even managing the product catalogue. With the help of these experts, you can have all your needs on Shopify platform answered and met with.

Born exclusively to function as an e-commerce platform, Magento is a free open source platform that suits the needs of businesses looking out to venture into online retailing. But this being said, it is important to know that this not an easy ‘plug and play’ platform, but requires coding knowledge to be able to build the site.

A lot of templates available with Magento can help you in easing your designing tasks. You can easily customise the way your store should look with those superb themes. Also the customization tools available with Magento can impart an even better look for your online store.

What makes Magento more popular is the fact that it is much easy to integrate third party apps or plugins in the platform. So whatever extra you need to have on your e-commerce platform, such as shipping and tracking facilities, payment gateways, web analytics or anything, Magento is the place where you can plug in your favourite app. Well, with a marketplace that has a wide variety of e-commerce apps, you can be free to install any app you wish to have.

Magento can also be the one place where you can run multiple websites from one common backend system, while all the others would only let you run one site on a system. With Magento, you can run multiple stores, with different domain names and design and layout, on a single system. In Magento, you can control each of the site using a single unified admin panel. So, for businesses that caters to multiple industries, hosting an online store in Magento can be a big boon.

Optimizing each page separately can be a daunting task, but thanks to Magento’s source code, you can now save time that you spend to make your website SEO friendly. Magento is built to be SEO friendly, as it’s source code comes with some features like creating SEO optimized URLs, meta tags, descriptions, URL rewrites and more. With magento, you can be pretty sure that your site is 100% search friendly.

A really fast site can reduce the number of visitors backing out of your site. Magento is one of the fastest platforms that is out there in the industry. It has the capacity to load pages fast, retrieve huge data from enormous databases within a fraction of a second and display anything the visitors are searching for in no time. This can surely please your customers.

Having a huge online community is indeed a blessing for Magento. Through this community, you can clear off any doubts you may have and it also helps you to get hold of any new features, designs or bug fixes released by the community, apart from those improvements made by Magento itself. This can also ensure that your e-commerce site is safe and secure and that your customers would lose any of their valuable information.

Among its various competitors, PrestaShop is a platform that stands out from the crowd because of some high quality features that it possesses. Free, powerful and an open source platform, PrestaShop is now one of the highly used e-commerce platforms of the present times.

One feature PrestaShop possesses is that it has two versions, one that can be downloaded and the other that is a cloud hosted version. The downloadable version is suited to those who need to access the source file and it enables diving into the code, while the cloud version doesn’t need anything special as it is already hosted. With this version you can just start selling anything online.

With people now moving on to mobile shopping, it has become the need of the time to have a website that is as friendly to the mobile as it is to a larger screen. PrestaShop platform is on the gaining side in this respect as it is a highly mobile friendly platform and it helps you stay in close contact with all your shoppers, no matter how and where they are accessing your store from.

Even while boasting of a wide range of built-in features, that includes anything and everything that facilitates easy and smooth running of the online store, it is also possible to add new functionality features that provide an even more better user experience. This can be achieved through the use of modules, extensions and add-ons. Innumerable themes and templates you can avail at PrestaShop gives your store a unique and distinctive look that can’t be surpassed. Anything ranging from the look and feel to the functionality of your site can be easily customised according to your business needs.

Multiple tools are available with PrestaShop, that helps you in easily managing your product catalogue, and your store. The dashboard is so simple to use with everything clearly laid out to ease the task for you. This could lend businesses with a great advantage, as their online business can be managed very efficiently without the need of any additional software.

A full time online support can further ease every need you may have on PrestaShop. The platform website itself offers a huge volume of information on the different functions, features and settings of the platform. Add to id an active online support forum that can answer any of your questions and aid you in the smooth functioning of your online store.

With speed and security topping everything else, there is no need to search for a better online platform that could serve your need in setting up an online store.

OpenCart is an open source e-commerce platform for setting up online stores and running your business effectively. Just after a few steps like Install, Select template and Add products, you are good to receive orders and run your e-commerce business online much cost effectively.

A range of free and also cost effective themes can help deliver a great and awesome look to your online site. With a built in template system, you can easily switch between themes to check out whether which theme delivers the look and feel you desire. The availability of modules that are quick and easy to configure can help you to easily increase the site’s functionality according to your needs.

A user friendly menu and dashboard can help you navigate across easily and find out whatever you need with ease. Everything ranging from sales, catalogue to system and extensions, can be navigated across easily with one of the best dashboards across all e-commerce platforms.

Multi-store support is one great advantage OpenCart delivers. With this feature, from a single dashboard, you can control 2 or more stores. You can impart distinctive looks to each site so that there wouldn’t be a slightest hint of commonality, customise the ways in which each site interacts with the customers and so on.

Multi-language support feature of OpenCart helps you to easily cater to different audiences. OpenCart is a language neutral CMS and you can add almost 3 dozens of language translations into OpenCart. OpenCart also has the added advantage of being able to add multiple tax zones. It helps you to avoid mistakes and that, depending on the country, the correct taxes will be paid. Your job thereby become relatively easy.

OpenCart is also able to grow with you as you expand your business. As OpenCart doesn’t put a limit into the number of products that can be added, and categories and manufacturers alike, you can always be free to bring in more products and manufacturers as your business grows. With OpenCart, the size of your business never becomes a problem.

Yet another advantage that OpenCart delivers you is the speed at which it performs. Even though this store can hold a lot of products, it can still load faster than any other platform. It also works fast on weak servers and this attribute can help you in your SEO activities.

An active community that is available at anytime can be a good area to get all your queries answered, and OpenCart offers such a feature. OpenCart can boast of a community that is very active and loyal and regularly shares updates, experience, discusses issues and so on. Any issues that you face on OpenCart will be fixed within no time with the availability of this rich forum.

A newcomer to an already thickly packed and competitive arena, e-commerce platforms, Zoey, though being a newbie, is now one of the most sought after e-commerce platforms now available. Easy to use and its popularity as being the most effective platform, has led to businesses and entrepreneurs going for Zoey when it comes to setting up an online store.

The success of Zoey is owed to the fact that it has everything that a business craves for. A drag-and-drop interface is one highlight Zoey can boast of, and what is its advantage? Well, for starters, you need not have a website development expertise or coding knowledge or anything to come up with a professional looking site in Zoey platform. All you need to do is select what you need, drag and drop them at the place that suits it best and create your store. Well, it is as easy as that.

Being responsive is an innate talent that Zoey has. Whatever your display is, through Zoey, you can create a fully functional e-commerce website that is optimised for mobiles, tablets and desktop alike. When it comes to ease of use, scalability, and performance, you won’t be able to find any other alternative that is as good as Zoey. E-commerce websites set up in Zoey platform can give you access to advanced analytics that can help you understand how exactly you are doing. Through this analytics, you can be able to measure your metrics and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Well, over time, with Zoey, you can be able to take your business to a much smarter level as the need arises.

When it comes to checkout, most of the other platforms host it on their own serves, but with Zoey, you can have it done on your own domain. Checkouts for your site functions directly through your site and it also has the advantage of being completely secure.

Adding products to a category is now a breeze, thanks to a more intuitive and organized interface that Zoey provides its users with. Even determining where a product should appear within a category lies within the discretion of the user. The ability to create different design templates for categories can impart a distinctive look to your store, as your main categories will feature different designs.With Zoey, you can have a live preview of your design across multiple devices that helps you make sure that everything is in order and appearing perfect before making the site live. The performance, usability and power of the design tools provided by Zoey is always updated and improved, thanks to the new update releases they would have each week.

Getting support in Zoey is made easy with the availability of relevant FAQs, active forums and communities, phone support and such other facilities. A built in blog and designed to adapt and perform well with modern SEO practices ensure that relevant traffic is directed to your site, which could turn out to derive more sales.

If you already own a WordPress site for your business, featuring your products that is sold offline, and would like to venture into e-commerce, you needn’t build a new e-commerce store from scratch. You can easily convert your WordPress site into an online store with the help of WooCommerce, considered as the most popular e-commerce solution.

WooCommerce, coming from the same house that brought out WordPress, is an open source plugin that is built to seamlessly integrate with WordPress. With this you can have the advantage of using your existing WordPress website as an e-commerce site and that you can be a part of the large and fast-growing ecosystem of WordPress. What WooCommerce lends is an aid to set up an online store that is not only good looking, but user-friendly too.

Being an open source plugin, you can download WooCommerce for free and set it up on your WordPress website. You can also benefit from an active and fast-growing community of users and contributors. It can be a good place to clear all your queries and get support. You can also avail the services of a dedicated team ready to lend support at any time.

Being mobile friendly is the best way to catch a lot of business in these times, as mobile shopping is on the rise. WooCommerce is specifically designed to impart a quality look on desktop as well as mobiles and tablets. If you need a mobile app for your WooCommerce store, you can easily do it by the help of a few third party tools.From adding your first product to having a thousand products and generating a million sales, shows how much your business has grown over the time. And WooCommerce is exactly built to grow alongside you, helping you to add as much as products as you wish, and sell as much as is needed. It is designed to provide you with scalability and growth.

With WooCommerce, you would not have the need to share any of your valuable information with anyone or any third party softwares. You can keep your data independent and that gives you ultimate control of your business. Another important feature is that it can be much beneficial for your customer’s too as their valuable information would not be shared with anyone else other than you. Security measures adopted by WooCommerce is outstanding and it complies with all standards an e-commerce store should follow.

Ranking your online store with WooCommerce is easy, as it is built for, and runs on WordPress. Integrated SEO functionality of WooCommerce helps in your e-commerce site's marketing strategy. The built-in analytics of your online store can help you identify the user behaviour, track sales and growth, which can help you frame your future plans.