How To Choose The Best E-Commerce Platform For Your Business: 4 Primary Things to Consider
With so many options available, choosing the best e-commerce platform that suits your needs can be overwhelming. Read on to find out the four primary things you need to consider when choosing the…
With so many options available, choosing the best e-commerce platform that suits your needs can be overwhelming. Read on to find out the four primary things you need to consider when choosing the ideal platform for your unique needs.
Shopify, WooCommerce, Squarespace, BigCommerce, Magento, Navelle, Swell, Strapi, and so on, and so forth.
The list goes on and on, giving you a major headache even before you kick off your e-commerce business. But we got you.
This article can be an antidote of some sort as we’re giving you the four main things you need to consider when choosing the best e-commerce platform for your business, both in high-level and more granular scenarios. Read on!
On a high level…
Starting an e-commerce business is an exciting journey, but don’t get too caught up in the excitement. Pay attention to these four high-level key points when you’re choosing the best e-commerce platform for your business:
- Costs
- Growth
- Tech
- Services
The cheapest platform on the pricing page is rarely the cheapest one a year in.
Breaking down each point to help you choose the best e-commerce platform
Let’s see what each key point entails and what exactly you need to consider on a granular level.
Costs
Beyond setup fees and monthly or yearly platform subscriptions, you might also want to take into account these running costs:
- Hosting: for WordPress (and WooCommerce) we usually recommend WPEngine or Flywheel
- Domain name
- Bandwidth
- Transaction fees
- Add-on subscriptions, including plugins, extensions, and apps
Other than comparing costs between platforms, don’t forget to compare them to your budget and revenue projections as well. This way, you can forecast how much profit you expect to gain each month and when you will start getting a positive return on investment (ROI).
How to do it
- List every recurring line item, not just the subscription: hosting, domain, transaction fees, and paid apps or plugins.
- Pull each platform's published subscription tiers from its own pricing page (Shopify, BigCommerce) and note where the next tier kicks in.
- Model payment processing separately using Stripe's or your gateway's published per-transaction rate against your projected monthly order volume.
- Compare the total against your budget and revenue forecast to find the month you break even.
See a worked example
As an illustration, a store doing roughly 300 orders a month at a $60 average order value moves about $18,000. At Stripe's published 2.9% + 30c per transaction, card processing alone lands near $600 a month before any subscription, hosting, or app fees. Running that same math across two or three platforms usually surfaces a bigger gap than the sticker subscription price does.
Tools to use
Shopify pricing and BigCommerce pricing to compare subscription tiers, and Stripe pricing to model per-transaction fees against your projected volume.
Steal our AI prompt
Act as an ecommerce finance analyst. My numbers are: [describe projected monthly orders, average order value, and monthly budget]. Here are the pricing pages I'm comparing: [paste the subscription tiers and transaction fees from each platform]. Build a month-by-month total-cost-of-ownership comparison that includes subscription, payment processing, hosting, and app costs, and tell me the break-even month for each option. Flag any cost that scales with order volume.
Growth
As your business expands, you'll want to be able to add new products, features, and integrations to your e-commerce store. Therefore, it's important to choose a platform that is scalable and flexible enough to accommodate your growth, through features as follows:
- Scalable, robust inventory management capabilities: so you can track stock levels, manage product variations, and generate reports.
- Customizable themes, allowing you to create responsive UI and delightful UX for both customers and staff.
- Ability to create personalization: stand out in the crowd by providing a unique customer experience.
- SEO-friendly: because without SEO, people can’t find your e-commerce business on search engines.
How to do it
- Write down the growth you expect in 12 to 18 months: SKU count, sales channels, team size, and markets.
- Check each platform's next tier up, not just the entry plan, for where inventory, staff seats, or API limits cap out.
- Test SEO-friendliness on a real store built on the platform: crawl it with Screaming Frog (free up to 500 URLs) and confirm clean URLs, editable titles, and meta descriptions.
- Confirm the platform supports sitemap submission and verification in Google Search Console.
See a worked example
As an example, a platform can look fine on day one but cap you later: some plans gate staff seats, API call volume, or advanced inventory reporting behind a higher tier. A store that adds a second warehouse or a wholesale channel a year in can hit those ceilings fast, so it is worth pricing the tier above the one you would actually start on.
Tools to use
Google Search Console to confirm the platform supports sitemap submission and indexing, the Google SEO Starter Guide as the fundamentals to test against, and Screaming Frog SEO Spider to crawl a live demo store (free to 500 URLs).
Steal our AI prompt
Act as an ecommerce growth consultant. My 12 to 18 month plan is: [describe expected SKU growth, new sales channels, team size, and target markets]. Here is what each platform's plan tiers include: [paste the plan feature lists]. Tell me which platform's limits I would hit first as I grow, focused on inventory management, staff seats, API and app limits, and SEO controls, and tell me which upgrade would be forced and roughly when.
Tech
The technology behind the platform is also crucial. If you want to provide your customers with a seamless online shopping experience, you may want to choose an e-commerce platform that:
- Can integrate with other solutions or SaaS
- Has built-in tools or support plugins for various purposes: add to cart, checkout, payment gateway, shipping, customer service, and more
- Improves your customer engagement, with features such as email marketing, customer reviews, and others
- Can optimize for mobile
- Maintains your business’ cybersecurity
- Is PCI compliant
How to do it
- List the integrations you actually need on day one: payment gateway, shipping, email marketing, and your accounting or ERP tool.
- Look up two or three competitor stores in BuiltWith to see what a real stack on each platform looks like.
- Run a live store on each shortlisted platform through Google PageSpeed Insights on the mobile tab.
- Confirm the PCI DSS split: check the PCI Security Standards Council for which requirements the platform covers versus which fall on you.
See a worked example
As an illustration, before committing you can open a competitor's store in BuiltWith to see which platform, payment gateway, and apps they run, then drop that same storefront into PageSpeed Insights to check its mobile score. If the reference stores on a given platform consistently score poorly on mobile, that is a signal worth weighing against the sales pitch.
Tools to use
BuiltWith to see the stack behind competitor stores, Google PageSpeed Insights to test their mobile performance, and the PCI Security Standards Council to confirm which PCI requirements become your responsibility.
Steal our AI prompt
Act as an ecommerce solutions architect. My must-have integrations are: [describe payment gateway, shipping, email, accounting or ERP, and any other tools]. Here is what BuiltWith shows for the platforms and competitor stores I'm considering: [paste the detected tech stacks]. Map which of my required integrations are native, which need a third-party app, and which are unsupported on each platform, and flag any PCI or mobile-performance concerns.
Services
The level of support and services offered by the platform is also a crucial consideration point.
How does the team behind the platform engage with you as their client? Do they respond to your queries quickly, give you personalized content, and offer a referral or loyalty program?
Other than that, a reliable platform will also provide resources that can help you succeed such as training and education, and a support team that makes you feel comfortable and confident working with.
How to do it
- Check the platform's public status page (for example Shopify Status) for incident frequency and resolution time over the last few months.
- Search the platform's help center for a problem you expect to hit and judge whether the docs genuinely answer it.
- Note the support model: managed support with response commitments versus a self-hosted platform where you lean on community forums and docs.
- Ask the sales team, in writing, for response-time commitments and exactly what is included at your plan tier.
See a worked example
As an example, two platforms can both advertise 24/7 support and still differ sharply in practice. Skimming a platform's public status page for how often incidents happen and how quickly they resolve, plus how deep its help center actually goes, usually tells you more about real support quality than the sales page does.
Tools to use
Shopify Status to read a platform's real incident history, Shopify Help Center to gauge documentation depth, and WooCommerce documentation to compare a self-hosted, community-driven support model.
Steal our AI prompt
Act as an ecommerce operations lead. The support experience I need is: [describe channels, hours, and how fast I need responses]. Here is what I found on each platform's status page and help center: [paste incident-history notes and a few documentation links]. Compare the platforms on real support reliability, documentation depth, and whether support is managed or community-driven, then list the questions I should send each sales team before committing.
In conclusion, which platform is best for e-commerce business?
Cliché as it seems, you need to compare your budget, business goals, current team members and resources, and timeline before picking the best e-commerce platform for your business.
For a small business with limited resources, Shopify or Squarespace might be a better choice. On the other hand, you might want to use WooCommerce on WordPress if you have an experienced team of developers. These platforms usually offer a free trial so you can utilize it before committing yourself. And if you would rather not weigh it all alone, our ecommerce team helps growing brands choose, build, and scale the right platform.
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