Choosing the Right eCommerce Platform for Your Business

When choosing the right eCommerce platform for your business, you could just go on a recommendation alone. But how can you be sure it's the right decision for YOUR business?

If you take these simple steps, you can get to an answer more quickly and have confidence in the decision you are making.

What Are You Selling?

Documenting what you are selling and how you sell it will be useful when assessing the best technology option. Consider the type of product (physical goods, digital goods, or services), your business model (B2C or B2B), and how your customers pay (payment on order, payment on invoice, or subscription).

Narrow Down Your Research

Tools like BuiltWith allow you to see the usage of eCommerce technologies in the UK right now. Starting here gives you the benefit of other people's decisions and helps you identify popular technologies where finding skilled implementation partners is easier.

Comparing Technology Options

When assessing eCommerce technology, compare across these eight categories:

• Branding and UI: How much scope is there to define and apply your branding and create custom UI design?
• Features and Functionality: How comprehensive and flexible are the features offered?
• Integrity and Ecosystem: How well does the platform connect to other popular products through integrations?
• Content Management and SEO: How easy is it to create and manage content, and how SEO-optimised is it?
• Ease of Use: How easy is it to set up and maintain?
• Fees and Pricing: How competitive are the pricing and fees?
• Scalability and Portability: How scalable and portable is the platform?
• Customer Support: How well rated is the provider for customer service?

Score each option across each category 1–5 to give you an overall score for each technology option.

Find a Good Partner

It's rare for small and medium-sized businesses to maintain the digital skills needed to build and maintain digital technology in-house, so good partnerships are crucial. Many eCommerce platforms fundamentally do the same things — how you work together and apply the technology will likely have a more significant impact on your success than the technology itself.