Marcus W K Wong is the Head of Marketing at SEOReseller.com. A digital marketing weapon with a passion for SEO, Conversion Rate Optimization and User Experience - Marcus brings over a decade of selling on the frontlines to empower a new wave of digital marketing agencies around the world.
Worldwide e-commerce sales are expected to grow from $2.92 trillion in 2018 to $6.54 trillion in 2023, according to the 2019 Global E-Commerce report by Emarketer. This growth is because of the strong online shopping market in countries like China, the U.S., and the U.K. There’s a variety of options to choose from when it comes to selling your products online. Marketplace giants like Amazon, eBay, and AliExpress make your product available to billions of global customers. Amazon alone gets 4.6 billion visits a month.
With your own e-commerce website, however, you’ll have more control over how you present your brand and sell your products. Find out why.
Apart from your company’s logo, banner, and featured items, you won’t find much room for personalization in marketplace platforms. With your own site, you can rearrange elements as you please. You can customize your store’s background and foreground colors according to your branding.
When you list your products on a marketplace, it’ll be grouped with your competitors, especially if you offer similar prices. Plus, sites like Amazon may change your item’s price according to its algorithm. With your website, you only feature your items at your price.
Apart from a limited About Us page, there’s not much additional content to add on a marketplace site. With your e-commerce store, you can add a blog to keep your audience engaged with updates about your brand and guides on how to use your products. You can also provide a full-fledged About Us page with your company’s history and values. The possibilities for additional content are endless.
If you want to create your own e-commerce store easily, providers like Shopify, WooCommerce, and Squarespace are your best bets. Though they have similar features, each has different fees, template designs, and search engine optimization (SEO) capabilities. Take a look at what they offer and how they stack up against their competitors.
Shopify is popular with e-commerce businesses that are just starting out, but it’s also a hit among big brands. Tesla, Oreo, Red Bull, and Nestle all use this platform to create an online storefront for their products. As of October 2019, there are more than one million merchants on Shopify, and its third-quarter revenue grew to over $390.6 million. This is a 45% increase from the same quarter in 2018. So why is it such a success for businesses big and small?
You don’t need web development and hosting expertise to set up and use your Shopify store. It has easy-to-follow tutorials, which help you navigate through its interface and answer the forms needed to get your site up and running. And when it comes to items, upload product photos, fill out the name, description, and price fields, and submit your entry. It’ll be up for sale instantly.
This platform also offers built-in tools that help you clean up and organize your store. Its “collections” feature allows you to group similar products into categories for easy filtering. If you have items that come in different variants (i.e., colors, patterns, sizes, and materials), Shopify allows up to 100 variations for every product. It also lets you create expansive megamenus for your site’s navigation bar, so customers can find the product or category they’re looking for in a few clicks.
Here, you can easily change your store’s theme without affecting your existing content. Shopify offers over a hundred free and paid templates to choose from, ranging from minimalist to loud styles. If you really want to step up your personalization game, third-party developers like colorlib. and Out of the Sandbox offers a diverse number of themes as well.
The most basic Shopify subscription starts at $29 a month, which allows you to upload unlimited products and create discount codes. The package also comes with a secure certification that keeps your customers’ information safe and gives you access to the company’s great 24/7 support.
While Shopify makes it easy to set up your online store, it doesn’t feature a lot of advanced options. If you’re a power user who wants to optimize every blog post to perfection, this site’s SEO tools aren’t as fully-featured compared with platforms like WordPress. Plus, URL customization options are also limited.
This platform is more focused on helping you build a unique website for your brand. It’s used by publications like Wired and brands like Lyft and UberEats. And it’s recently getting into e-commerce. Here’s what Squarespace can offer your business.
While Shopify has great themes, Squarespace’s templates offer sleeker and flexible designs. It also categorizes its designs according to industry, so you’ll immediately know which ones look great for your business.
Both Shopify and Squarespace’s templates are mobile-friendly, which means they can adapt to any screen size. However, the latter gives you the ability to turn their pages into accelerated mobile pages or AMP. This simplifies your site, making it load almost instantaneously. Fast loading times are always a plus for customers.
Squarespace takes the cake again when it comes to design, as it has a built-in zoom feature for your items. And it also supports sales for digital products right out of the box. With Shopify, you’ll need to find and install apps to get both features.
While Squarespace is a design powerhouse, it lacks in sales features and support compared to Shopify. It only supports PayPal, Stripe, and Apple Pay, while its competitor can take payments from over 100 options. And while both provide 24/7 customer service, Squarespace only offers chat services compared to Shopify’s phone support. And while Squarespace is filled with built-in features, it doesn’t have an app store like Shopify. As such, if you want to add a new feature to your store, third-party developers won’t be able to save you. You’ll have to wait until the company officially releases it on the platform.
WooCommerce is the grandaddy of e-commerce site-building. It started as a mere plugin for WordPress in 2000. This little extension could launch a lot of successful online businesses. Now, it powers over 28% of online stores, including big brands like Orange, Singer, and Weber. So what makes this veteran e-commerce plugin last throughout the years?
Unlike Shopify and Squarespace, which offer $29 and $26 monthly on their basic subscriptions, WooCommerce offers its powerful platform for free. As such, it also makes a good starting point for budding e-commerce professionals.
WooCommerce runs on Wordpress. This makes the platform an attractive tool to use for power users and white label SEO experts who want to have full control over their URLs, metadata, and alt tags.
WooCommerce is an open-source app, which means you can customize every part of your store according to your liking. It’s easy for web designers using this platform to edit HTML, CSS, and PHP code to make your store truly unique. And if you want to stick with themes, WordPress has thousands of themes to choose from, compared to the hundreds that Shopify and Squarespace have.
While WooCommerce may be free, it lacks essential features that Squarespace and Shopify already have, like hosting, security, and a domain name. You’ll have to set everything up and maintain them yourself. You’ll also need to buy and download extensions to get more payment options, manage your inventory better, and set up a subscription service.
Shopify, Squarespace, and WooCommerce are all great options when it comes to e-commerce. But they vary greatly when it comes to customization and ease-of-use. If you’re an established brand that wants a fast and straightforward way to sell your goods, or you’re new to e-commerce, Shopify provides a smooth and no-frills experience.
Care more about the presentation of your brand and products? Squarespace’s templates and diverse customization options are for you.
And if you’re a seasoned SEO or web development professional that wants complete control over how their website functions, WooCommerce’s WordPress-based, open-source platform is your best bet. Now that you’ve chosen your e-commerce tool, all you need to do is to fill it up with content to create a site that’s unique to your brand and products.
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