eCommerce Shopping Carts For Home Business – Which Is The Best?

Nowadays, with the availability of eCommerce shopping carts for home business, you can easily build a professional website with all the necessary features suitable for businesses in all fields. Website design is an indispensable part of all businesses and individuals doing business. 

Therefore, it is necessary to expand the scope of activities, increase sales and profits for businesses by investing in website construction. By building a professional image on the website, customers will keep in touch with the business. 

To help you make a decision, today we will review some of the best eCommerce shopping carts for home businesses: Shopify, Wix, Squarespace, Weebly, WooCommerce, and PrestaShop. These may provide you with an easy start.

Let’s begin!

What to Look For When Choosing a Platform to Build Your Marketplace?

Each eCommerce business is unique, and thus requires particular treatment. However, keeping in mind crucial characteristics which align with the capabilities of the various available shopping carts. There exist criteria that you should take into consideration for shopping cart software selection.

• Ease of use: Platform with a moderate level of complexity allows to spend less time and effort to manage common business operations. Instead, you’ll be able to dedicate yourself and gain a broader opportunity to grow your business.
• Customization options: At any point of development, you may need new requirements. Therefore, when selecting a shopping cart, it is recommendable to choose a cart with the ability for customization.
• Clear navigation: Make sure that the shopping cart you employ for your eCommerce business can provide clean and clear navigation across all stages of the buyer’s journey.
• Optimization for mobile devices: Experts predict that by 2021, mobile eCommerce will account for 53.9% of eCommerce sales. Thus, prioritize the shopping carts that are adapted for mobile device usage.
• Scalability: Make sure that the shopping cart you choose at the very beginning will be able to support growth in the future.
• Customer support model: Shopping cart with reliable and dedicated customer support. This choice will allow you to get fast and qualified feedback about any issue occurring.
• Pricing policy: Choose your perfect solution based on your business requirements but not the price tag on the software.

The Best eCommerce Shopping Carts for Home Businesses

1. Shopify

Shopify’s shopping cart is a good choice for those who sell digital and tangible products. You can select from a variety of customizable templates, which can be configured to suit branding requirements. The platform is easy to use for users with little tech skills. 

Furthermore, if you can cope with HTML and CSS, you can edit the whole structure and configuration. The company offers a free 14-day trial, so you can set up a store to experience before purchasing.

The cost of Shopify store:

With price considered as the lowest on the market, Shopify becomes an attractive option for businesses that run on a tight budget. The cost of Shopify’s pricing plans per month are:

• Basic Shopify: $29/month
• Shopify: $79/month
• Advanced Shopify: $299/month

Shopify Basic can satisfy your needs unless you run a large shop. You will receive regular discount codes, unrestricted storage products and multi-channel integration. Upgrading to Shopify or Advanced Shopify offers you better analysis and reporting.

Shopify offers the following features:

• Automatic carrier shipping rates, sleek mobile optimization, customer profiles, accounts and groups, more than 70 professional themes, built-in marketing tools and more.
• Shopify is very easy to set up . It is one of the most user-friendly structures irrespective of your technical background.
• This shopping cart solution is a favorable combination of flexibility and robustness though its advanced features are quite pricey.

If you want to learn more. here's a detailed review of Shopify.

2. Wix

By opting for this website shopping cart as an eCommerce extension of your shop, you can get your hands on it's all-in-one management features. With its affordable pricing plans, Wix is a perfect choice for creating your very first shopping cart from scratch. 

Wix is also attractive thanks to a plethora of customizable templates to create a unique look for non-coders. Wix helps you to quickly construct a professional website with beautifully pre-designed templates, integrated security and in-house technology.

The three Wix plans which let you sell online are:

• Business Basic: $20/month. Get the Full Suite.
• Business Unlimited: $25/month. Grow your business.
• Business VIP: $35/month. Accept Online Payment.

Wix offers the following features to eCommerce entrepreneurs:

• Shipping, tax, and inventory management, a custom & branded checkout page builder, drag-and-drop editing, and point-of-sale (POS) support.
• This free eCommerce shopping cart charges no fees for transactions and payment processing.
• Real-time shipping calculators are available, making the shopping experience more convenient and joyful.
• You can use over 500 professional templates, but without redesigning your site you can’t switch templates.
• You may build a shop free of charge, but users must upgrade them for three economic eCommerce plans to sell.

Read our Wix review to find out more.

3. Weebly

Weebly is the pioneer platform which allows users to build business websites using a drag-and-drop builder. Weebly provides web hosting, SSL security, and allows you to manage your website from their mobile app. 

You can also add photos, videos, and integrate with third-party tools. As well as this, you can operate your Weebly website with one of their completely free accounts.

This platform is similar to competitor website builders, particularly Wix and Squarespace. However, Weebly offers the cheapest eCommerce plan out of the three therefore it is probably the most appealing for smaller businesses, especially for those just starting out in eCommerce.

The cost of Weebly’s pricing plans per month are:

• Connect a Domain: $5/month
• Pro for Groups and Organizations: $12/month
• Business for Small Businesses and Stores: $25/month
• Business Plus for Growing Businesses: $38/month

Weebly’s features:

• Weebly prides itself as a straightforward, easy to use system. From setup to management, it maintains a user-friendly interface.
• Pre-made Weebly templates ensure your website is functional and fast without messing up the build.
• Easily update your site into an eCommerce CMS. If you want to make online sales, then Weebly will let you turn your regular site into an online store.
• Weebly can transfer a domain name you already own onto its service. If you are building something fully new, you can search and buy within Weebly itself.
• Weebly makes building a website from scratch straightforward with its drag-and-drop abilities. You can select an element and drag it to where you want it on your Weebly website.
• Fast page loading times. Your pages don’t compete against others and are optimized for the server they live on. This gives you an SEO boost when it comes to brand positioning.

Read the Weebly review to find out more.

4. Squarespace

Squarespace is an awesome option for small businesses because of its simplicity. This website builder offers many stunning store themes to build a website. When building a site using Squarespace, you’ll get access to their inventory management system. 

You can integrate this into your site to keep track of your inventory. Squarespace allows you to easily control various aspects of your website. You can set coupon offers, shipping configurations, and manage your email lists.

Price Policy of Squarespace:

• Personal SquareSpace: $12/month
• Business SquareSpace: $18/month
• Basic Commerce SquareSpace: $26/month
• Advanced Commerce SquareSpace: $40/month

Some features that Squarespace delivers to store owners:

• Simple to use: No programming or coding skills needed to establish your store after migration or restart it.
• High-quality photographic themes and models that do not need additional modification and adaptations. All changes are made to the new web standards automatically.
• Tech support is available through a wide range of channels, including email, live chat, online forums and training videos.
• SquareSpace has no telephone support in contrast to Shopify, therefore immediate help will be out-of-the-question.
• Limited SEO optimization software.
• In general, advanced marketing tools and innovative customer loyalty programs are lacking.

Check out the Squarespace review for more.

5. WooCommerce

WooCommerce attracts entrepreneurs with great chances for customization, a multiplicity of themes and integrations, and an optimal user-experience. To run the WooCommerce shopping cart efficiently and grab maximum benefits from that, it would be useful to learn some of the basics of WordPress and to make sense of the platform’s main features. 

This may sound like a lot of ground to cover, but if you have the patience for some upfront work, you’ll reap the rewards over the long term.

Price policy of WooCommerce

WordPress and WooCommerce are totally free to use, both of them can be downloaded freely from the website and can be set up easily following this instruction. Thus, small and low-budget businesses can consider using this platform to build their online stores.

However, you have to pay for domain name, web hosting or SSL certificate in order to start your WooCommerce store. Normally, the cost of a domain name is $14.99/year, hosting solution $8/month and SSL certificate $70/year. 

However, you can always find the cheap hostings that still live up to your expectations. Besides, theme and website design usually range from $50 to $100 and plugins & extensions are from $25.

The main features of WooCommerce are:

• Modular structure, pre-installed popular payment gateways, an advanced reports builder and convenient product import options.
• The plugin is free so that you don’t need to pay for anything to run a full version.
• An advanced level of security is available by utilizing premium themes.
• Integration with over 33 payment gateways.
• Built-in renewal notifications and automatic emails. This feature lets you and your subscribers know when subscription payments have been processed and when the next payment occurs.
• Detailed reports: This allows you to keep track of your upcoming revenue, cancellations, retention rate, and especially the number of active subscribers.

In case you pay much attention to platforms providing subscription service, you can also find the best subscription eCommerce shopping carts that match your store well.

6. PrestaShop

One more decent solution when selecting the best eCommerce CMS platform is PrestaShop. However, PrestaShop shopping cart solution is not for beginners, and for the best results, you should consider engaging with professional developers. 

You can find the detailed process here. If you go this route, you’ll be able to take advantage of numerous features provided by this out-of-the-box platform. You can also enrich your store functionality with third-party integrations represented on the official addons store.

Price policy of PrestaShop:

• Prestashop edition: As an open-source platform, Prestashop is free to set up.
• Prestashop hosting: Customers can use hosting plans such as SiteGround, Bluehost, or HostPapa. Also, Customers can get even cheaper deals from Prestashop official hosting partners 1 and1 Hosting and A2 hosting.
• Prestashop themes: Prestashop provides users with numerous professional themes costing from €59,99 (about $70) to €349,99 (about $348).
• Prestashop add-ons: There are many free available Prestashop add-ons of which price starts from 30€ (about $35) to 5000€ (about $5806).

Highlights of PrestaShop:

• One-page checkout, quick product creation, shipping method configuration, and the ability to set a minimum quantity for particular items to purchase.
• In addition, over 3,000 mobile-responsive templates at your service to create a unique look and feel of your PrestaShop store
• Addons for expanding functionality may seem a bit too pricey.
• User-friendly: Store owners with hardly any technical knowledge can easily handle and maintain their websites on Prestashop platform
• Budget-friendly: Users can use shared-hosting web services and cloud hosting, which are fairly low-budget hosting solutions in comparison with self-hosting.
• Limited scalability: Prestashop is suitable for small to medium stores. Once a store on Prestashop grows into massive scale, it might experience lags in various aspects.

Conclusion

In conclusion, It may be a tough and time-consuming process to define the best shopping cart platform for your business. However, clarifying the pivotal standards to support the growth of your ecommerce business surely can help you choose the most appropriate one. 

Finally, thank you for keeping up with this article this length. We hope that this comparison among 6 top choices of eCommerce shopping carts for home business will somehow give you a broader picture of these shopping carts recommendations of suitable platforms.

If you intend to move your business to another platform that fits current needs or set up a completely new website, then LitExtension is the most reputable data migration service provider in the current market. You can always contact their support team for any further detailed requests.

Good luck with your business!

About the Author: Thomas Nguyen

Thomas Nguyen is the SEO Manager at LitExtension. He sees himself as a thought leader, strategist, and the go-to person for any digital marketing related question. He believes that his ideas are the ones that shape the marketing industry. You can find him on Likendin.