Despite the global economic uncertainty, eCommerce sales continue to grow at a confident pace, now accounting for 14.3% of all retail sales worldwide. More interestingly, eMarketer forecasts the eCommerce share of total global retail sales will hit 23% by 2023. This screams opportunity for stores looking to create or expand their online presence! Of course, a thriving industry attracts its fair share of risk-takers, so the competition grows fiercer by the day. Yet, if you’re thinking of joining the ranks of eCommerce entrepreneurs, the best way to start is by researching the eCommerce CMS landscape. This article will tell you which B2B eCommerce CMS your Magento store needs.
BigCommerce
One of the most prominent eCommerce platforms on the market, BigCommerce supports over 60,000 merchants of all types and sizes. With a plethora of built-in features and CMS capabilities, BigCommerce platform is powerful enough to facilitate the growth of fast-scaling eCommerce businesses and intuitive enough to empower complete eCommerce beginners. It caters to the full spectrum of the eCommerce sector.
The platform is famous for its advanced SEO integration and flexible APIs, enabling merchants to connect to leading software and other CMS solutions, while leveraging the BigCommerce shopping cart in the backend. BigCommerce is fully hosted, Level 1 PCI compliant and available on a monthly subscription basis.
WordPress
WordPress is the most dominant CMS player in the industry, but it isn’t an eCommerce platform in itself. To transform a WordPress site into an online shop, you will need the WooCommerce plugin.
Incredibly popular, the open-source WooCommerce platform is favored for its immense selection of extensions and themes — most of which are available for free. The great thing about these plugins is that they can easily enable missing features and functionalities within the WooCommerce core product at a click. The downside is that adding a high number of plugins leads to unnecessary complexity and impacts site performance.
BigCommerce also offers a WordPress plugin that’s easy to integrate and adds an extra layer of convenience. It allows eCommerce merchants to combine the frontend flexibility of WordPress with the backend benefits; such as abandoned cart recovery, coupons and discounts and single-page checkout that comes out-of-the-box with BigCommerce SaaS platform.
Drupal
Although Drupal isn’t designed for eCommerce specifically, it can be combined with different plugins and frameworks to enable eCommerce functionality. In fact, it is one of the most widely used open-source content management systems; nearly as popular as WordPress or Joomla. Sadly, Drupal is not particularly user-friendly for those without significant development knowledge (although that’s slowly changing for the better).
As a CMS, Drupal commerce offers incredible flexibility. If you combine it with the BigCommerce plugin, you get the best of both worlds — a fully customizable frontend and fully hosted backend.
Shopify
Shopify is one of the world’s well-known SaaS eCommerce platforms. Thanks to its simple interface and affordable pricing, it has become a popular eCommerce platform for startup merchants and small businesses. However, that’s not to say bigger brands cannot use the CMS. The number of features will depend on the type of plan you choose; so it’s best to study the features list before signing up. Shopify offers free 24/7 support, a range of free store templates and a separate POS system. The downside is that Shopify charges transaction fees for using payment providers outside of Shopify.
Prestashop
Prestashop is another open-source platform with MySQL data management and extensive backend code customizability. It boasts a huge variety of add ons and themes, enabling merchants to develop a web store from scratch with limited tech abilities. However, watch out for the total cost, as some of the extensions are quite pricey.
The good news is that you don’t need to be a developer to build a website on Prestashop, making it a great option for startups and medium-sized stores. Businesses may overlook Prestashop due to its lack of free support.
Conclusion
Above are some examples of B2B eCommerce CMS that you can check out for your Magento store needs. If you have any questions, contact us and we will help you to find out.
