7 Best Ecommerce Platforms For Small Businesses in the UK

Why is An eCommerce Platform So Important?

An eCommerce platform is a software application that permits the business owners to manage their sales, marketing and all the business operations online. It works as the backbone of your organisation, whether it is for a B2C or a B2B company. Infact, when you are starting an online business, an eCommerce platform is the most important thing. Moreover, a good eCommerce platform for small business assists you in streamlining the way your business interacts with your customers, clients, and employees. eCommerce platforms are the software applications that help businesses in executing complex functions both in the back end as well as front end.

7 Best eCommerce Platforms For Small Business in the UK

To make sure that you choose the right eCommerce platform for your small business, we have researched and jotted down some of the best eCommerce platforms for small business in the UK.

Go through them one by one and decide which one works the best for your business. These platforms will help in improving your business, sales, and SEO results dramatically. In this blog we have shared 7 best eCommerce platforms, their features and pricing. This will also help you in getting an insight of how much does a website cost in the UK? So without further ado, let’s just dive into the world of eCommerce platforms.

1. Wix

Wix is one of the most advanced and creative eCommerce platforms for small businesses in the UK because it relies on cloud-based storage rather than hard server-based storage. This eCommerce platform will help small businesses like you to make your online stores through creative drag and drop tools, also it contains myriads of designs and templates.

By far, it is known to be the best eCommerce platform for newbies. The services it offers are more than enough for small businesses, and thankfully, you can insert various plug-ins to expand these features for added value.

Features of Wix:

Wix offers tons of features despite its low asking price, including a spread of website building functions such as the ability to show digital products or to create pages dedicated to the image gallery of products.

Moreover, it offers plenty of shipping options, also discount codes are available. Along with this, it includes a comprehensive inventory management system as well.

In addition to this, its cart recovery tool is something different and interesting, and many clients will love this tool. Furthermore, the eCommerce platform for small businesses in the UK is mobile optimised and it comes with numerous mobile app payment gateways, so it makes international transactions much easier.

Pricing of Wix:

Wix is a user-friendly and affordable eCommerce platform. It offers a free trial which is inclusive of advertisements. The cheapest plan for Wix is available at £3/ month and the price of the most costly website plan is £18/month.

Pros:

• Very Affordable
• Excellent for the small businesses
• User friendly

Cons:

• Not very good for large enterprises.

Also Read: How much does a website cost in the UK

2. Shopify

Shopify is one of the most popular eCommerce platforms for small businesses in the UK. When you look at the history of Shopify, it is very unexpected. In 2004, a group of snowboarders pooled all their money to build a platform that is now well known in the entire market.

More than 1 million businesses have taken the benefits of this platform to reach the top, so there’s no surprise that there is a lot to like here for each kind of business whether it’s large or small.

Shopify is loaded with tons of website building features and its prices are also quite reasonable depending on the scalability you want. Plus, it comes with a free trial of 14 days, so you can try it before blocking your money into it.

Features of Shopify

There are loads of site-building features available for you such as custom domains, limitless product listings, inventory tracking, and lots of personalisation and customisation tools.

Moreover, if you will buy the higher service of this platform, then you will also be able to collect AI tools to offer shopping cart recommendations and personalised greetings for your common as well as most valued customers.

The most interesting thing about Shopify is that you can easily create your unique website as it comes with more than 70 different themes and templates.

Pricing of Shopify:

Shopify is fairly priced. The price ranges from £22 a month for small businesses to £219 a month for the larger businesses with so many online payments taking place every single day. It provides a free trial also.

Pros:

• Plenty of website building features and analytics tools.
• Includes a 14 day free trial.
• The pricing is affordable.

Cons:

• The advanced tier of the platform can get a bit complex.

3. WooCommerce

If you are looking for a free and best eCommerce platform for small business, then WooCommerce is just for you. It is an open-source plug-in that is designed for WordPress websites, so it’s a brilliant choice for WordPress users. ( Who doesn’t use WordPress these days?)

WooCommerce is the perfect eCommerce platform for small businesses in the UK that require a free tool that can assist them in growing and boosting their sales quickly. Moreover, there are supplementary add-ons and extensions available, some of them are paid. But yeah, believe us, you get a lot by spending a little on WooCommerce, which is just amazing!

Features of WooCommerce:

They provide plenty of outstanding features that are quite easy to integrate into your WordPress website, together with mobile optimised shopping (which is a big deal as the major portion of the traffic comes from the mobile apps only), a bunch of catalog management tools, and support for the geolocation services as well.

To put it another way, WooCommerce offers almost everything that a newbie needs to service the customers and keep a track of its inventory.

Various other tools such as discounts and special coupons work well for the business who struggle to bring new leads to their websites. It also includes the product review functions, shipping calculators, and options as well. Not only this, but it is also one of the best platforms for search engine optimisation too.

Pricing of WooCommerce:

As we have already said, WooCommerce is available free of cost for users. Also, adding it to your WordPress site is easy.

The only and biggest drawback is that they don’t provide any kind of email or phone support, so you need to handle the technical hurdles on your own. But you can afford to make a little effort since you are getting it for free.

Pros:

• Free and affordable eCommerce platform for small business.
• Works best for small-scale shipping.
• Brilliant for mobile businesses.

Cons:

• The customer support is not very quick.

4. BigCommerce

BigCommerce was founded back in 2009 by two Australian entrepreneurs, though the institution now calls Texas its place of origin.

BigCommerce is one of the best eCommerce platforms that helped around 100,000 to build their digital store. It has been downloaded more than 82 million times and provides the existing sites the ability to sell online.

Furthermore, it comes with ample features that are analytics and SEO optimisation, website customisation, application integration, inventory management, and many more.

Features of BigCommerce:

Various features are worth your time and money, including review and rating systems, custom domains, support for sales via multiple currencies, and even online gift cards.

Not only this, but the platform also comes with 12 different free themes, however, you will need to pay a minimal amount to access the other 160+ other features that will help you in standing out!

Some of the very significant features of BigCommerce are it offers custom domains, online gift cards, limitless product listings, a review and rating system, and lots of Google analytics tools. So, it is a great choice for small businesses.

Pricing of BigCommerce:

The price of BigCommerce ranges from £22 a month to £220 a month. It offers a free trial of 15 days.

Pros:

• It works well with the point of sale systems.
• Unlimited file storage and bandwidth.
• Brilliant for big-scale shipping integrations.

Cons:

• It is relatively high priced.
• Some free themes are almost similar to the other themes.

5. Squarespace

Moving onto the next best eCommerce platform for small business in the UK in our list, it’s none other than Squarespace It is best for combining the designs with the sales feature. With the help of its smooth, tailor-made templates, you can make your website stand out. Do you know what’s the best thing about it? You don’t even have to spend a lot of time creating an attractive Squarespace store.

Besides, each template of this great eCommerce platform is very unique, it conveys an aesthetically pleasing and clear message with the strategically positioned checkout tabs. This can help in making the user experience much better and in increasing sales. These are some of the reasons why Squarespace is one of the brilliant eCommerce platforms available in the market.

This isn’t it, Squarespace also offers excellent value for the money. It supports the sale of digital products, physical, and service-based digital products through Instagram in its affordable pricing plans.

Nevertheless, it is not as good as Wix or Shopify, when it comes to user-friendliness. Also, it supports just two payment processors which might force you to take a step back.

Pricing of Squarespace:

The pricing of Squarespace is quite good. It ranges from £20 per month to £30 per month. A free trial of 14 days is offered.

Pros:

• Excellent value for money offers an affordable business plan with sales tools and attractive templates.
• The templates are unique and beautiful.

Cons:

• It is quite difficult to use as compared to Wix, Shopify, or Square.
• It supports only two payment processors.

6. Magento

Now coming to the very popular and reputed eCommerce platform for small business in the UK in terms of self-hosted solutions, that is Magento.

It was published in 2008, was acquired by eBay, and then sold to Adobe. Magento handles more than $100 billion in merchandise volume every year. It helps newbies to create their websites specific to their requirements. Also, it is a great platform for a store that you know is well built and will do well in the future.

Moreover, with the help of Magento, you can build your web store conveniently. In addition to this, it is well optimised to work with tons of traffic, thousands of digital products, and a lot of sales. Plus, it offers a mobile website store with a mobile-friendly interface.

Along with this, it offers multiple payment processors, which means, you can add a lot of payment options such as Stripe, PayPal, Google Checkout, and many others. Moreover, you can manage your store from any corner of the world.

Features:

Magento offers tons of amazing additional features such as inventory management, coupon management, third party payment gateways, API for the website services. Moreover, it also handles the shipping charges and offers coupon management services.

In addition to this, more than 5000 extensions are readily available on this Ecommerce platform. Magento is well optimised for both tablets as well as mobiles and offers SEO tools too.

Pricing of Magento:

Magento offers a free community version for its users. However, the Magento enterprise edition will cost you between £17000 to £25000.

Pros:

• Self-host on any web hosting with the help of this top eCommerce platform for small businesses.
• Convenient to find developers to customise your eCommerce store.
• It is free to begin.

Cons:

• This eCommerce platform requires technical knowledge.
• It is quite complex.
• It is comparatively expensive.

7. Salesforce

Salesforce is the leader in CRM (customer relationship management) software, so this is going to be the best CRM that you’ll come across. It is an on-demand customer relationship management platform that offers service for all businesses with a focus on customer relationships and sales.

Moreover, the platform also has CRM capabilities that include marketing automation, contact management, and lead management. These applications assist small organisations to track sales leads, manage customer accounts and monitor marketing campaigns.

Besides, this best eCommerce platform for small business is available only for SaaS deployment. In addition to this, the Salesforce application offers a technology stack that covers security and database as well as user interface and workflow.

Features of Salesforce:

Salesforce offers numerous top-notch eCommerce features for small businesses. The Salesforce automation feature includes activity and task management, inventory management, contact management, price and product list management, desktop integration, and so on.

In addition to this, it also provides marketing automation features like lead and campaign management. The customer support features of Salesforce are knowledge base and case management. Other than this, it offers analytics and reporting features as well

Pricing of Salesforce:

Salesforce doesn’t offer a free version. The pricing of Salesforce ranges between £20 to £240.

Pros:

• It is a robust CRM and brilliant eCommerce Platform for small businesses.
• You can insert and remove the features to suit your business needs.
• The services are fully optimised.

Cons:

• This eCommerce platform for beginners is a bit expensive.
• You have to pay extra for the add-ons.
• Setup and configuration are time-consuming and complex.

Conclusion

So, finally, we are at the end of our article on the best eCommerce platforms for small business available in the market. If you are a beginner and want to run a business, then these platforms will surely help you. Now that you know about the various platforms available it’s time to start the business.

Most of these eCommerce platforms for small businesses offer free trials, so you can try them out before purchasing. All in all, if you wish to make a place in the digital world, then why wait? Choose the best platform according to the needs and requirements of your business and get started!

We believe this article helped you in making the right decision. In case you need any help, then feel free to contact us at RVS Media Limited.