Choosing an eCommerce platform for your business

Choosing a platform for your eCommerce website can be one of the most important decisions you make. Often a platform can dictate what you can or can’t do without custom development (which can be very pricey!).

When choosing a platform, assumptions are dangerous. You may often assume that a feature should be included in a platform as standard, but this is often not the case – there is no “standard” set of features, as everyone’s requirements and opinion and what would be considered “standard” are different.

One of the most important things to consider isn’t just what features you require right now, but also what features you think you may need in the future.

Questions to ask yourself when looking at platforms:

• What promotions will I want to run? e.g. buy x get y free, buy 10 and save 10% etc.
• Can I create product feeds? for Google Shopper amongst other services.
• Does the system allow you to display products in the way you want? for example: tabs, custom fields, stock status etc.
• How does the system deal with option products? this varies greatly with different platforms. For example, you may have a product that comes in three sizes, and three different colours. You might want to track stock on all of these – e.g. size 9 in red is out of stock. You may also want to be able to have different product codes for different options and different images.
• How can I structure my products? think about how you want to set your categories out, do you want products to be able to be in more than one category without having to duplicate?
• How can users sort products?
• Do I want to have customer reviews?
• Does the system support my preferred payment gateway?
• Does the platform allow for your preferred delivery pricing structure?
• Is the platform SEO friendly?
• Is the platform PCI Compliant?
• How flexible is the platform to modify?
• How often is the platform updated?
• How is support for the platform given? can you get premium support if need be?
• What is the checkout process? how easy would this be for potential customers?
• Can you change user access levels for multiple administrators?
• Can the platform integrate with other systems? this could be eBay, Amazon, stock systems or delivery services.
• Does the platform support cross sells? e.g. “You May Also Like…”
• Can you have multiple product images?
• Does it support multiple currencies?
• What are the email marketing features?
• How are returns dealt with?
• What sales reports are available?
• What are the web hosting requirements?

This is only an introductory list and there are probably many more variables which could be considered, but here are some to get you started – use this as a basic check list. Have we missed anything important? let us know in the comments below!