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With most orders coming from mobile devices, most retail businesses are revamping their strategies, taking the business to mobile commerce apps. Are you planning to ante up your eCommerce business game to sell on mobile? Adding mobile commerce to your strategy to tap new markets is a great initiative!
Mobile eCommerce is one of the many blessings the digital era has bestowed upon businessmen and consumers alike. When people are constrained by, say, whatever issue – lack of time or energy to go out after a long hard week or login to their desktops – they will most likely desire an easier solution. Something that fits beautifully into their palms and does not require them to get up.
Besides, numbers don’t lie, which is to say, by 2021, global mobile Commerce revenue is projected to hit $3.56 trillion with an average year-on-year growth rate of 33.8%. That being said, 70% – 80% of online orders are already coming through mobile devices. (Source: Statista)
With such promising figures, it would be ideal to adapt to a mobile commerce app solution to take a competitive advantage of the market. If you have already picked the best eCommerce platform to build your mobile app and happen to be scouring for must-have features to add to your eCommerce mobile app, we’ve got that covered as well. Click here!
Meanwhile, here is a brief overview of the 5 best eCommerce platforms to help you decide and pick.
5 Best E-commerce Platforms to Build Mobile Commerce Apps
Magento helps design and build mobile-ready solutions for different-sized retail businesses – big, small, or medium. Vendors can build custom mobile stores with various responsive themes that offer individual user displays using Magento’s mobile commerce platform.
It offers a mobile-friendly checkout and integrates with various payment gateways allowing vendors to receive and accept mobile orders on the go. Magento also serves PWA (progressive web apps), which helps build mobile sites with the ease of mobile apps as well as desktop site searchability. ‘Mobile optimization initiatives’ is one of Magento’s many virtues, helping vendors who use Magento to improve their mobile experience. Magento’s mobile commerce platform also offers Magento App Builders, extensions that empower businesses to create their company’s mobile apps.
However, drawback or not, most people argue that these extensions are a temporary solution and accompany multiple issues. In addition, they do not replicate all of the Magento store’s features and do not mimic any customizations made. Also, most of the app builder extensions are compatible with a handful of Magento versions. Community and business editions are both separate, making it impossible to have a seamless experience.
If you find yourself swimming in doubt, consider this, Magento is trusted by some of the world’s biggest brands including Ford, Landrover, and Nestle Nespresso. Brownie point, not only you can build fully native Android applications for your Magento eCommerce store, but with Magento’s mobile commerce builder you can also integrate it with your custom-built mobile commerce apps.
Shopify enables businesses to sell via mobile devices by empowering retail businesses of all kinds to design and develop mobile responsive themes that thrive on screens of all sizes. With encrypted mobile carts, mobile checkout is aimed at making payments on mobile devices convenient.
Shopify’s mobile commerce solution allows you to manage your store website on the go, allowing you to have an instant view of your products, order history, customer information, and even sales statistics in depth – all from your smartphone device. However, Shopify’s mobile solution was more of an afterthought, it originally wasn’t part of the bigger plan Hence, Shopify’s architecture has certain issues quite often reported by the users working on mobile sites. Moreover, since Shopify is centered on apps and extensions developed by individual third-party providers, users complain that the same problems can occur with any mobile extension.
What’s more, with its iOS and Android buy SDK – a library of native classes and routines – Shopify allows both, Android and iOS developers, to embed Shopify’s eCommerce functionality directly into a native mobile app for a seamless customer experience.
Shopify’s mobile eCommerce platform also empowers third-party mobile app developers that convert your Shopify store into mobile apps however, these are paid and require syncing with your main store to project all the alterations and customizations.
Shopify is powering more than 500 businesses at present, some big and famous names leveraging this eCommerce platform include BBC, RedBull, The Economist, and the Penguin Books.
WooCommerce mobile app solution allows vendors to manage their online stores on the go from anywhere at all as well as view business stats in real-time. WooCommerce enables vendors to sell on mobile leveraging built-in tools and plugin-based solutions to make their site mobile-ready. There is a wide spectrum of extensions to help optimize photos or make your website mobile-ready. In addition to converting your default store into a mobile store, some of these plugins also transform it into a quasi-mobile app, hence, it’s one of our 5 best eCommerce platforms.
WooCommerce offers a plethora of mobile app development plugins and extensions to help you design mobile apps for your WooCommerce store. Albeit, these extensions are paid, you are still required to select one that best fits your retail business requirements. If you are a one-man show, you have to hire an IT team for overall maintenance as well as manage hosting and any updates as WooCommerce is self-hosted. While opting to create or transform your web store into a mobile app with these plugins may seem easier, they are hardly personalized and with very little room for customization. While outsourcing your mobile commerce app solution to a mobile app development company may seem fancier or expensive, it is definitely worth a shot in the long run. You can always have your custom-built app integrated with WooCommerce or any other eCommerce platform you have in mind.
What’s more, it’s trusted by some of the biggest names in the industry including Weber, AeroPress, and Singer.
Many big names from the industry like Ben & Jerry’s and SkullCandy, trust and leverage BigCommerce for their businesses. Big Commerce primarily offers solutions to build mobile commerce apps to help businesses, big or small, establish their mobile presence. This platform serves to build mobile-optimized pages and also offers unconventional and lateral mobile-optimized themes. However, you will have to incorporate modifications using plugins and built-in tools that are basically an additional cost on top of the standard subscription for a fully functioning mobile site with BigCommerce. You will also have to draw on extensions to design your mobile apps that require a substantial understanding of the platform itself to be able to fine-tune as well as sync your BigCommerce store, duplicating all functionality as well as configurations on your mobile apps.
On a side note: While most of these platforms offer easy-to-build tools and plugins to make it easier to build a native Android or iOS app for your e-shop it is best to opt for a custom-built mobile app simply because you have the freedom to play around with the theme, color, design – everything to appease to your customers and retain users – and above all, you can customize it. Custom-built solutions don’t put a limit on creativity.
Here are some other notable features,
Oracle is a cloud-based eCommerce solution that helps small to large-scale retail vendors build and manage their web stores, mobile applications, and social sites with search engine optimization.
Ranked highest in the Garter’s top 18 vendors for “fast, nimble implementations” Oracle Commerce Cloud is truly an out-of-the-box solution, hence mentioned in our 5 best eCommerce platforms list. It’s designed in a way that is customizable to meet your specific business needs, allowing you to launch within a handful of months. It allows the vendors to manage everything like commerce engine, experience management, search, and SEO, content, PIM, AI, pricing, promotions, merchandising, intelligence, and media, centrally using easy-to-use visual drag-and-drop tools.
With a simple UI, the vendors can manage – in a painless way – the entire customer experience, as well as view complete pages. Although, certain tasks like refreshed page design, optimizing search, and refined navigation will require you to hire an IT guy or team if you don’t have one. However, for the most part, most solutions can be taken care of on an immediate basis by businesses with Oracle Commerce Cloud. Obviously, Oracle’s low-code app development is meant to take the pains of coding and whatnot out of app development but as industry experts, we recommend you opt fpr a custom-built app keeping in mind the comfort and convenience it brings in the long haul.
Oracle is trusted by many international big names including ZODIO (french-based), Pet Supermarket, and Walmart!
The above-reviewed best eCommerce platforms are the industry’s most trusted and are being leveraged by some of the biggest brands and names. However, when selecting an eCommerce platform for your e-shop, remember to keep in mind your retail business needs.
It’s Kind of Like Picking the Best Car or Any Other Electronics!
Best to choose an eCommerce platform that is known for its durability in the long run. Besides, new and scalable technology to upgrade your business is imperative to thrive in this era of retail. And with the right platform, retailers can cope better, connect with powerful digital and store platforms, and concentrate on delivering a sales and loyalty-driving customer experience.
You will need a viable alternative that not only ensures your online store is mobile-ready but also provides critical functionality and tools to use the technology wisely to boost your revenues from mobile commerce apps. While all the listed mobile eCommerce platforms in this article offer solutions for building m-commerce ready online stores, you would need to assess each of them on your own and see which one is most tailored to your online store.
We sincerely hope the detailed information presented in our article on the best eCommerce platforms will help you make an informed decision and choose only the best platform for your mobile commerce app, one that is best suited to your business needs. Should you have any trouble picking out a platform and hit a dead-end, we’re here for you to reach out, just a tap away!
Are you looking to build a multivendor e-commerce app that allows multiple vendors to sell their products on a single platform? CitrusBits has the expertise to develop sophisticated multivendor e-commerce apps that empower businesses to create thriving online marketplaces. From vendor management and inventory tracking to secure payment gateways and intuitive user interfaces, CitrusBits can create a feature-rich e-commerce app that drives growth and success for your business.
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