To find the best fit for your business, you need to look at what is most important to you and research the vendors offering complete ecommerce packages. For example, do plan to invest heavily in email marketing, or is mobile commerce a must-have option? Once you have a list of the features you need, look for an ecommerce software vendor that has a proven track record and can deliver the tools and services to meet your business goals.
Top 5 Ecommerce Software and Shopping Carts for Small Business Owners
Here are five options if you plan to invest in hosted ecommerce software to grow your small business or start a new online venture.
1. Ability Commerce: Amazon Channel Feed
The Ability Commerce feature set includes mobile-optimized versions of stores and tools to integrate your order management system (OMS) and accounting system. This ecommerce platform also includes the SmartSite content manager; this lets users without any programming knowledge change store promotions, prices, images and products in the Web store.
A key Ability Commerce feature is the Channel Feed service to manage products on Amazon. Once you provide the inventory to sell on Amazon, Ability Commerce Amazon experts will monitor your products daily to help you position products better, motivate buyers and, ultimately, boost sales.
Pricing for Ability Commerce is customized based on specific business requirements.
2. Big Commerce: Real-Time eBay Integration
The Big Commerce platform is a good choice for any small business that wants to start an online store and maintain an eBay business.
Big Commerce offers ample features for hosting, store design, SEO, mobile commerce, marketing and inventory--plus you can integrate your online Web stores with eBay listings from within the Big Commerce platform. Simply choose which products to push to eBay, create an eBay listing template and set custom eBay shipping. Now inventory is always synced between your online store and eBay.
Big Commerce offers five pricing plans, starting at $24.95 per month for 100 product listings. The Silver Plan, which is suitable for most small businesses looking to invest in ecommerce and which Big Commerce deems the "best value," costs $39.95 per month for 500 products, 10 staff logins, 3 GB bandwidth and 300 MB storage.
3. Intuit Ecommerce: The Merchant Account
