What are the types of products you want to sell?
Are you selling physical goods, for example clothes, or digital goods such as software or ebooks? It makes all the difference when thinking about aspects such as shipping costs. Look for a platform that suit your product needs.
How many products do you have?
Some eCommerce solutions charge more depending how many products you have. Will you need to specify attributes such as colour and size? Will you sell wholesale or just retail?
What is your budget?
How much are you willing to spend? Do you prefer to pay monthly amounts or give a small percentage of a sale to the company hosting your platform?
Some platforms come with standard monthly fees, others offer flat rates, some charge per transaction, and some eCommerce platforms require additional costs for app subscriptions.
Preferred payment method
PayPal, Square, Apple Pay, and Stripe are a few examples of popular payment gateways.
Hosted or self hosted
Read more about the difference between hosted and self-hosted eCommerce solutions.
Support for multiple currencies
You may also want to charge different fees for different geographical locations.
Features, eg coupons
You may want to run promotions or discounts so flexible pricing should be a consideration.
Flexible shipping
Often customers want the option to pay extra for things to be delivered on the day of purchase or the next day.
Analytics
It is important to monitor your store’s performance, such as number of sales, payment methods, orders, and to be able to easily interpret the statistics.
Integrations
Will you want to sync your products to another platform such as Facebook, Instagram, Facebook Messenger, Amazon or eBay?
Integration with Google Merchant allows product information to be displayed in the relevant Google Shopping results.
Support
It is important to look at various support options on offer before deciding.
SEO
Is the platform search engine friendly? You will want your store to rank well in search results, especially if you have a new store so that it is easy for customers to find your business.
Security
Security is extremely important. Your store will be handling sensitive data, so it is important to ensure that it is kept safe and secure at all times.
Scalability
Is your business looking to grow in the future? It is important to future-proof your business by ensuring that scalability is built in to whichever platform you choose.