The short way to answer this pivotal question is to know what exactly the idea of your project is and what this idea requires from the online store to implement it correctly. Do you need a specific design or unique features or what?
The following steps may help you get rid of this confusion and find signs on the road to choosing the best site to create an online store:
1. Create a plan for your online store.
We cannot stress this point enough. Anything unplanned is a hearty feast for failure. Take your time to identify the most important frameworks for your store, answering the most important question: “What is the most important function of my store?”
Determining the goals and tasks of your store will get you halfway to the best site for creating an online store. It will help you narrow down your search and compare the best online store builder sites, which, by the way, are highly competitive.
The following questions may help point you in the right direction:
- Who is my target audience?
- How many pages should I have on my store?
- What level of design do I need for my store, from templates to fonts and more?
- Maximum how many sales can I expect from my store each year?
- What payment methods does my target audience prefer?
- Which devices does the ideal customer use to shop online?
Answer these questions first, then proceed to the second step of nomination, which is the criteria for choosing you – and every business owner – the best site to create an online store:
- The required price and budget.
- Post-launch support and repair service.
- The possibility of integrating third-party intermediaries into the store, such as payment gateways, shipping companies, and others
- The possibility and ease of modifying the interface, deleting items, and adding to the store.
2. Check the price plans and service packages of the different platforms.
Especially if you are moving on a tight budget, choosing a reasonably priced website to build your online store is imperative. Some of these platforms allow you to pay monthly, fortnightly, or annually, and some require you to pay directly when you choose them.
Some stores also give you an unlimited trial period, like Weebly, where you can launch your store completely free. If you want to try some of these stores, some of them give you a guarantee period of 30 days, and some of them give you 90 days.
3. Check the experiences and opinions of previous users.
You may want to take a tour of the opinions and evaluations of current or former users of the stores and harvest the most important strengths and weaknesses in each of these stores.
You can also use your personal acquaintances or your LinkedIn circle, for example, to survey the opinions of other e-commerce merchants.
The most important points to check from user reviews and from your own research are:
- Ease of modification, addition, and deletion of products.
- Ease of improving the appearance of the store in search engines.
- The abundance and quality of interface designs, and the ease of response on all devices and screens.
- Support is available around the clock, whether you need it often or not.
- Ease of adding and integrating middleware programs or plugins.
- The most important features offered by each of them.
4. Your experience in building and developing stores
As you can see, there is quite a bit of work you will need to do yourself to design your online store and adjust a lot of the details in it. Some platforms require more expertise than others.
It is your turn to determine your ability to deal with these technologies. None, medium, or advanced? If you’re a beginner, Wix or Weebly might help. Since they are specially designed for beginners, they have easy-to-use drag-and-drop editors.
Shopify is a good start as well, but it needs additional effort and knowledge if the entrepreneur is a complete beginner, not because it is complicated but because it has advanced features.
On the other hand, BigCommerce is well suited to applicants with knowledge of web development and design.
In the end, choosing the best site for creating an online store is a purely personal process that depends on the requirements of each store in light of the nature of the target audience, the market, and the capabilities of the store owner.
Take your time to research and compare features and prices, and most importantly, study your project in detail.
Read also: The most important online stores building sites