Top eCommerce CMS Platforms
Tired of using technical jargon? An extremely effective Content Management System (CMS) can help you turn your ecommerce into a clean, professional platform. No headaches of coding again! Having an easy-to-use editor can be used to make and update your online store easily.
CMS systems are perfect for small businesses since they free the creativity in building a stand-out website. You no longer need to be a tech wizard to run an ecommerce business. After all, what matters most is the selling of products and the growth of the business.
Now, choosing the right CMS for your ecommerce success becomes a big key. Let’s deep dive into the pros and cons of different platforms so you make the right choice.
In the post below, we will discuss the top 10 CMS options for ecommerce. But before we get into the matter at hand, let’s define what an ecommerce CMS actually is.
What is an eCommerce CMS platform?
A content management system is simple interface through which the ecommerce business owner creates, edits, and publishes website content. It offers all the tools at your fingertips: you can change everything about an online shop from its look and feel to altering product pages or adding a promotions banner.
An ecommerce platform is an all-in-one solution that deals with product management as well as online sales. There are actually two types of ecommerce CMS platforms: SaaS and open-source.
- SaaS (Software as a Service): Cloud-based platforms, delivering features through a subscription-based model, offering ease of features, good security, and regular updates.
- Open-Source: Completely free to download and customize. You’re in control of what’s happening on your website but have to have a technical background.
- Hosted ecommerce CMS: These ones are cloud-based and thus bother-free to set up as well as maintain. Some famous ones include Shopify and BigCommerce.
- Headless ecommerce CMS: These are back-end based solutions. It is used by the developers for customizing the front-end in a fully customized manner. Famous ones include Contentful and Strapi.
A number of platforms also act as CMS – they work in a facile manner to control the backend operations and the frontend appearance of the store.
Why eCommerce CMS platforms are Important?
You might not have realized it until now, but not all ecommerce stores need a second CMS. So, before you decide on whether or not a CMS is something you need for your site, consider your content strategy.
If you find that you need to update your blog or product pages frequently, then a CMS will flexibly work with you. However, if it’s rarely that you’d ever need to make an update to the content, then a second CMS isn’t a must.
And of course, keep in mind that if your ecommerce solution already has CMS capabilities, you might not even need a separate CMS.
- Smoothens content editing and creation
Worried about making changes to the content of your website? Compared to other CMS software, modern CMS is extremely user-friendly. This means that even you or your whole team can readily update contents and products to speed up marketing campaigns and promotions.
- Helps to enhance reach
Content marketing is among the most potent ways of creating organic traffic. In a world dominated by social media, it is imperative to create content that grabs audiences’ attention to increase your store’s presence on Google and all other search engines.
Quality content will also be able to make your brand memorable and improve consumer loyalty. A good CMS makes it possible to structure, share, and retrieve your content in such a manner that remains SEO-friendly and user-friendly.
- Less Dependency
Profitable ecommerce businesses know that satisfying their customers’ expectations is a sure path to success. A CMS enables you to update your website quickly and easily while involving developers with minimal issues.
It saves time but helps free up a budget that can be used elsewhere in marketing, hence putting your business ahead of its competitors.
- Fosters collaboration
Good collaboration will be the key to high-quality content. A good CMS helps in team work, where team members can seamlessly work together on proofreading, formatting, and finding of visual assets.
The result is better targeted content, smooth review processes, and an overall well-optimized customer experience.
Top eCommerce CMS Platforms
1. WordPress
WordPress is ecommerce software of its class. It is not only leading for an ecommerce site, but it leads in all web pages as well. It’s estimated that about 28% of all ecommerce websites use WordPress as their CMS.
WordPress is open-source: Which translates to the fact you can use the basic technology at no cost. This is different from Shopify.
Successful ecommerce hinges on less expensive WordPress hosting. With flexible, scalable, and secure options, businesspeople can set up reliable stores that grow effortlessly.
WordPress also offers free themes to start you off. You can either add your custom code to customize them or apply WordPress plugins for easier site creation and management.
Top Features of WordPress:
- Availability of multiple ecommerce plugins
- Seamless integration of all payment gateways
- Ease of publishing content, both visual and textual
- Flexibility in choosing from free and paid themes
- Smooth integration of social media accounts
- Variety of free SEO extensions
Pros | Cons | Price |
– Free to use and open-source, makes it a versatile ecommerce CMS platform. – Ease of customizations to provide unique interface to your online store. – Plugins make it more SEO-friendly and feature-oriented. | – Lack of hosting services, which you’ll need to arrange. – Need for technical support as WordPress is free to use. | Business: $25/month Ecommerce: $45/month |
2. HubSpot
HubSpot is a kind of different CMS, that’s more focused on marketing beyond ecommerce. It is a cloud solution to funnel traffic in via SEO and marketing.
HubSpot is perfect for sites whose content production and marketing are at the core but may not have some of those key features associated with ecommerce pure plays.
Great SEO features and quick page loads also help to increase Google rankings. Combined with easy links to social media sites, sending your website all over these areas of marketing becomes a breeze through email marketing.
Ecommerce stores connect to additional tools with HubSpot integrations to streamline processes and boost productivity.
Top Features of HubSpot:
- HubSpot provides a great ecommerce website hosting environment.
- It provides all marketing metrics to measure progress at one place, including social media, paid ads, and content performance.
- Ease of setting up customer support features like live chat
- HubSpot has a user-friendly dashboard with ease-to-read data.
- Flexible to optimize quality shopping experience for customers.
- It offers A/B testing to optimize your online shopping store.
Pros | Cons | Price |
– No-code, user-friendly interface that helps in managing every task effectively. – It helps improve overall efficiency of marketing campaigns. – An array of top-notch SEO features | – Lacks some useful ecommerce features that can make your store successful. – Might be on expensive side as compared to others. – Requires to learn a proprietary coding language, HubL, and hence making it complex to edit your webpages. | Starter: $25/month Professional: $400/month Enterprise: $1200/month |
3. Shopify
Shopify is another powerful CMS platform that is specifically designed for the ecommerce sector. It saves you much effort and time because it comes with built-in hosting, so you don’t need to have a separate domain name and web hosting.
Shopify’s site builder is also extremely easy to use, and beginners can make great-looking ecommerce stores with Shopify. There are a huge number of readymade templates and themes.
With Shopify, experienced developers can customize CSS and HTML code to their preference as they so desire. Shopify allows better developers to make just about whatever you want with the store-making it possible to customize your store’s CSS and HTML code.
However, Shopify provides its users with an easy site builder. As a result, any person, even those who lack technical skills, can design his own ecommerce store. You can create a professional-looking online shop rather quickly as you have many templates and themes to choose from.
Top Features of Shopify
- You can easily utilize your own domain and set up contact forms.
- Seamlessly integrate in-store sales processes and desktop-as-a-service on both desktop and mobile.
- Allows smooth connection with social media channels and selling product on Facebook.
- Provides a user-friendly order management system along with engaging add-ons like coupons, gift cards, and discounts.
- Availability of mobile app to track every progress and performance.
- Ease of setting and running email marketing campaigns through various platforms.
Pros | Cons | Price |
– Plenty of free and paid extensions. – Smooth and most secure payment platforms. – A great addition for drop shipping, a powerful feature for ecommerce stores. | – There is a fee for the sales that comes through third-party payment providers. – Not many free themes available. – To add a feature, you need to install the mobile app. | Basic: $29/month Shopify Plan: $79/month Retail: $89/month Advanced: $299/month |
4. WooCommerce
WooCommerce is a multivariant ecommerce plugin that combines to WordPress to make any website running on the blog a store. This, therefore, gives it an excellent choice if one already has a WordPress blog and is willing and eager to begin selling.
This open source platform is widely used, providing flexible and adaptable ecommerce functionality for small and medium-sized businesses to customize and control. It’s perfect for users who are already on WordPress and need an awesome ecommerce solution, with an awesome community.
WooCommerce also possesses a large community and comprehensive documentation to help ecommerce businesses find valuable resources to run their online store.
Top Features of WooCommerce
- Several adaptive templates are available for instant use.
- Available on both iOS and Android for smoother management of website on all devices.
- Friendly ecommerce CMS platform for both developers and designers.
- Provides a variety of plugins and extensions both free as well as paid.
- Offers several integration opportunities on the basis of your ecommerce store performance.
Pros | Cons | Price |
– Ease of customization to make your ecommerce store look better. – Driven by a huge community and extensive support. – Easy track of all the metrics with user-friendly dashboard. | – Need a WordPress website to integrate and run WooCommerce. – Might be challenging for beginners. | WooCommerce Plugin: Free Add-ons: $0-200/month |
5. Wix
Wix is a versatile website builder that follows artificial intelligence and also offers features of an ecommerce platform. It provides business as well as an ecommerce plan through various subscriptions.
Whilst Wix will probably provide users with a seamless and hassle-free experience, in general, it will not offer the same level of customization as with other SaaS ecommerce platforms. Although Wix cannot be very versatile for personalization, many of its store templates are pretty attractive and professional-looking.
Still, a bit of trouble will occur with customizations on parts of the site, especially providing individual visitors with custom experiences or when dealing with structuring certain discounts as well as getting the specifics of user analytic details.
If you like an easy-to-use platform and a store design that’s nice, you’ll consider Wix. However, if the features are pretty much advanced and you need high customization for your ecommerce store, you’ll not want to use Wix.
Top Features of Wix:
- Pick from the vast collection of ecommerce templates that really correspond to your brand.
- A user-friendly interface to set up your online store very easily and quickly.
- Assured hassle-free shopping experience on their mobile devices with the responsive design features.
- Immense blogging capabilities to track viewers easily and hence enhance SEO.
- Efficient inventory management to track and maintain the ordering of your products.
Pros | Cons | Price |
– A value for money ecommerce CMS platform. – No additional fees for commission. – Plenty of templates to set up ecommerce store. | – Requires sign up to access certain features of premium plans. – Customizing website might seem limited. | Basic: $16/month Unlimited: $22/month Pro: $27/month VIP: $45/month |
6. BigCommerce
BigCommerce is a more robust SaaS ecommerce platform that will allow an online business to launch, scale, and manage a website. Boasting great flexibility and scalability, BigCommerce powers some of the world’s biggest brands, including Toyota, Burrow, and Skullcandy.
The other essential factor explaining its popularity is the level of website editor adopted by the platform. Businesses can easily find templates to tailor them but, at the same time, delve into the code with HTML and CSS to create unique online stores.
This explains why BigCommerce could easily be found suitable for small businesses which would like a ready-set-go setup, even large enterprises seeking a fully customized online presence.
Top Features of BigCommerce
- Provides managed hosting to rack your head over managing servers.
- Smooth integrations with 3rd party applications and expansions.
- User-friendly ecommerce store builder with quick implementations.
- Engaging templates to design your ecommerce store.
- Flexible with multiple payment gateways
- Enterprise-level support for smooth development.
Pros | Cons | Price |
– Easy to use website builder and features. – Flexible customizations with the templates. – SEO-friendly features to gain more search traffic. | – Not an open-source ecommerce CMS – Quite expensive to access all the features. – Charge more after a certain sales limit. | Standard: $39/month Plus: $105/month Pro: $399/month |
7. Drupal
The open-source CMS platform Drupal Commerce lets you create professional ecommerce sites from the ground up. This is very different from the model of WordPress as well as those SaaS CMS options-it really acts more like a website framework. And with that comes both curse and opportunity.
Getting past those above hurdles or hiring a developer to work past them for you you can create some seriously unique online stores on Drupal.
Another solution is Drupal Commerce – an ecommerce CMS like WooCommerce. The process of creating and running a site using the ecommerce platform makes it easy though not automatic, yet requires some work, and with others, you will arrange your own web hosting and security.
Top Features of Drupal:
- You can design a totally unique online store that exhibits your brand precisely.
- Provides an excellent shopping experience across all devices.
- Multilingual support for a wider audience reaches in one easy step.
- Powerful and effective SEO modules for ecommerce website optimization.
- Built-in workflow system to streamline your team’s processes and improve efficiency.
Pros | Cons | Price |
– Flexible migration to other CMS platforms. – Separates backend and frontend for smooth content creation and publishing. – Multiple integration options. | – Little complex when it comes to usability. – Difficult to use and one can only find solutions on forums. – Insufficient plugins as compared to other ecommerce CMS platforms. | Drupal Plugin: Free Hosting & Modules: Free |
8. Squarespace
With Squarespace, fresh faces to the world of online business will find it highly suitable. The interface is friendly and intuitive, making one of the simplest ecommerce options to work with without help.
Squarespace has premium templates, which are known for quality and aesthetics. There is an integrated drag-and-drop editor, and hence making customization simple and easy to do. In this platform, you can control the style and look of your store.
Besides this user-friendly interface, Squarespace provides some essential options such as hosting and payment processing, making it a one-stop solution for a beginner. This mobile-centric design will ensure that your customers have an effortless shopping experience on mobile devices.
Top Features of Squarespace
- Easy order management, payment processing, and shipping.
- Utilize third party apps and plugins to make functionality available
- Track website performance and customer behavior.
- Unlimited showcasing of products and catalogs.
- Any one of the Squarespace plans gets you a free professional web address.
- Free SSL certificate for assured data security to customers.
Pros | Cons | Price |
– No hidden costs or transaction charges – Plenty of ecommerce products and tools like high-quality template. – Seamless and flexible usage. | – Lack of call support, but offers chat option | Basic: $28/month Advanced: $52/month |
9. Adobe Commerce (Previously Magento)
Magento is owned by Adobe and is the largest open source CMS for e-commerce, powering over 260,000 online stores worldwide. Magento carries strong functionality and keeps an extensive extension marketplace, which thus offers very wide ranges of features and integrations for every business need.
Magento is a very flexible system that is suitable for any size of merchant. However, in the real world, its great use is found in fast-growing and larger companies mainly because of the elaborate setup process, flexible pricing, and mostly more complicated development requirements.
Due to the advanced features and because of its high scalability, this solution is highly popular among those who require a very customizable and very powerful ecommerce solution.
Top Features of Adobe Commerce
- Ease of updating pages through smooth editing and customizing elements using Page Builder.
- Utilize every type of content – images, videos, banners, and additional layouts without any restriction.
- Additional product recommendation tool powered with AI to help users find the right products.
- Content automation by Page Builder to schedule and publish content any time.
- Drag-and-drop interface to help you utilize all the elements and editing inline texts.
Pros | Cons | Price |
– Automated content scheduling and posting makes it time-saving. – A complete no-code platform for ecommerce and marketers. – Enhanced security and scalable performance. | – A bit costly as compared to other ecommerce CMS platforms. – Less customizations – Dependency on updates | Basic: $130/month Advanced: $2000/month |
10. Joomla
Joomla is a content management system powered robustly, and it has effective ecommerce extensions attached to it; hence it may be used by businesses which require rich content management along with an online store.
Ease of use and simple yet substantial ecommerce features like product catalog management, secure payment options include all these things which make Joomla a great option when a business wants a whole range of online presence.
While it’s not an easily learned CMS, Joomla is a flexible and extensible platform, as businesses require a very versatile CMS that can fully integrate their ecommerce capabilities. You shall control your website content and give your customers an intuitive shopping experience using Joomla.
Top Features of Joomla
- Seamless integration with Joomla ecommerce extensions with the core CMS.
- Ease of management for all content and e-sales at one single platform.
- Ability to administer an ecommerce product catalog effectively, including product variations, pricing, inventory management, tax calculations, etc.
- Allowing your customer, a choice of multiple payment and shipping options to meet their requirements.
- Availability of powerful SEO and marketing tools to design effective marketing activities and drive traffic as well as generate sales.
Pros | Cons | Price |
– Highly customizable platform to make your ecommerce store impressive. – Extensive feature set to fulfil various purposes. – Strong community support | – Needs expertise of technical professional sometimes. – Might be difficult for beginners to set up. | Free to use. |
How to Choose the Best eCommerce CMS Platform?
Every CMS will have its unique design and structure, interface, and functionality. However, the most important factor in choosing a CMS remains your project’s specific requirements. The nature of your project will determine the desired functionality of your website and the needed management system.
Another essential factor is your team’s technical skills. If you can command the services of good developers or have an in-house team of experts, you might opt for a more complex CMS offering advanced features.
But if you are to take care of the website management yourself, then you might want to choose a user-friendly CMS to ease the process. Here are the factors you should consider while choosing a perfect ecommerce CMS platform:
- Profound Programming Language: The more popular a programming language is, the higher your chances of finding experienced developers to hire if need be.
- Intuitive Design: Responsive design ensures that any content your website is supposed to display actually gets displayed across all devices. This is highly crucial as over 50% of web traffic nowadays is mobile.
- Ease of Use: The flexibility of a CMS enables using various content, features, and formats without having to create profound customization or coding.
- SEO Integrations: Assess the CMS’s SEO capabilities as an indication of whether they are enough for successful web promotion or just attract more work.
- Security: Security is always one of the priorities that ensures that your website does not get hacked and thus you do not lose money because of that.
- Scalability: Your CMS should also be able to scale up with enough volumes of content, functions or traffic to avoid performance degradation.
- Visual Editor: A seamless interface helps you view the final presentation of your content before it is presented to website visitors in real time.
- Customization: An ecommerce CMS needs to allow content publishing and management. Customization feature allows you to tailor the system for the most specific features of the project and according to the needs of the target audience.
A good example will be – Magento or Shopify are excellent platforms for small business owners should they need powerful e-commerce platforms; on the other hand, WordPress is ideal for an information resource website.
Integrate Top eCommerce CMS Platforms with eSearch Logix
We know how to easily bring these ecommerce CMS solutions into your platform by using the expertise from a number of ecommerce CMS platforms that we have knowledge in, such as Magento, WooCommerce, Shopify, BigCommerce.
Thus, we will easily ensure a smooth transition and save all existing content and functionality while adding functionality to your web-based store.
- Needs Analysis: We closely monitor your business needs and objectives to provide you the appropriate ecommerce CMS solution.
- Integration Planning: Our experts will prepare an integration plan outlining what needs to be done and where the integration might trigger challenges.
- Migration and Implementation: We migrate all the content and data already existing in consideration for minimizing any disturbance of operations while installing a seamless new ecommerce platform.
- Customization and Optimization: Our developers customize the ecommerce to look more like you, making sure that it’s fast and optimized to provide user experience.
- Ongoing Support and Maintenance: We also provide ongoing support and maintenance services to ensure that all ecommerce platforms maintain smooth functionality and stay up-to-date.
Partner with us and run your ecommerce store smoother than ever. Just share your requirements and let our experts handle everything from beginning to end!