The Role of eCommerce in businesses
In today’s competitive business world, traditional shopping methods are outdated and less preferred by consumers. Startups, B2B companies, and small businesses have started adopting eCommerce development services and solutions as they are more flexible and reliable. Businesses can sell their goods and products with an effective eCommerce web store. An optimized omnichannel or multi-channel eCommerce website helps modern businesses in generating more sales and increasing the product ranges thereby achieving their marketing goals.
An eCommerce platform is a software application or a technology solution that helps online businesses to manage their websites, operations, and sales and marketing. A comprehensive eCommerce website can be used to reach your targeted audience and potential customers in a more efficient method. Various eCommerce platforms can be set up very easily and offer all the robust functionalities needed to run your business effectively with centralized operations.

Benefits of using eCommerce platforms
As there are increasing demands in the eCommerce industry day-by-day, every business owners are looking to develop an online store for effective selling of their products and services. An organization can expand its business to national and international markets with minimum capital investment by using eCommerce solutions. An eCommerce platform can simplify business processes with better and efficient customer services.
Here are the benefits and advantages of using eCommerce platforms:
1. Gain New Customers
Millions of people use the internet for various purposes on a day-to-day basis. By taking your business online, you will be able to increase and expand the product ranges thereby attracting more customers. Also, retailers can gain new audiences as they can view your website at any point of time. ECommerce websites provide flexible and convenient user experience thereby improving your reach to a larger audience.
2. Lower Operating costs
One of the major benefits of using eCommerce websites is lowered startup and operating costs. It helps the organization to manage and distribute the information to customers accordingly as well as digitize and automate consumers shopping experience by the elimination of paperwork and physical stores. Compared to traditional methods, customers feel eCommerce as a convenient way to effectively increase their product sales.
Advertising and marketing (pay-per-click, social media promotion) through eCommerce websites can improve brand reach to potential customers. ECommerce automates all the processes such as inventory and shipping management, sales integration, bills and payment management, etc. thus reducing the workforce and employees.
3. Customer tracking
Using web analytics, eCommerce helps online sellers to gather the complete information of your customers. It can track every action that the customer does and you will be able to optimize your website with the obtained information. ECommerce can help in boosting your sales as well as creating new products for the website by tracking the customers.
4. Time-saving
With improvements in advanced technologies, customers do not prefer reaching out to physical stores in search of the products. It is a time-consuming and tedious process as setting up a store with all items tends to be costly as well.
Hence, to make things easier, an effective eCommerce web store can be adopted and customers can buy their desired products within few clicks. It is cost-effective as well as practical and eCommerce helps in increasing the productivity of an organization.
5. Comparison shopping
Comparison shopping can be done on eCommerce websites in which the customers can browse through multiple eCommerce merchants and compare and find the best and suitable prices. Consumers can learn and understand the technical information of other brands and models through a comparison shopping feature.
6. Targeted communication
Ecommerce improves your business by increasing product offerings and enhancing communication with your target audience. It’s important to develop your websites as per customer demands and requirements. ECommerce helps you build a custom website that can boost your reach to the global audience through targeted advertising. B2B organizations can expand their brand awareness in the market by creating quality content in the eCommerce web stores thus reaching your target audience effectively.
7. Elimination of geographical limitations
Say, for example, if you are operating a physical store, you are restricted to the geographical area that you serve. You may not be able to reach the customers outside your limitation. To overcome these challenges, there is a need for an eCommerce website. You can sell your products and services across the world.
You will be able to expand your reach geographically across international and foreign markets with an effective eCommerce website supported on mobile devices as well. Also, m-commerce (mobile commerce) helps in eliminating geographical limitations.
8. Locate products easily
An eCommerce website provides customers with an automatic navigation pane or a search box to modify the product searches immediately. Some websites identify customer preferences and shopping lists to promote repeat purchase. This increases the website’s customer visits which help in scaling your business to the next level.

The top 10 eCommerce platforms of 2019
Online sellers and savvy merchants are in search of best eCommerce platforms that fit their business. The three different types of eCommerce platforms are open-source, Software as a Service (SaaS), and headless commerce hosted in the cloud or on-premise web environments. Take a look at the top 10 eCommerce platforms that you would choose to develop your online store: