E-commerce is the process of selling and buying of goods or services over the world wide web. It is also known as electronic commerce or internet commerce. E-commerce helps customers to discover and purchase products through online retailers and marketplaces. E-commerce has benefited independent freelancers, small businesses, and large corporations as it enables a large-scale market when compared to traditional offline market/retail.FastyCloud also provides dedicated E-commerce Hosting that you can use to create an E-commerce website with ease.
The different models involved in eCommerce are business-to-consumer (B2C), business-to-business (B2B), consumer-to-consumer (C2C), consumer-to-business (C2B), business-to-administration (B2A) and consumer-to-administration (C2A). E-commerce platform involves exchanging different types of objects like subscription, physical products, digital products, services, crowdfunding, dropshipping, and Retail/wholesale product sales.
The eCommerce hosting is a service offered by web hosting service providers, which helps customers to build their website for their business. In addition to this, they also provide webspace to host their site, an email server, and even standard web hosting features for the company. E-commerce hosting helps the client to manage all their technical aspects of website development and maintenance.
Shopping Cart
A shopping cart is a software used by eCommerce websites to make an online transaction for the purchases. It is one of the secondary applications used in eCommerce sites by the customers to add multiple items in the cart and continue shopping. Shopping cart is a collection of scripts that make the connection between the client and the payment system to select and track the order.
Using this software, the owner of the site can set the parameters like tax percentage, shipping charge, cost of the product, etc. When a user checks out something from the eCommerce site, the software calculates the total of the order by calculating all the parameters set by the website owner. To succeed with an eCommerce site, a customer should have the best shopping cart incorporated with their website.
Some of eCommerce shopping cart software commonly used by web hosting providers are:
Magento
Magento is one of the commonly used content management systems (CMS) in the eCommerce platform. It is an open-source platform, which was officially launched in 2008 and written in PHP. In the world, over 20% use Magento. It has a flexible with extensive architecture and scalable with different control options that help users to manage their multiple stores from a single admin panel. By using Magento, we can create an eCommerce website in just a few hours.
Magento provides different technical features and modules, which makes the management and customization of your online store easy. You can use Magento to develop small, medium, and large E-commerce websites. With the help of Magento, a client can update their eCommerce website automatically. One of the main features of Magento is that it helps us to enable searching and sorting of products in different ways.
MAIN FEATURES OF MAGENTO
- It gives the feature to add different payment methods such as credit card, PayPal, cheques, money order, Google checkouts, etc.
- It allows the shipping of a product to multiple addresses.
- Magento supports email, RSS feeds and also provides order status and history of the product.
- Magento can be used for the global transaction as it allows multiple languages, currencies, and tax rates.
- Grid and list display of the products are available.
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one of the features available in Magento.
- It is user-friendly and compatible with smartphones, tablets, and other devices.
WooCommerce
WooCommerce is an open-source shopping cart plugin that allows the client to create a virtual store directly using WordPress. It acts as a modular kit for building an online store, as it contains many elements such as shopping carts, inventory management, statistics, payment gateways, etc. It supports PayPal, but we can also use other payment methods by adding free and paid extensions.
WooCommerce is user-friendly software. It allows a client with less knowledge in coding and programming to create an eCommerce website in WordPress. In the WooCommerce dashboard, we can add plugins. It is an excellent tool for clients who are familiar with WordPress and want to create a single online store. It is an entirely customizable eCommerce platform.
MAIN FEATURES OF WOOCOMMERCE
- WooCommerce helps to optimize its website using Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
- It allows the user to checkout as a guest if they do not want to register.
- WooCommerce helps customers to have inventory management like track order details, get the notification for low and out-of-stock items, hide out-of-stock items, and more.
- It helps to do different order management features like add customer notes, manage the fulfillment process, and even edit their stock manually.
- It is flexible and has lots of customization options.
- WooCommerce has an analytical tool to track and measure store performance.
PrestaShop
The PrestaShop is an open-source software that powers more than 100,000 stores worldwide. PrestaShop provides several features and a user-friendly management interface. PrestaShop offers different features like managing product listing, payments, shipping, manufacturers and suppliers, etc. The client can customize their store themes and add new features using PrestaShop add-on modules.
The add-on market place of Prestashop helps third-party developers to sell their items and modules to the customers. PrestaShop allows different varieties of payment methods, an unlimited number of transactions, and we can translate it to different languages. PrestaShop helps clients to set tax rules on the website according to their country.
MAIN FEATURES OF PRESTASHOP
- PrestaShop has a robust catalog and site management because of which it is easy to manage one or multiple products in a single transaction.
- As per our desire, you can set the product display, and it also allows consumers to view their desired outcomes in numerous ways.
- PrestaShop provides features to optimize your site and also ensures significant search engines are indexing the store.
- PrestaShop offers a single page checkout feature.
- It helps customers to add custom messages, and also, they can add control logistics such as fees, weight, shipping restrictions, and more.
- PrestaShop helps a client to create their account to keep customer loyalty, and it can also increase customer satisfaction.
- PrestaShop is a global community, and a single store can translate to different languages.
4) X-Cart
X-Cart is a commercial open-source PHP based e-commerce shopping cart platform used for eCommerce solutions by different web hosting providers. The main feature of X-Cart is that it can integrate with online transaction processing systems and because of which it is compatible in the market. X-Cart platform can really enhance the online shopping experience for your customers.
X-Cart aims to make the online shopping experience more enjoyable and interactive by flashing personalized greetings, which makes the customer feel more special and valuable. A customer can automate many aspects of sales using X-Cart.
MAIN FEATURES OF X-CART
- By using X-Cart, a consumer can track items based on its availability and variety of the product. It can handle your inventory needs regardless of how big it is.
- Using X-Cart, businesses can manage orders of their clients directly from the admin dashboard.
- It is lined up with ample and robust security features to ensure store security during the payment transaction.
- This platform helps the client to narrow down the search using product attributes with its filtered search feature.
- The clients can choose their website templates from a wide range of designs available in the X-Cart library.
- We can link the X-Cart platform to different shippers. The platform automatically calculates the shipping fees, total, etc. and displays it in the relevant currency details.
- Apart from shopping cart software, X-Cart offers various services like unique design creation, web development such as SEO audit and optimization.