In this digital day and age defined by persistent technological progress with one of the worst pandemics since the bubonic plague and a worldwide web of information (and misinformation) at our fingertips, it’s never been easier to buy and sell stuff online. People all around the globe are using their desktops, laptops, tablets, and most often smartphones to shop and sell all sorts of digital and physical products and services from the comfort of their homes.
With this dramatic growth of the online market, it’s no surprise so many young entrepreneurs are trying to get a piece of the action by launching their own ecommerce stores, while experienced business owners are branching out their brick-and-mortar stores and building their online presence. Whether you wish to go digital through and through or combine online and offline business models, one thing is certain: to get your online shop all set up and ready to conquer the market you’ll need a set of suitable site-creation tools with a terrific ecommerce twist.
Not all ecommerce tools are created equal, so to choose the one that’ll benefit your business in the best ways you should recognize your needs and desires and make sure that the tool of your choice can address them. For instance, the simplest of all ecommerce building tools is a storefront builder (a term sometimes used interchangeably with an ecommerce website builder) but it often comes tied to ecommerce marketplaces (such as Amazon) which means you’ll never be the true owner of your online store.
The same is true for ecommerce platforms. And although they provide much more freedom than most ecommerce marketplaces do, at the same time they’re more likely to cost you an arm and a leg. Truth be told, they truly are an end-to-end solution bustling with all the tools you’ll need to run a booming ecommerce business. However, the price tag might make many think twice before blowing their budgets on something that could turn out to be overkill.
The simplest and the safest way to create a nice-to-look-at online store (or transform your old site into one), is to get yourself an ecommerce website builder, and you can do it without having a clue about complicated code or any deeper understanding of web design. So, before taking your chance with an ecommerce business be sure to check our list of five reasons why you should get an ecommerce website builder right away.
1. It’s an affordable all-in-one solution for launching an online store
The cost of creating an online store from scratch is impossible to ignore, even more so if you’re just starting out and have a small budget to think about. Although there are advantages to hiring a professional web designer to build your store for you, in addition to costing a ton it will also take time. One alternative is to take the task of building a store upon yourself, but that can be even more time-consuming, especially if you’re not familiar with the nuts and bolts of web development.
So, if you don’t have a big budget and a bunch of time, your best bet is to pick out an easy-to-use website builder, and there are plenty of them on the market, and at pocket-friendly prices to boot.
Some of the popular web hosting providers offer a complimentary site builder with their hosting solutions, and you can even find a free entry-level plan for most website builders available all over the web. Most of them cost anything from $5 to $50 per month which is a pretty big bang for the buck.
Also, make sure to pick a website builder made for ecommerce from the ground up, not a standard website builder compatible only with the most crucial ecommerce features. In addition to this, you want to make sure your data and your customers’ data is safe and sound, that there are enough SEO and marketing tools to draw a crowd, data analysis tools so you can keep track of everything, and sufficient site customization options to make your site look like one in a million.
Another advantage of using an ecommerce website builder is that it works as an all-in-one ecommerce solution, meaning that everything you’ll ever need to run a successful online store will be at the same spot. We can’t stress enough how convenient it is to use a single site-creating tool (an ecommerce website builder, in our case) to set up, run, and grow your business from a one-and-only platform.
2. Ecommerce site builders are unbelievably user-friendly
If you’re just starting out, it’s smarter to put your resources into a novice-friendly website builder you can use on your own than to spend everything on hiring a web designer to create a custom site for you. Without the need to understand the lines of code and with thousands of ready-made templates at your disposal, site building shouldn’t be too much of a challenge. Even if you’ve spent most of your life as a technophobe and have a hard time figuring out new technology, a user-friendly ecommerce site builder will flatten the learning curve (and all site builders should be created with user-friendliness in mind).
While the layout of a site builder’s user interface (UI) and included features may vary from one to the next, most well-known ecommerce site builders geared towards small businesses follow the golden rules of UI design. In short, it should feel intuitive, be easy to navigate, offer informative feedback, and be able to accommodate users with various skill levels. So, if you can’t figure out the better part of how it works by playing around in it, then that UI isn’t as user-friendly as it could (and should) be.
Most user-friendly ecommerce site builders today utilize drag-and-drop functionality, which allows all non-tech-savvy users to create their online stores on their own. With drag-and-drop site builders you can easily move and adjust templates, alter them, add new elements (such as images, text boxes, or social media buttons), and so forth.
With a single click and a move of a mouse you can position each of these elements anywhere you want them to be. In a couple of hours, you can create multiple pages and in a day or two, your newly created ecommerce site could be ready to start selling products.
Considering the ease of use most ecommerce site builders have to offer, it’s no surprise they’re a bestseller among small businesses.
3. Complete control over your store’s look
Although a proprietary ecommerce site builder can’t match the same level of customizability of open source software created solely for ecommerce (such as WooCommerce), it will give you complete control over the look and feel of your online store. In contrast, with a professional web designer, you would describe what you had in mind and cross your fingers that everything would turn out the way you wanted. In the end, the final product might match your vision in every aspect, miss it altogether, or fall somewhere in the middle of the two. However, one is sure, it’s more likely you’ll get what you want if you roll up your sleeves and do it yourself.
While most ecommerce site builders insist upon built-in templates and themes, many of them supply their users with some customization options as well, so your online store doesn’t end up looking like every other store on the web. Together with starter templates, you should also be able to pick out fonts, layout, backgrounds, colors, position, structure of different elements, objects, media you’re going to include, and an overall visual style for your site. With these simple yet significant customization options, you can transform a basic site template into something captivating.
Another advantage of using an ecommerce site builder is that you’ll be able to update your site whenever you feel like it, and you can even get your employees to do it for you. If you don’t have enough time or energy, you can simply share login information with one of your trusted employees and wait for the changes to happen. What’s more, all good ecommerce site builders allow their users access from any device connected to the Internet, scoring an additional point in added convenience.
Thanks to this, you’ll have more time to think about your brand’s personality, portrayal, and promotion while keeping pace with ever-changing trends in the ecommerce market.
4. SEO optimization, mobile responsiveness, and social media tools
If you’re setting up an online shop that aims to attract the widest possible audience, having a well-optimized site is imperative for its success. So, what are exactly the benefits of having an SEO-optimized ecommerce site? First of all, the customers will find your store much easier than before, which will therefore expand your brand’s reach.
Two of Google’s main ranking factors are usability and user experience, which in part amount to site loading speed, responsiveness, and page visual stability. Also, if your site is communicating with your targeted audience by targeting the right keywords, the almighty Google will deem your site worthy, and its ranking among the search results will consequently go up. This is why you need a website builder that won’t only make it easy to build a site, but will also support its ascent to the top of the search results.
Enter an ecommerce site builder, a site-building tool that takes SEO optimization seriously. With most used ecommerce-powered site builders (such as Wix, Squarespace, and Weebly) you can expect to get built-in SEO tools that also provide actionable advice, integration with all popular social media platforms, web analytics tools, as well as access to additional apps and plugins.
Also, since more and more internet users are accessing their favorite sites via their smartphones (rather than desktops, like in the old days), don’t forget to make sure your online store is mobile-responsive. Thankfully, almost all ecommerce site builders offer tons of mobile-responsive templates that will make your online store look charming on any device, smartphones included.
5. Solid support options
It doesn’t matter if you're a brand new ecommerce entrepreneur or a well-versed ecommerce veteran, there will come a day when you'll find yourself in need of a helping hand. Even if you strive to stay as self-sufficient as humanly possible, having solid customer support to back you up while you tackle the challenges of running an ecommerce store is always good news.
There are almost no ecommerce site builders that don’t come with a comprehensive self-service section loaded with step-by-step guides which are often supported with screenshots or videos tutorials. Along with this, you should also find a FAQ section, a knowledgebase, an official blog, and a community forum where you can get in touch with fellow users and ask them for favors.
However, we should note that the range of self-service options either depends on the price tag of an ecommerce site builder you’re using or on its overall popularity. For instance, although with WooCommerce you can get away by paying just a couple of bucks (WooCommerce itself can be downloaded and used completely free of charge) since it’s the most popular open-source ecommerce solution around, there’s plenty of help you can get from its committed community of developers, web designers, and all sorts of content creators.
With proprietary ecommerce solutions, you should get access to professional support channels (like live chat, telephone, and ticketing systems) where the amount of technical assistance you’re going to receive is typically proportional to the overall cost of the solution you’re using. Since ecommerce site builders are commonly cheerfully cheap in comparison to end-to-end ecommerce platforms, person-to-person customer support might not be their strongest asset. However, they’re making up for that with solid self-service options as well as with their unbeatable user-friendliness.
An ecommerce site builder is an online store’s best friend
If you are reading this, there’s a good chance you haven’t launched your online store just yet. Or perhaps your store is all set up but it somehow comes up short, so you’ve been searching for a way to polish it up a bit?
Whatever the case, search no more. What if you were told that there is a solution that’ll make creating an online store as simple as choosing a ready-made theme, adding your products, customizing your shopping cart, setting up shipping and taxes, and picking out preferred methods of payment. And what about SEO optimization, mastering marketing strategies, and selling yourself on the market?
All of this and much more is within arm's reach thanks to an affordable all-in-one solution with which you can start creating your online store straight away and that solution is an ecommerce site builder.
We've also featured the best ecommerce platforms and the best ecommerce website builder
