Starting an online store can be an exciting yet daunting task for small businesses. One of the first and most critical decisions you’ll make is choosing the right e-commerce platform. The platform you select will influence everything from your website’s design and user experience to its turnover and revenue.
To help you make an informed decision, we’ve rounded up the best UK e-commerce marketing platforms for small businesses in 2024. These platforms offer a range of features, pricing plans, and ease of use, ensuring you can find the perfect fit for your business needs.
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Shopify
Shopify is one of the most popular e-commerce platforms, particularly for small to medium-sized businesses. Its user-friendly interface and extensive theme selection make it easy to scale your online store and grow your business in the ever-changing market.
Shopify works on a drag-and-drop store builder, which makes it easy to make any changes without using a code or the help of a developer. It has an extensive marketplace which supports thousands of apps which can be easily integrated with your store to make further customisations and add features to differentiate your store. Shopify has robust SEO features to help your store rank in search engines, providing easy-to-maintain and edit areas where SEO is needed to continuously optimise your website’s rankings.
Finally, Shopify offers an integrated payment processing system which supports all payment methods through Shopify payments. This allows users to successfully checkout using any payment method they require, opening up the possibility of reaching new customers and improving conversion rate optimisation as users can securely check out using their preferred payment method.
InSynch has designed and built many Shopify websites for new ecommerce businesses across various sectors. If you need help, talk to one of our e-commerce marketing experts today!
WooCommerce in WordPress
WooCommerce is a free, open-source e-commerce plugin for WordPress. It’s ideal for small businesses already using WordPress or those comfortable managing a WordPress site. WordPress is an extremely intuitive platform that allows you to create pages, add posts, and manage media with ease. With its user-friendly interface, you don’t need to be a tech expert to use its user-friendly interface and dashboard.
Similar to Shopify, WordPress offers thousands of themes and plugins that allow you to customise your store and website’s appearance to match your specific needs. WordPress is known for being SEO-friendly, with a well-structured SEO section on each page to simplify the process and help search engines crawl and index your website.
Although WordPress is user-friendly, it does have a steep learning curve in order to build and manage your own website, especially if you’re new to website development. Understanding how to customise themes, use plugins and optimise your website for SEO can take time to learn. However, we’re here to help in these instances as we’ve worked with hundreds of clients with WordPress sites, helping manage their websites and improve their organic SEO rankings.
Wix
Wix is a user-friendly website builder that offers e-commerce functionality, making it a great choice for small businesses just starting out. It’s especially popular among those who want a quick and easy way to build an online store.
Wix uses a drag-and-drop website builder which allows users to quickly design and build a website without any coding knowledge. Similarly to the other CRM platforms, Wix provides hundreds of templates for you to pick from that allows you to easily design your website.
While Wix’s drag-and-drop interface is easy to use, it also comes with some design limitations. Once you choose a template and start building your site, you cannot switch to another template without starting from scratch. Additionally, while you can customise templates, there are limitations in terms of advanced design and layout options compared to more flexible platforms like Shopify or WordPress.
Wix offers a range of pricing plans, including a free plan with basic features. The premium plans are reasonably priced, making Wix an affordable option for small businesses, freelancers, and personal projects.
Grow Your E-Commerce Business With InSynch
Start your business on the right foot with UK e-commerce marketing and consultancy. We offer packages to suit everyone’s needs, whether you’re for one of our popular packages that encompasses e-commerce marketing, PPC ads, SEO, social media, email marketing, consultancy and much more, we have different levels available to suit your needs.
Alternatively, check out our Essential Digital Marketing package for smaller businesses. This package covers the digital marketing you can’t do without, with 5 hours per month with one simple fixed monthly fee. We can do practically anything you require within a monthly allowance of 5 hours! Book a FREE consultation to discuss the options available for you and your business.
