According to current ecommerce statistics, the market is growing and more niches are forming—despite or because of the pandemic. Moreover, customers play a big role more than ever in shaping ecommerce. Customer preferences rule what businesses do. When businesses fall short from expectations, they get major repercussions in both reputations and in their profits. So, to manage the online buying experience, it is only proper for you to use top shopping cart software. These systems help you manage orders, payments, inventory, and other ecommerce processes.
In this article, you will get to know the top 10 best shopping cart software solutions in the market today. We have ranked them according to core features such as usability, payment support, customizability, and back-end management features.
Globally, around $4.6 trillion worth of merchandise is abandoned annually. For perspective, that is well above the estimated global ecommerce sales of $4.2 trillion in 2020. Going back to that lost merchandise, that huge figure came from about 75% of shopping carts abandoned on average. Meanwhile, checkout optimization can recover $260 billion of that merchandise lost on abandoned shopping carts.
Having pigeonholed abandoned shopping carts as the culprit to huge merchandise loss is one thing, but figuring out how to fix the bleeding is another thing. So if you’re an online seller, what are your best options to address abandoned shopping carts? One straight approach is to understand why shoppers are abandoning shopping carts and go from there. In that respect, you would have to find out how to mitigate high shipping costs and the standard hassle of requiring would-be shoppers to create an account first before they could process and close their transactions.
Extra costs (shipping, taxes, fees) too high
%I had to create an account
%The checkout process was too long and complicated
%I couldn't calculate total order cost up-front
%Delivery was too slow
%I didn't trust the site with my credit card information
%Website hard errors / crashed
%Returns policy wasn't satisfactory
%There weren't enough payment options
%My credit card was declined
%Source: Yieldify 2020
Designed byThus, when you are shopping for shopping cart systems, you need to find the ones that are flexible for all of these demands. Should you use a platform that is so rigid and, therefore, not customer-centric, then your business will have problems finding good long-term success in ecommerce.
Landing on the top spot of our best shopping cart software solutions is Salesforce Commerce Cloud. It combines the functionalities of a comprehensive online shopping cart, ecommerce platform, mobile-first POS, and order and inventory management. The software utilizes predictive intelligence to ensure smooth front-end and back-end processes every time.
Salesforce Commerce Cloud offers users the tools they need to build and grow an ecommerce site. Its features are categorized into three main sets of functionalities: experience, operations, and intelligence. The capabilities under the experience category allow users to manage their products, pricing, promotions, and other content to hook customers. Meanwhile, the features under the operations category include key tools you need to streamline back-end fulfillment. Finally, the intelligence features offers data-based insights that you can maximize to improve overall operations.
Moreover, Salesforce Commerce Cloud offers a full-featured reference app with cart and checkout. It also supports site search and guided navigation for an improved online shopping experience. Even better, as a global platform, Salesforce Commerce Cloud allows you to scale up your operations securely.
With its AI-powered business tools and certified integrations, this platform does more than what a regular shopping cart software can do. Its robust reporting and analytics features also help users track their operations and determine areas that may need improvement.
Detailed Salesforce Commerce Cloud Review
Next on our list of top shopping cart solutions is Wix. This platform lets you build, manage and promote your products and services online. What sets it apart from many products available today is that while it is first and foremost a website builder, its flexible functionality enables you to create an online storefront with ease. By opting for its e-commerce extension, you can get your hands on its all-in-one shopping cart management features.
It provides you with all the tools and features you need to get started and set up your e-commerce site. You’ll get additional pages – a detailed product page, shopping cart page, and thank you page. It has hundreds of templates to choose from which you can customize to the look and feel you want to achieve according to your branding even without technical skills. It streamlines the way you manage your inventories, tracks your orders in a professional store manager, displays your products in stunning galleries, and facilitates your customers’ orders in a secured SSL-certificate checkout.
Furthermore, with its blogging tools and SEO capabilities, you can maximize your online store to increase your sales by improving your website’s searchability and linking your products to your blog content posts. It is also mobile-friendly to give your customers an intuitive experience while shopping on-the-go through their smartphones and tablets. It’s 100% commission free so you can guarantee to receive all your profits without worry.
You can use all the features for free for a period of time to see if the software matches your needs.
With a complete solution for your online store’s shopping cart needs, Wix is an excellent go-to hub that’s packed in affordable pricing plans that you can maximize to increase its value to your business.
Detailed Wix Review
NetSuite SuiteCommerce is an omnichannel ecommerce system built for small to medium-sized companies. It comes equipped with basic and advanced functionalities that can help you manage your B2B or B2C business. From storefront creation and marketing to sales and inventory management, this can provide you with everything you need to streamline your ecommerce operations.
Aside from the abovementioned features, the platform also helps users provide the best possible customer service through its full-featured POS. With this, you can simplify checkouts as well as automate payment processing to speed up transactions. What’s more, you can use the built-in CRM to keep track of customer preferences and provide a more personalized service the next time they purchase from you.
If you’d like to learn more about how this platform can help you, you can try out its features firsthand at no cost if you sign up for their free trial plan.
Another handy thing about NetSuite SuiteCommerce is that it has built-in reporting features. With this, you can see a timeline display of purchases, returns, and support requests. As a result, you can gain in-depth insight into your operations and take out the guesswork in business decision-making.
Last but not least, this platform is completely mobile-ready so you can oversee your ecommerce business on the fly. Moreover, it can support a handful of third-party integrations to help you with content delivery as well as to reinforce the security of your online store.
Detailed NetSuite SuiteCommerce Review
Shopify Plus is the premium version of Shopify, the popular cloud-based ecommerce platform for high-volume merchants. What’s more, it provides users with tools to create better and memorable shopping experiences for their customers. This includes features like augmented reality, virtual reality, customizable checkout dialogs, custom automations, and localized customer experiences.
Other wonderful features include customer segmentation based on buying behavior, loyalty rewards, inventory management automations, and multiple currency support, among others. Furthermore, it comes equipped with robust built-in analytics and insights modules to help you make more data-driven decisions in the future.
You can check out its comprehensive feature set if you sign up for the vendor’s free trial plan.
In addition, with Shopify Plus, you can customize the look of your platform to be consistent with your branding. You don’t really have to know how to code or outsource it to website builders out there as Shopify Plus allows you to easily make them from scratch.
With Shopify Plus, you can sell online and accept payments from seventy other payment gateways such as PayPal and, even, Bitcoin. To top it all off, the provider ensures a 99.7% uptime for this SaaS service. For more details, you can check out more Shopify Plus features in our in-depth review page.
Detailed Shopify Plus Review
X-Cart is a versatile shopping cart software that aims to assist small and mid-sized businesses to get a better foothold in the e-commerce side of their operations. Business owners can avail of its fully-managed hosting suite or downloadable on-premise system, depending on their needs. X-Cart provides extensive product and inventory management to help owners monitor the available stocks of items, effectively avoiding instances of customers ordering items that are out of stock.
Dealing with bulk orders is also easy since X-Cart can handle over 1M SKUs that can be easily managed on X-Cart’s interface. For customers, X-Cart’s intuitive platform provides a smooth user experience that allows them to place their orders without much fuss.
Detailed X-Cart Review
The platform is also integrated with multiple third-party applications for shipping, CRM, email marketing and advertising such as FedEx, UPS, HubSpot, Salesforce and Mail Chimp. This enables users and customers to have smooth transactions and ensure their orders are properly handled from point A to point B.
A very popular e-commerce solution, BigCommerce offers a feature-packed platform that allows you to build your own online store and sell your products online. Flaunting a wide selection of customizable templates, users can easily design a store that looks and feels professional. With BigCommerce you can easily sell both tangible and digital goods; it also comes with marketing features to help users reach out to their potential customers. While the platform is primarily aimed at business owners with little to no design and technical skills, BigCommerce allows for HTML and CSS configurations for those who have advanced designing expertise.
You can say that BigCommerce is the complete eCommerce platform, but it has more to offer in terms of benefits, including marketing tools, analytics, marketplace integrations, and site hosting. These can significantly improve any organization’s performance.
Detailed BigCommerce Review
The app also makes simple your checkout process so that you can collect transaction data for use in benchmarking your company’s performance. You also get to have total control over all your transactions, enabling you to accommodate orders at a faster pace.
BigCommerce is not just an eCommerce software, it is loaded with features that are bound to enhance the way you do business online. These include SEO, warehouse management, social media marketing, and payment processing. You can also integrate the solution with third-party apps or your existing business system with the solution’s API capability. The websites that you create using the product are sure to engage visitors, allowing for richer customer experiences. The platform is SEO-friendly and mobile-optimized, two things that could lead to site traffic and search ranking improvement and increased lead conversion.
Shopify has a non-premium service that is still a very good option for sellers who peddle both tangible and digital products. This platform offers users with a number of customizable templates that can be configured to suit branding requirements.
While Shopify is designed to be an easy platform for users with not much experience and technical and design skills, those with extensive HTML and CSS knowledge will be happy to know that they can edit the whole structure and configuration. This feature gives users a good degree of control when it comes to the templates’ design.
Detailed Shopify Review
Another attractive feature that many Shopify users like about the software is its affordability. Their product packages are among the lowest priced in the market, making Shopify a viable choice for businesses that are running on a tight budget.
Lastly, as a hosted application, users won’t have to buy web hosting or install the software onto servers; nearly everything they need to build and operate an online store is included ‘out of the box’.
Our team of experts analyzed all popular shopping cart software solutions and found 3DCart to be one of the reliable options currently available on the market. The solution also offers a great free trial offer that allows you to try out all the key features and see if this service fits with your requirements.
Combining robust shopping cart features with useful marketing capabilities, 3DCart is a good e-commerce software choice to grow your business. It has plug-and-play usability and a simple interface both for administrators and buyers. More than 100 themes are optimized for conversion, including an intuitive checkout for a smooth buying experience. Likewise, the platform offers unlimited rules-based product attributes and inventory options and variations. Its responsive end-user interface also guarantees that your storefront adapts to desktop, smartphone, and mobile browsers.
Detailed 3dcart Review
3DCart also has an extensive integration that extends its functionalities to meet the more complex needs of larger online stores. It works with popular tax software, QuickBooks, drop shippers, Amazon, and eBay that gives you more order management flexibility.
It also has marketing tools such as CRM, SEO, point-of-sale, drip email marketing, and promotions. Notably, you can predefine emails to customers who abandoned their cart to improve your recovery rate. 3DCart is the ideal balance of a simple shopping cart with affordable plans, and it allows you to extend the functions with add-ons, integration, and custom HTML/CSS coding.
Initially called iCentral, ShopSite comes loaded with shopping cart tools and features that are primarily intended for small and medium-sized businesses. The award-winning e-commerce platform makes it simple for users with little technical knowledge and expertise to build a small yet very functional online store.
Other features that make this platform a good option for small businesses include Store Setup Wizard, Digital Coupons, Associates and Inventory Tracking. ShopSite’s efficiently manages tracking items and monitoring inventories as well as keeping tabs on all the smallest details.
Detailed ShopSite Review
Moreover, there are really useful built-in features such as gift certificates, coupons, Facebook stores, and mobile commerce. What’s more, is that you can place your order button digitally anywhere like on blog posts, emails, newsletters, and even affiliates.
There is a free version available for Shopsite. This is already good and functional in itself. However, if you want more premium features, you can get them via paid plans priced starting from $5.99 per month.
Formerly called Yahoo Merchant Solutions, Yahoo Stores is one of the oldest e-commerce platforms, with a history tracing back to the first wave of e-commerce. As the years went by, Yahoo Stores underwent changes and restructuring to make it stay up to date with the changing needs and new trends in e-commerce.
Yahoo Stores comes with a shopping cart so flexible and versatile that it can be used by any business type or size. No business is too big or too small for their service. As it is a web-hosted platform, users can expect that the system will be hosted on the best in-house servers.
Detailed Yahoo Stores Review
Another positive thing to note about Yahoo Stores is that the essential features remain consistent, whether you opt for their cheapest package or go for their most advanced plan. Only API access, priority phone support and an account manager are features available to users who choose the more expensive plans. On top of that, transaction fees get lowered once you go for an upgrade.
There is really no clear-cut answer to the question: “what is the best solution for you?” This depends on what you need and what your budget is. So, it is really good to at least try out some of the shopping cart platforms we’ve listed. To begin your browsing process, we highly recommend you check out Salesforce Commerce Cloud.
As part of the Salesforce suite of robust digital business solutions, Salesforce Commerce Cloud poses itself to be an outstanding platform for creating, managing, and growing online touchpoints, including a shopping cart module for your site. However, it is more than just a shopping cart software as it gives you every tool out there to help you be successful from analytics to automation.
It has great back-end tools for managing inventory, shipping, promotions, orders, and many more. All of it is fitted into an intuitive and easy-to-use interface with highly-visual dashboards. You can check the solution closely when you sign up for a Salesforce Commerce Cloud free demo.
However, essential ecommerce tools don’t just stop at shopping carts. There are many platforms and offerings out there that can help you create a great digital business. If you want to find out more about such tools, you can check out other ecommerce software here.
Additionally, we recommend that you be aware of ecommerce trends like green consumerism so you would be better prepared for the ecommerce of the future.
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