An enterprise eCommerce platform is a software that allows businesses to sell their products or services online.
Although smaller businesses can use enterprise-grade platforms, usually larger organizations with products in multiple categories employ it to take care of its inventory, dropshipping, reselling, and a lot of other factors that allow them to get their hands on quite an expensive enterprise eCommerce platform.
These platforms can be installed on the system or arrive as cloud-based services and are attuned to provide seamless integration to other departments of a company such as CRM.
These platforms are ideal for a business that attracts huge traffic and there are plenty of other reasons why you should go for an enterprise eCommerce platform if you have a large enough business marking its requirement.
How to choose the Best Enterprise Ecommerce Platform in 2021
There are practically a million things you should consider before choosing the best enterprise e-commerce platform that fulfills all your requirements. One should look for how many products and categories they can add and if the platform supports integrations.
The room for flexibility, stability, and scalability isn’t a negotiable factor for a booming business. Also, the speed and performance of the website/portal/online store are crucial as visitors tend to lose attention pretty quickly causing loss of potential customers.
Cost and ease of use are one of the deciding factors since if the cost is low but the system is pretty complex, it isn’t that feasible. Thus, all must be in-line with your needs, requirements, and other factors. Listed below are 5 best enterprise eCommerce platforms to choose from.
Magento Commerce
Earlier known as Magento Enterprise, Magento Commerce is a well-known brand supporting thousands of enterprises on its flexible on-premise and cloud-based enterprise eCommerce platform.
In an enterprise eCommerce platform comparison, Magento Commerce is a great option when it comes to handling a large dump of traffic. It also provides great installation and troubleshooting support that would otherwise cause serious altercations with the online business.
The platform is flexible and scalable that should meet your growing business’ requirements with ease. Moreover, Magento Commerce offers a myriad of features for marketing, customer experiences, loyalty, and whatnot.
Integrate it with any app, plugin, or extension it supports no matter what the occasion and avail the advanced functionalities on the go. Magento offers a free demo for its enterprise edition although the Commerce licensing commences at a whopping $23,000 a year onwards.
Pros
Magento Commerce has one of the largest developer communities you would find in any enterprise commerce platform or otherwise. It offers a humongous range of third-party extensions available in its in-house marketplace that can be used to fulfil any type of tasks or requirement by any online business. Add a myriad of products thanks to its support to host a large catalog of products unmatched by any other platform.
Cons
Admins and webmasters are tasked with abiding by the PCI compliance and other protocols for transactions. These might break certain integrations and customizations with other systems linked.
It is expensive to support and maintain adding to the overall cost of using Magento Commerce. Migrations are another clause ripping the user’s bank accounts. The platform reportedly becomes buggy and slow when it is used with a lot of data by major enterprises.
Shopify Plus
Launched in 2014, Shopify Plus is a powerful and best eCommerce platform for large businesses as it is easy to set up, offers a wide range of extensions and apps, and overall, has a great 24/7 customer support that gives it an upper hand. The platform is equipped with everything from returns management to order tracking. Upselling tools, CRM integrations, and cost-effective monthly plan for a budding business, unlike a one-off yearly payment that other platforms charge.
Shopify Plus takes care of all protocols including PCL compliance for payments and has a solid uptime that makes it a must-have for those who don’t want to miss on lost opportunities. There’s a robust set of apps that are exclusively available for Shopify Plus that extends its functionalities to the next level.
Pros
There’s an excellent website builder that uses the drag-and-drop capability to set up the online store. It has built-in SEO capabilities that enable Google and other search engines to render results that can profit your business.
Shopify Plus, one of the best enterprise eCommerce platforms, offers up to 70 payment gateways although charges may vary.
Cons
Shopify Plus is limited to 10 requests per second when it comes to its API capabilities. Although the platform offers up to 10 additional expansion stores, every store requires individually in-app purchases of apps and plugins.
B2B is limited on the platform while templates and themes for B2C businesses are limited as well. Shopify Plus isn’t a full-fledged solution to all your growing needs.
SalesForce ECommerce Cloud
SalesForce E-commerce Cloud is a flexible option for businesses that require an enterprise eCommerce platform that is both stable and scalable and offers a wide range of services and features that would help businesses bloom.
It is a PaaS based platform that caters to large businesses since beginners might see a huge hole in their bank accounts if not used properly.
It does throw machine learning and artificial intelligence at work to create a personalized user experience that no other platform listed above offers. Of course, it has both pros and cons to discuss and evaluate their weight.
Pros
SalesForce offers competent tools to make Artificial Intelligence-based personalization easier on the platform. The platform arrives with a plethora of social integrations, extensions available in its stores and offers a higher degree of scalability and stability on the go.
Cons
SalesForce customer support isn’t its strong suit and neither its expert community as it is small. The platform does offer a lot of features, however, it is costly and charges fees per transaction. The developer sandbox is slow as well.
BigCommerce Enterprise
BigCommerce Enterprise as the name would metaphorically explain is one of the best eCommerce platforms for large businesses although not huge. It arrives with features over the scope of any other platform listed here.
The platform offers powerful tools and features such as easy and efficient migration support, tools for custom orders, inventory management, CRM management, and a bunch of other tools and integrations for both online and offline commerce.
BigCommerce allows users to plug in their CMS through Drupal or WordPress or use their custom-made solution at the front-end while the SaaS platform from BigCommerce will take care of the back-end. It arrives fully compliant with PCI, checkout security, etc.
Its commerce tools add a string of microservices based on API that includes integrating third-party solutions that helps in different layers of touchpoints including AR/VR, IoT, mobile apps, and others.
Pros
Flexible than Magento, custom pricing available upon contact. BigCommerce is one of the all-powerful enterprise eCommerce platforms for small and medium businesses with a plethora of features including CRM tools, unlimited staff accounts.
The platform supports a string of payment gateways and doesn’t charge any transaction fees which is a boon for small businesses. There’s a competent customer support team that helps resolve queries and whatnot to keep their customers satisfied.
Cons
It lacks B2B features such as price lists and customer group-specific catalogs among other features. Unlike other platforms, BigCommerce is ideal for small and probably medium-sized enterprises and not the large ones with big data, etc.
WooCommerce for Enterprise
WooCommerce itself is a popular brand on WordPress with thousands of businesses running on the platform. With its enterprise edition aka WooCommerce for Enterprise, it makes it a few steps ahead.
It is highly flexible and any component on-board can be structured to suit the requirements. It has a huge collection of themes unlike the limited designs on Shopify Plus.
Each theme is available at $39 and can be extensively customized if you know how to code. This doesn’t mean the platform is all perfect because it isn’t. It lacks customer supports which means it would take longer for your queries to resolve and so on.
There’s also a hidden cost involved when choosing WooCommerce which is free to use a plugin but using themes, domain name, hosting, apps, SSL certifications, and others cumulative costs a lot.
Pros
One of the key features that WooCommerce offers is the one-click refunds since a customer would appreciate it if he/she gets the refunds as per certain policies.
The platform offers a highly customizable theme and how the store looks and works thanks to its limitless customization feature.
Cons
If only lack of dedicated customer support wasn’t enough, WooCommerce for Enterprise is self-hosted that brings issues that would require technical knowledge beforehand to fix unless you find it on the various support forums.
It is one of the cheapest platform listed here unless you end up stumbling upon the various hidden costs that would bore a hole in your bank balance.
It’s not that piece of cake to zero in on any particular enterprise eCommerce platform just like that, you’d need to scan through the available options.
Find out which one satisfies your requirements and budgets and if you are ready to splurge on developers and executives to take care of the platform such as maintenance and troubleshooting or if you are a one-man-army at this moment and would love a user-friendly platform that you manage on your own.
I hope this blog on 5 best enterprise eCommerce platforms did justice to what you were looking for.