472: The ONLY 4 Ecommerce Platforms You Should Be Considering for Your Online Store – Family First Friday

In this episode, I'm going to go over my top four e-commerce platforms to start your online store, depending on a number of factors such as your budget, your level of tech savviness and what you sell, and I'm going to be as comprehensive as possible. What's up, everyone? You are listening to the MyWifeCutor.com podcast where I teach you how to make money online by exploring different tools, strategies, and understand how to leverage human psychology to grow your sales. Welcome to a special segment of the show called Family First Fridays, where I go solo to give you my thoughts on how to make money without sacrificing your lifestyle. Now, if you haven't picked up my book, the Family First Entrepreneur yet, head on over to MyWifeCutor.com slash book, fill out the form, and get over $690 in free bonuses. Also, if you are interested in learning how to start your own e-commerce store, make sure you sign up for my free 60-minute course over at MyWifeCutor.com slash free. Now I want to start out this episode with some statistics, just in case you are wondering which platforms are the most popular in the world. Now according to Statista, WooCommerce has the largest global market share among e-commerce platforms, followed by Squarespace, Shopify, and Wix. But interestingly enough, two out of my top four e-commerce platforms don't even crack this list at all. Now a lot of these top e-commerce platforms on this list are skewed by platforms with free plans where probably 90% of the customers never sell a single thing. Now with that in mind, let's start with the 800-pound gorilla in the room, Shopify. Shopify is probably the number one recommended e-commerce platforms by most gurus and YouTubers online. And back in the day, Shopify had an amazing affiliate program that paid out at 20-25% recurring revenue, which inspired almost everyone and their mother to promote the tool. And this strategy worked. Shopify went on to become a publicly traded company, and these standard for e-commerce platforms for today. Now personally, I never jumped on the Shopify bandwagon because everyone has different needs, and every e-commerce platform has different strengths and weaknesses, which I'm going to share with you guys today. I would never blindly promote any platform just because of an affiliate program. Now don't get me wrong, I do think that Shopify is probably the safest solution for me to recommend for most people. After all, no one ever got fired for recommending Shopify. But there are some downsides as well. First off, Shopify is expensive. One of the ingenious strategies that Shopify made early on was to make the out-of-the-box shopping cart bare-bones in terms of functionality, and then rely on third-party developers to fill out the feature set. And as a result, Shopify has cultivated one of the largest third-party developer ecosystems out of any shopping cart in the world. If you need a feature or a specialized app, chances are that someone has already created it on the app store. If you need a developer, there are tens of thousands of people ready to help you. Here's a recent example that I just encountered at my annual e-commerce conference, the seller summit. Walmart Marketplace was a sponsor of my show, and right now they are trying to get everyone on their platform to compete with Amazon. So what did they do? They created a Shopify app that automatically imports your Shopify products onto the Walmart Marketplace. But they only support Shopify right now. If you are on any other platform right now, you are out of luck. Now the truth is, is that most companies and developers will create apps for Shopify first because they have a huge market share in App Store, and they can make recurring revenue for every single installation. But this is bad for the consumer because you end up paying monthly fees for every little tiny feature. For example, if you want a more elaborate way to issue discounts, you need to pay for an app that may run you an extra 20 to $50 a month. If you want to be able to collect video reviews, you might have to pay another $50 a month. All these fees add up to make Shopify one of the most expensive platforms to run on. The average Shopify store uses seven apps. In my course, the people using Shopify pay several hundreds of dollars per month on recurring app fees. Now Shopify is the best and the most flexible e-commerce platform out there, but it's going to cost you. However, in the grand scheme of things, the cost of Shopify should in theory become a very small percentage of your overall revenue once your store starts taking off. But in the beginning, these fees can add up. Some other notable disadvantages of Shopify are that their blogging platform is pretty bad. So if you plan on launching a blog or creating content, you are at a major disadvantage. Also, Shopify charges transaction fees if you do not use their built-in payments platform, Shopify Payments. Well, you might be telling yourself, Shopify Payments is good enough for me, so why would I use anything else? Well, I believe that almost every store today should be using PayPal in addition to accepting credit cards because of their one-click checkout features. But accepting PayPal on your Shopify store can potentially cost you almost 5% in fees with Shopify's transaction fee penalty. Shopify also has poor international support. If you plan on opening a store in a non-supported country outside the US, Canada, UK, Europe, and Singapore, you're out of luck. Shopify also has a sub-optimal SEO URL structure. Now unlike almost every other e-commerce platform, Shopify does not allow you to fully customize your URLs and inserts extraneous terms in your URL, such as collections or products which is bad for SEO. Now on the product side, I would avoid Shopify if you sell products with many variants. On Shopify, you can only offer three types of choices for your products that cannot exceed 100 total combinations. And this is a severe limitation for products that have different colors, sizes, and varieties. But outside of these disadvantages, Shopify should be the top choice for most of you because it's extremely easy to use and expand upon. And as I mentioned earlier, no one ever got fired for going with Shopify. The number two e-commerce platform on my list is Shift4Shop. Now when Shift4Shop first debuted in 2021, they offered a 100% free solution to anyone in the US as long as you use their payment processing solution, Shift4 Payments. And the fact that it was free made it a no-brainer for me to recommend it to my entire audience because Shift4Shop was an amazing shopping cart even when it cost money. Unfortunately though, Shift4Shop received a ton of spam shops and people who were signing up just to create elaborate link farms to game SEO. Anyway, long story short, Shift4Shop eliminated their 100% free program and created a new rule that you have to process at least $500 in payments per month to make the shopping cart free. And in my opinion, this is still an amazing deal. The shopping cart right now costs $29 a month until you start processing $500 in payments. Now if you were to just charge your own credit card $500 a month, that would only cost you 2.9% or $14.50. So in reality, you're getting a shopping cart that is way more powerful than Shopify out of the box for only $14.50 a month. Now personally, I've run two stores on Shift4Shop and it's a fantastic e-commerce platform that is way more powerful than Shopify's base offering. Now the biggest problem with Shift4Shop in my opinion is their user interface. Shift4Shop has so many features and they try to cram it all in one back end. And as a result, there's a much steeper learning curve than with Shopify. But if you're willing to suck it up and learn the platform, it's actually an amazing shopping cart with limitless potential. Put it to this way, my teenage daughter picked it up in a weekend and was up and running with her jewelry shop over at rena b.com. Now the other problem with Shift4Shop is that it has a very small developer community. As a result, cutting-edge features like the Walmart example I gave earlier won't make it to Shift4Shop until much, much later. But all in all, Shift4Shop is a solid choice with free email marketing built-in that will support a store that makes 7 figures and beyond. In fact, there are many enterprise stores on the platform that make 8 figures or more. Now the number 3 e-commerce platform on my list is WooCommerce, which just happens to be the most popular e-commerce platform on the planet. But remember what I said earlier? These numbers are skewed because WooCommerce is 100% free to use and I'm willing to bet that a ton of WooCommerce users fiddle out or don't sell anything in their first year. So take these numbers with a grain of salt. I teach a lot of my workshops based on WooCommerce because it is literally the cheapest way to get started selling online and you can get started for only $3. If you are interested in starting your own e-commerce store on WooCommerce, I put together a 20 minute free tutorial and I even designed a custom theme that I'll give to you for free. Just look at the show notes below, all it takes is 20 minutes and it's really that easy. The other benefit of WooCommerce is that it's built on top of WordPress, which is the best blogging platform on the planet that powers over 20% of the web. Now with WooCommerce as your shopping cart and WordPress as your blogging platform, this combination has the best search engine optimization of any platform out there. So what's the catch? The catch is that WooCommerce is kind of a pain in the butt to use and you have to understand more of the technical aspects of maintaining your online store. For example, your WooCommerce store is free, but it's just software and you need to get your own server in order to run that software. As a result, WooCommerce requires a web host. It's actually not as complicated as it sounds, but the upshot is that you are responsible for maintaining your server and keeping it virus free. If someone were to hack your site, that would be your responsibility to fix. Now if you use plugins on your website, it is also your responsibility to upgrade them and make sure everything works properly. Now compared to Shopify and Shifra Shop that handles all this for you, you can get into trouble with WooCommerce if you are not tech savvy. But because WooCommerce is literally the most popular e-commerce platform on the planet, it actually has fantastic third party developer support and it's really easy to find someone to help. Also, because you own the source code, you have full control and autonomy over your entire website. Let me give you an example of why this is important. Platforms like Shopify actually have a say in what you're allowed to sell. For example, during the pandemic, Shopify literally shut down my friends online store for selling hand sanitizer because they felt his prices were too high. You also can't sell drugs or any other chemicals on the Shopify platform and sometimes these restrictions are arbitrary. There are no such restrictions with Woo. You are in full control over everything. So bottom line, WooCommerce is inexpensive, but it's harder to maintain, but for context, my 9-11-year-old kids started their first store, KidInCharge.com on the platform and they were fine. Now the final shopping cart I wanted to discuss is BigCommerce. BigCommerce is kind of like a hybrid of Shopify and ShifuShop. For example, BigCommerce is as easy to use as Shopify and it offers a full feature set out of the box, which means you don't have to pay for that many apps. They also don't charge any transaction fees at all, which makes it cheaper than Shopify and they have more third party developer support than ShifuShop. Now in terms of blogging, they have an amazing integration with WordPress, which allows you to have a WordPress blog and a BigCommerce store on the same domain, which gives you superior SEO and blogging, which is something that you can't do with Shopify. Now the only catch with BigCommerce is that the amount you pay is based on revenue. For example, it costs $2,999 up to $50K in revenue, $79 a month up to $180K, and $299 a month up to $400K in revenue. Now to a certain extent, I kind of like this pricing scheme because your costs go up as your store becomes more successful, unlike Shopify, which saddles you with all these app costs up front, even if you aren't making that much money. But this pricing scheme can be problematic for drop shipping stores. In general, drop shipping carries very low margins. So let's say your net margins after all overhead is only 5% and your store makes 10K a year. That means your monthly fee of $29 will make up about 6% of your overall revenue, which is pretty high. But overall, BigCommerce is a solid choice because it has a lot of features out of the box, then Shopify with little or no plugins required. They have better SEO. There's no limitation on product options. They have superior international support, no transaction fees, and better analytics and reporting. Their only weakness is third-party developer support, which is better than shift for shop but worse than Shopify. So the million dollar question is, which platform should you go with? As I mentioned earlier, you can't really go wrong with Shopify unless you don't have a large budget or if you want a good blogging platform with superior SEO. If you are not tech savvy, go with BigCommerce. If your company is not supported by Shopify payments, if you sell prohibited products, if you require multiple variants or if you don't want to get nickel and diamond by apps, if BigCommerce is out of your price range and you are not tech savvy, go with shift for shop if you live in the United States. If you want the most complete features set out of the box, if you are a fast learner and if you don't mind a lack of third-party developer support. And then finally, if you are tech savvy and you want the cheapest and the most flexible e-commerce platform in the world, go with WooCommerce. But be prepared for the maintenance that goes along with it. By the way, if you want more comprehensive reviews of all these shopping carts, you can find full reviews on my blog over at mywifequitterjob.com. Just do a search for e-commerce platforms and I've reviewed practically every single one out there.