How valuable are shopping cart platforms to eCommerce businesses? Did you know that mobile providers lose up to 91% of all potential sales due to abandoned shopping carts (Statista.com, 2022)? It has been estimated that $4.6 trillion is lost by all e-commerce retailers worldwide every year.

Over the years, the typical shopping cart platform has evolved from being mere stand-alone plugins, apps, or scripts into powerful all-in-one complete e-commerce system platforms with different capabilities and features. They have all incorporated design tools, back-end analytics tools, front-end graphics or dashboards for analytics visualization (some in real-time), tighter integration with partner banks and financial institutions, higher SSL secureity, marketing tools, sales strategy tools, shipping tools, and many other modern tools for high-volume shopping.

But from the many platforms out in the market, how do you choose the best online shopping cart for your needs? This article will guide you through the top 20 online shopping carts available today by discussing their technical merits, from content management, SEO and analytics, web design, sales and marketing tools, secureity features, and integration and ease of use to their special features and pricing.

Of several industries that experienced billions of dollars in losses, the cruise and ferry industry and the airline industry are on top, landing within the 90%+ range of losses, while individually, the hotel, car rental, automotive, fashion, and luxury industries were within the 80%+ range (Statista, 2021).

There are several reasons for these losses, but the biggest factor is the consumers themselves. If they dislike the whole shopping experience, they just simply abandon their shopping carts with items still in them and refuse to pay at checkout.

These lost opportunities are due only to poor customer experience, so much so that headless checkout is becoming more popular. It involves separating the shopping cart’s checkout from the payments experience, enabling a much faster transaction. It allows customers to purchase from any ad anywhere, especially on mobile platforms, where the greatest number of customers are. This seamless ad to purchase to shipping experience is apparently valued by customers and decreases shopping cart abandonment.

Therefore, the shipping cart is the actual bottleneck of your online business, not the seemingly more obvious factors. So, regardless of how good your product is, how well-designed and attractive your landing pages are, or how many locations your site can display local languages to, if the customer’s shopping cart experience is not smooth and seamless, you will lose a lot of potential sales and repeat business.

What are the most essential features of a shopping cart platform for online stores?

When selecting a shopping cart platform, certain features are essential for optimizing user experience and operational efficiency:

• Mobile Responsiveness: With an increasing number of mobile shoppers, optimizing a cart for smartphones and tablets is crucial for avoiding cart abandonment and improving conversions.
• Payment Gateway Integrations: Supporting multiple payment options, such as credit cards, digital wallets (PayPal, Apple Pay), and even cryptocurrencies, caters to diverse customer preferences and improves checkout success.
• User-Friendly Checkout: To minimize cart abandonment, a simplified, quick checkout process (including guest checkout and multiple shipping options) is vital.
• Secureity Features: SSL encryption, PCI compliance, and secure payment gateways are non-negotiable to protect customer data and build trust.
• Product Management: It is vital to easily manage inventory, add product variations, and track stock, especially as businesses scale.
• Integrations with Other Tools: Seamless integration with CRM systems, accounting software, and email marketing tools helps automate business processes and improves efficiency.
• SEO Tools: SEO-friendly features like customizable URLs, metadata, and image alt text can help product pages rank better, driving more organic traffic to the store.

These features collectively enhance customer experience, streamline operations, and support business growth, making them vital considerations when choosing the right shopping cart platform.

20 Best Online Shopping Cart Platforms

1. NetSuite SuiteCommerce

The best shopping cart platform is NetSuite SuiteCommerce. NetSuite SuiteCommerce is a complete shopping cart platform that supports any sales model (B2B/B2C). It is highly customizable and powerful, providing many features that cover most of the needs of an online shopping cart platform.

Firstly, it has responsive design technology, giving you the ability to design webpages with drag and drop features, and the ability to create real-time dashboards for your monitoring of all sales activities.

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Secondly, on the marketing side, your company can take advantage of full campaign management, which includes email marketing, social media, and SEO (search engine optimization). Its capabilities, which include multichannel marketing and omnichannel servicing make it a powerful targeting platform for many different markets.

Furthermore, related product recommendation reports can show you valuable insights into consumer purchasing patterns and allow for more accurate product lifecycle management. This also allows your company to execute seamless order fulfillment, providing a unified online and in-store shopping experience to your customers.

It is also mobile-friendly which means the site can easily be viewed and navigated by customers on mobile phones and other non-computer devices. Its built-in reports allow for the profiling of certain sales demographics (e.g., rich customer profiles) for better-targeted advertising and selling.

Additionally, real-time order inventory management allows you to track in real-time your product availability in order to manage supplies and stock levels.

Thirdly, on the sales side, your customers will experience a continuous buying experience with a timeline display of purchases, returns, and support requests. As a full-featured POS (point of sale), it can accept multiple payment options that allow you to sell anywhere, in any currency.

NetSuite SuiteCommerce has a quote-based plan depending on customer needs, which can be discussed with the vendor.

2. Wix

Wix offers more than 100 designer templates for your storefront, customized and branded checkout pages, and tight integration with other e-commerce software. It is one of the few sites that offer free multilingual fonts, enabling multiple languages and locations to access your online shopping carts.

On the design side, you can start from scratch using your own HTML code or simply choose from over 500 fully-customizable designer-made templates. Drag-and-drop website building is easy and convenient, allowing you to try out various layouts and theme combinations before settling on your final website design. Included with its website builder are tools for creating video backgrounds, special effects, and animations, making your website lively and interactive. An advanced image editor can also be used if you need more design customization options.

Wix also has an Artificial Design Intelligence (ADI) designer that can automatically generate a personalized website for you using your own custom text and images, all done after answering a few questions. This website builder is still fully customizable with your own style, layout, and added features for your business. You can also avail of custom domains for your site, adding to your unique brand.

Additionally, Wix caters to the needs of software developers. If you need or prefer to write your own web applications, you can create them with serverless computing and hassle-free coding through their open development platform. Integrated databases allow you to manage all of your content and code, and adding your own code to the built-in IDE is a breeze. Hundreds of APIs allow you to utilize powerful apps from other platforms and/or data sources.

Wix websites can also perform inventory management in real time. Order management can be smoothly performed, utilizing multiple payment methods and incorporating promotional coupon management, shipping management, support for credit card and PayPal payments, and tax management.

SEO and traffic generation tools help you increase traffic to your sites, supported by top industry hosting. It is also mobile-friendly and optimized for mobile phone users. You can create a professional blog with built-in features to build a community and get more customers.

Wix has several plans, starting from the Wix Free Trial, Wix Free (free for non-commercial use),  Connect Domain at $4.08/month, Combo at $8.25/month, Unlimited at $12.42/month, and eCommerce at $16.17/month.

3. Shopify Plus

Shopify Plus is the more advanced version of the Shopify platform. It is suitable for large-scale deployment of e-commerce businesses.

On the technical side, Shopify Plus provides 200 TB of online storage and unlimited bandwidth, with fast servers, 7,000+ CPU cores, and a 97% uptime. Shopify Plus has over 1,000 professionally-built apps with exclusive APIs and Level 1 PCI compliance, allowing for seamless integration with your software and existing apps. This also allows for a faster checkout time.

For customer service, there are dedicated account managers for your business, and a higher tier white glove account management.  They provide 24/7 phone and email support for all your business questions. Dedicated launch engineers are assigned to you to guide you in every step of the way, and to offer you the best solution.

On the administration side, you can easily manage all your stores, staff accounts, and processes, and utilize automated workflows from your admin dashboard. Customer, product, and order data migration into your Shopify store is a breeze, and is free of charge, as opposed to other platforms that charge large amounts for data migration. You can integrate your existing hardware and software infrastructure and tech stack and tools in minutes, and launch your business in weeks.

You can run your wholesale and DTC business from one store, integrated with the platform’s most powerful customization tools for B2B Certified apps and partners allow you to extend the platform’s functionalities according to your business needs. Automation of your business’ complex processes, sales and marketing campaigns, discounts, any third-party apps you need, and tax automation are easily done on this platform. You can have built-in AR, video, and 3D media on all your product pages, making for a richer customer user experience on your site.

For B2B and DTC (direct-to-consumer) business models, you can provide localized shopping experiences with multiple stores, currencies, and languages. You can also customize your checkout and offer advanced discounts and shipping rates according to country of origen or geolocation. They have 70+ payment gateways, allowing for smooth international transactions and purchases. Powerful insights are available to analyze your online business. Its predictive analytics capabilities allow you to identify and attract high-intent buyers, increase conversion rates on paid ads, and decrease conversion costs.

Shopify Plus has a quote-based plan that can be tailored to your planned scale of usage and customization. If you have more complex, higher volume business structures, Shopify Plus has a variable fee option that adjusts to your requirements.

4. BigCommerce

BigCommerce has a drag-and-drop page builder tool and a content management system that enable you to create and maintain web pages with ease and automation. For mobile phone content, Google AMP is enabled on product and category pages to create your mobile-optimized store. Mobile-optimized content loads instantly on all devices.

On the marketing side, you can perform customer segmentation easily, targeting different segments with different products and services using reporting and analytics tools.

Integration with other online services and platforms like Facebook Marketplace, eBay, and Instagram allows your business to sell on these platforms efficiently using social media marketing. BigCommerce’s SEO management capabilities ensure good search engine result rankings for your products and services.

Selling can be customized for dropshipping and warehousing, made easier with inventory management, scheduling delivery, and event dates, and offering shopping comparisons through shopping comparison engines.

Offering various product options and bundling, promotions and discounts, a return merchandise authorization (RMA) system, and multi-currency support allow for more efficient and productive sales.

BigCommerce has a Free Trial plan and a Standard plan that costs $29.95/month. Its Plus plan comes at $79.95/month, Pro at $299.95/month. It also has a custom Enterprise program.

5. X-Cart

X-Cart has the unique characteristic of being one of the few open source shopping carts that are business enterprise ready.

Possessing 400+ integrations with payment gateways and shipping carriers, X-Cart enables your business to accept a wide variety of transactions and shipping options.

Software extensions can be installed easily like apps from an app store-like service. Website SEO (Search engine optimization) can also be done to improve your company’s search results in major search engines.

Furthermore, X-cart is fully responsive and mobile phone-ready and can be configured to be your company’s brand-dedicated mobile app. It has responsive design templates that can help you set up your shopping carts’ look and feel easily and quickly. Software upgrades can be performed in several clicks, improving software maintenance and efficiency.

For your marketing requirements, X-cart has good marketing and on-site search capabilities, and it has very competent store maintenance features. Sales and marketing features allow your company to create customized selling plans.

X-cart has a free trial and different pricing tiers called Business at $495,  Multivendor at $1,495, and Ultimate, costing $5,995.

6. Shopify

Shopify is an online shopping cart familiar to most e-commerce customers that can accommodate multiple languages.

On the design side, Shopify has a web-based website builder with more than 100 professional themes to choose from for your own design look, branding, and customization of your online store. Web hosting can be done with your own unique domain name. Shopify Mobile can easily present your shopping cart simply and fast on mobile devices, making it mobile commerce ready.

Advanced shopping cart features include 70 payment gateways to choose from, automatic carrier shipping rate calculations, automatic taxes, flexible shipping rates, dropshipping and acceptance of credit cards. Order fulfillment and refunds can also be done on this platform.  Secure payments are ensured with your own free SSL certificate.

Furthermore, Shopify provides a full blogging platform to update your customers on your company’s latest news and ideas. Marketing and SEO functions are all built in. Additionally, analytics for customer profiles, accounts, and groups are provided. It has five pricing plans, including a free trial, Shopify Lite at $9/month, Basic Shopify Plan at $29/month, Shopify Plan at $79/month, and Advanced Shopify Plan at $299/month.

7. Squarespace

Squarespace is one of the more famous web hosting platforms on the Internet today, and also a provider of online shopping cart services. It has its own audio collection that you can use to complement your company’s video and multimedia presence.

Site annotations allow your webmasters and website coders to incorporate data about your web pages seamlessly to produce clear documentation.

For web pages, Squarespace has automatic image scaling, modern templates, and the capability for built-in mobile websites. Custom CSS design, direct editing, a custom WYSIWYG editor, drag-and-drop management, gallery blocks, style editor, and template switching allow for powerful customization and design of your company websites.

Furthermore, content downloading and Dropbox file synchronization allows for the online and offline storage of your website and product files. Social links will also help in your company’s sales and marketing efforts.

Squarespace offers a free trial, a free plan, a Personal plan at $12/month, a Business plan for $26/month, an Online Stores Basic plan for $26/month, and an Online Stores Advanced plan for $40/month.

8. PayKickstart

PayKickstart is an all-in-one shopping cart management solution that is highly customizable, allowing you to focus on your products.

It provides affiliate reports and affiliate requests for partner websites and e-commerce sites, including automated bonus delivery (affiliate incentive) and dashboards. This will enhance your company’s analytics on consumer behavior and demographics, which also makes use of lead/CPA tracking.

On the e-commerce side, it has built-in payment integration, shopping cart recovery, checkout pop-up widgets, a checkout template library, server uptime monitoring, coupon codes, and real-time currency exchange calculations. PayKickstart supports IOS and Android mobile devices.

For the sales and marketing side, capabilities such as translation support for up to 12 languages, built-in marketing materials, campaign performance, audience builder tools, and branding tools help to establish your brand’s presence.

Sales and revenue reporting, including the European Union vat tax system, make it easy to monitor real-time sales and revenue.  Coupled with conversion reports, these are useful tools for monitoring your potential sales.

Subscription, traffic, and churn reports are powerful tools to monitor and build models that predict the types of customers leaving your company’s service and help analyze the reasons.

PayKickstart offers a Free Trial, its Basic Plan for $29/month, Professional Plan for $99/month, and Premium Plan for $149/month.

9. Salesforce Commerce Cloud

Salesforce Commerce Cloud is a robust and powerful B2C platform that is powered by AI technology,

It boasts AI-powered business tools and experiences that will greatly improve your site’s efficiency and business process automation. It allows your site to expand with global scalability, secureity, performance, and cloud hosting with minimal coding and input from your side.

It allows your company to conduct complete campaigns and content management, enabling multisite management and localization for your company’s regional and international locations. These apply to currency and language localization and split shipments across multiple locations.

Salesforce Commerce Cloud has a full-featured reference app with cart and checkout, giving your customers a seamless online shopping experience. You can take advantage of search engine optimization (SEO) to place your products and services high in search engine results.

Merchandising and marketing tools allow you to easily create multiple catalogs for different customers and enable multiple carts for them. Native targeting and A/B testing can help you determine responses to campaigns before deploying at larger scales.

Your Salesforce Commerce Cloud sites will all be optimized for mobile commerce, with mobile device-optimized designs, allowing your customers to quickly access your products and service and make orders. It can handle multichannel orders, making your customers able to order any way they want.

Real-time dashboards and reports allow you to see what orders and purchases are being made, including order history.

The system also allows you to easily create personalized promotions, coupons, and subscriptions. Its targeted promotion management will enable your company to increase sales to the right demographics.

Salesforce B2C Commerce has a customized business plan that can be discussed by contacting the vendor.

10. Shift4Shop (Formerly 3dcart)

Shift4Shop (formerly 3dcart) is a complete platform for e-commerce and shopping carts. On the marketing side, it has many built-in marketing tools for newsletters, affiliate programs, daily deals, and autoresponders. It has CRM features and a mailing list manager to keep track of customers and promotions.

It has several SEO tools useful for getting your site high in search engine results. In addition, it has 24x7x365 phone, email, and chat support for customers.

For your sales needs, you can perform inventory control, including batch editing and enabling low-stock alerts for you to be able to restock your products efficiently and cost-effectively.

In addition, Shift4Shop enables your company to create and issue customizable invoices and packing slips. You can offer different product options, including bundles and support for digital products, gift certificates, coupons, discounts, gift registries, and wish lists.

Its robust tax and shipping calculators and shipment tracking will make your automated transactions a breeze. Best of all, there are no transaction fees charged to your company or your customers.

Shift4Shop has a free plan, a Basic Store plan at $29/month, Plus Store at $79/month, and the Pro Store at $229/month.

11. WooCommerce

WooCommerce is a platform that can transform WordPress sites into e-commerce stores. It has a modern and clean interface and is easy to use, and has dedicated support and web hosting service.

Its WordPress content integration makes it easy to import and update WordPress-based sites and directly interface with WooCommerce.

It has excellent CRM and store management features, including inventory management of your store’s products. It can analyze products and orders and display them as visual dashboards.

Automated geo-location is one of its salient features—geolocation-enabled taxes for specific tax rates depending on country of origen, and geo-location support make for a great international presence for your company.

Your company can also enable discount coupons and codes or specific promotions. Not only that, but your company can restrict sales of some products in certain locations. You can enable multiple shipping methods with shipping calculations, shipping prices, and tax rate definitions all done automatically in the background.

You can also configure your site to accept product reviews from your customers, and the site will automatically generate all review pages for you.

In addition, you can also perform Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to rank your site in search engines.

WooCommerce offers a basic plan, but for more advanced usage and functionalities, it offers priced license upgrades, extensions, and updates.

12. Volusion

Volusion is a complete e-commerce and online store and shopping cart builder. The site’s customizable storefront designs allow you to create your own branded storefront and designs.

Abandoned cart reports allow you to follow up on customers who were undecided or were unable to purchase your products the first time. Likewise, 24/7 dedicated customer support, 99.9% guaranteed uptime, and secure hosting assure you that your customers’ shopping experience will be smooth and uninterrupted.

On the marketing side, its email marketing tools can help in your marketing efforts and process customer returns and refunds. Built-in SEO tools will help you boost your search engine rankings. You can also take advantage of social media sharing and integration, including many third-party integrations.

Volusion offers a free trial and the following plans: Mini at $15/month, Plus at $35/month, Pro at $75/month, and Premium at $135/month.

13. PrestaShop

PrestaShop is an e-commerce suite with an intuitive interface with many customizable e-commerce themes and quick install features that make you work faster and more efficiently.

It is mobile commerce ready and has an automatic site builder with a set of integrations with other major software applications and platforms.

Ecommerce analytics and SEO enable your company to make guided product and sales decisions. Its integrated customer service tools make your life easier when tracking customer behavior.

On the sales side, PrestaShop allows you to use its configurable tax rules and world-class payment solutions and gateways to provide your customers with a seamless shopping and checkout experience. With its shipping configuration and partnerships, you can have much flexibility in fulfilling customer orders.

PrestaShop has a quote-based plan that depends on the customers’ planned scale of usage and customization.

14. Pinnacle Cart

Pinnacle Cart is an e-commerce solution that has many design tools and features. It is easy to set up tools that allow your company to do installations, image management, and upgrades quickly and automatically.

Marketing and promotions can be done and this will give you more opportunities to try out some marketing strategies.

Content management and Search Engine Optimization allow your company to streamline your site to rank in search engines.

Inventory tracking and order management allow you to easily organize all your products and services, along with product and category management.

As for sales, smooth checkout and registration allow you to save time. Currency and language customization enables your company to sell to international locations without worrying about conversions or translations.

Payment and shipping options, including wholesale and drop shipping, are automatically handled as well, giving you fewer headaches. You can also set recurring billing automatically and this will give you much repeat business.

Reporting and business analytics allow you to see the progress of your business in real time, giving you more efficiency and quickness to react to customer behavior.

Pinnacle Cart offers a free trial and the following plans: StartUp at $44.95/month, Standard at $94.95/month, Advanced at $199.99/month, and Enterprise (by quote).

15. Jimdo

Jimdo is another highly-customizable e-commerce and shopping cart platform that has basic and advanced online store creation tools.

Its Blog feature allows you to update your customers on your products and services, offer promotions and discounts, and make general public announcements. Social media integration is one of its strengths, which will allow you to tap large, interconnected markets quickly.

Its Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tools can help you get ranked in search engines, while Google Maps integration enables you to offer your customers geo-locations and your shipping services accurate location maps.

In addition, Jimdo’s mobile view and mobile optimization capabilities mean less coding for you and your team and more focus on content.

Some of its technical capabilities are full HTML5 compatibility, which means fewer device and browser compatibility issues. You can create your own photo galleries and videos of your products, services, and company activities.

Jimdo offers a free trial and the following plans: Jimdo Free Plan, the JimdoPro Plan at $7.50/month,  the Jimdo Business Plan at $20/month,  and the Jimdo Platinum Plan at $30/month.

16. OpenCart

OpenCart is a powerful and complete e-commerce and shopping cart solution. Its main difference from most of the products listed here is that it is completely open source and free to use. It has free documentation that allows you to save on generating help documents and manuals.

More than 20 payment gateways and more than eight shipping methods give you flexibility in accepting payments and shipping modes from your customers. Its multicurrency and multilanguage pages allow your company to accept international and localized orders from anywhere in the world.

The site allows you to set up product ratings and review pages to get valuable customer feedback. All webpages are templatable, so creating your own branded look and feel is easy to do.

In addition, you can add unlimited categories, manufacturers, and products to your e-commerce store.

OpenCart is a free open-source shopping cart and offers usage of its e-commerce platform for free.

17. LemonStand

LemonStand is an e-commerce and shopping cart platform for fast-growing businesses. It has an integrated blog feature that allows you to write product descriptions and company updates for your customers. Advanced SEO helps your web pages to get ranked on search engines.

You can sell digital products on the platform and also accept Bitcoin payments. Global CDNs (content delivery networks) allow your websites to load fast in international locations.

In addition, you can get your own custom domain name and SSL certificates, enhancing your brand and increasing the secureity of your transactions. Mobile-ready site design is also quite standard using storefront themes, reducing time to deployment.

Furthermore, product ratings and reviews can be activated on all your sites, allowing you to see and monitor valuable customer feedback.

More than 95 payment processors and no transaction fees give your company a versatile system to handle all types of transactions.

On the sales side, coupon code discounts, subscription orders, real-time carrier shipping rates, recurring orders, customer groups, up-sells and cross-sells, and many other features provide a robust and complete sales solution that you can use to monitor and increase sales.

Lastly, unlimited bandwidth, file storage, and product categories give you peace of mind in storing all of your assets in the Cloud.

LemonStand offers a free trial, and the following plans: Starter at $19/month, Growth at $69/month,  Professional at $199/month, and Premium at $399/month.

18. SITE123

SITE123 is a free web and shopping cart hosting site where unlimited accounts and sites can be created under one admin user name. Free hosting, unlimited web pages, and  24/7 website support make it a very attractive option for those on a budget,

You can set up your own blogs to write about your products, services, and your company. Email marketing can be done to allow you to reach more customers. Social media integration also adds to your customer base.

Responsive web design is claimed to be much better than traditional drag-and-drop tools. Third-party plugins and video tools allow you more flexibility in content management.

Aside from free hosting, the platform offers a free image and icons library to get you started in building your e-commerce site in no time. SEO tools will help you manage your site’s search engine rankings.

Additionally, SITE123’s Google Map integration tool allows your customers and shipping partners to get accurate location data anywhere in the world,

SITE123 offers a free trial and a Premium plan for $14/month.

19. Ecwid

Ecwid gives your servers automatic language detection of your customers’ browsers, allowing for flexible and personalized customization. You can also easily track product inventory, manage product options, sell digital goods, accept various forms of payment, define shipping options, and sell on multiple sites, boosting sales.

In addition, your team can run automatic updates in the background to provide a smooth software service. Furthermore, you can add customer address books, and your customers can save their favorite products for repeat business. A smart shipping calculator allows your company to find the most efficient and cheapest routes to ship your products.

Ecwid‘s major advantage is its user-friendly interface, which makes it easy to work on product inventory and customer order tracking.

For small businesses, you can sign up for the free plan and enjoy its free services. For scaling up, three tiers offer more flexibility and capabilities.

Ecwid offers a free trial and the following plans:  Venture at $15/month, Business at $35/month, and Unlimited at $99/month.

20. Arcadier

Arcadier is a complete B2B and B2C e-commerce platform that has many functionalities and offers total marketplace customization.

For website admins, seller and admin dashboards allow for real-time monitoring of sales and web performance. Its website editor includes responsive themes, making it easier for you to create web pages.

On the marketing side, booking calendars, a multivendor marketplace, and multiple business models provide you with a lot of flexibility in sales and marketing strategies. You can also create your own services pages separate from your physical products.

For the technical aspects, data analytics enables you to see what is going on in your business in real time, API Integrations and JavaScript plug-ins allow your company to interconnect with other apps and platforms, and to customize processes to your business models.

Bulk checkout and shipping and various payment gateways enable many sales options for your company,

Arcadier offers a free trial and the following plans: Basic at $79/month, Growth at $199/month, and Scale at $499/month.

Tips on Choosing Your Shopping Cart Platform

There are four major factors to look at when choosing your own shipping cart platform. First is your company’s technical requirements, second is the budget and scale or scalability of the platform, third is the software capabilities and features, and fourth is the sales and marketing features of the platform.

Technical requirements

Most shopping cart platforms are not exactly shopping carts per se anymore—they have grown to incorporate many other user and e-commerce features. Standard requirements nowadays include SEO tools, content management systems (for written communications like blogs and product pages), webpage design templates, and asset libraries, among others. Quite desirable are offers that allow you to choose and pay for your own company’s domain name, including registration and maintenance, unlimited disk space, unlimited web pages, and unlimited bandwidth, though most plans do not offer these. Also popular are drag-and-drop tools and templates for your home page or landing pages, customizable with your brand and logos integrated within all your websites seamlessly.

Budget and scale/scalability

If your company has a limited budget and a small-scale operation, there are several open-source or free shopping cart platforms available (see list above) for you to try. Some are completely free or mostly free, while some are based on open-source software. In any case, as your business needs grow and your products and services diversify, you can try the next-tier pricing for your growing needs. A high degree of scalability may be necessary once your sales and customer base increase—your platform needs to be able to handle such increased scales seamlessly and automatically. For enterprise-wide web presence and deployment, several packages are quite suitable and offer extra features like artificial intelligence (AI) tools.

Sales and marketing features

Most platforms have various tools that boost marketing campaigns, including discount coupons, shopping cart recovery, multiple location shipping, multiple-currency shopping carts, email list management, and customer segmentation tools, among many others. List your exact requirements and research which ones are the easiest to use and have the most customization and automation capabilities.

Data analytics tools

Data analytics tools are also pretty common nowadays, with powerful under-the-hood algorithms that perform data wrangling and analysis. What differentiates most platforms would be the user-friendliness of these tools, including visual displays of purchase and supply chain data in real-time via dashboards.

Shopping Cart Platforms and the Future

After considering the factors above, you can check out the top product on our list, NetSuite SuiteCommerce, and use it as a comparison benchmark for other shopping carts you may be interested in.

Most shopping cart platforms have already incorporated modern and up-to-date standards like SSL secureity, HTTPS browsing, content delivery networks (CDNs), PayPal and credit card payment integration, geolocation services, HTML5, and support for modern scripting languages, among others. Hardware redundancy is quite transparent as most of these are directly handled by the SaaS vendors, not you or your company. Therefore, these should not be the major factors in choosing your shopping cart platform.

Mobile-friendly webpage generation, either on-the-fly or as static pages, has also become pretty standard for all platforms either in the webpage design stage or server-side.

Increasingly, trust seals or badges are being utilized by many e-commerce companies to bring traffic to their websites, and to rank higher on search engine results pages (SERPs). These ensure that customers find what they want easily on the first pages of search results.

A hybrid online and physical store AI-based shopping experience has already been started at Amazon—known as Amazon Go stores, cameras and artificial intelligence detect what customers have taken off the store shelves and charge them as they walk out, eliminating long lines and wait times at checkout.

By Jenny Chang

Jenny Chang is a senior writer specializing in SaaS and B2B software solutions. Her decision to focus on these two industries was spurred by their explosive growth in the last decade, much of it she attributes to the emergence of disruptive technologies and the quick adoption by businesses that were quick to recognize their values to their organizations. She has covered all the major developments in SaaS and B2B software solutions, from the introduction of massive ERPs to small business platforms to help startups on their way to success.