Define Your eCommerce Platforms By Product Types

Introduction

If you’re new to the eCommerce industry, chances are that you need to think about a lot of factors to choose the right eCommerce platform. They are platform features, pricing, customer support, and the like. However, some of you may forget to take types of products into consideration.

Hence, in this article, we’ll be providing you instructions on how to choose the right eCommerce platform by product type for your consideration. Let’s get it checked!

How many product types are there?

Before going deeper into choosing the right eCommerce platform, let’s take a look at some types of products you can sell on the Internet.

• Physical goods are tangible products that the sellers can pack and deliver to the customers’ address after confirming the orders. Physical products can be clothes, books, home decorations,…
• Some examples of Digital products are eBooks, store templates, music, video, and the like. Customers can download and use these intangible products instantly.
• Dropshipping goods are promising eCommerce products that attract a sheer number of e-merchants out there. The biggest advantage of Dropshipping is that you don’t have to keep the products in stock, prepare the order and deliver it. Briefly, dropshipping goods is a low-risk investment.
• Subscription service allows the business to receive recurring payments on a monthly or yearly basis by offering either physical goods or digital products. Spectacularly, this business model focuses on customer retention rather than acquisition, thus, it somewhat ensures financial stability for the business

Choose the right eCommerce platform by your products

As a matter of fact, some platforms allow you to sell different product types while others limit the items you can upload to your store. Hence, product types play a crucial role in choosing the right eCommerce platform.

In this post, we’d love to emphasize the importance of product types in choosing the right eCommerce platform. Let’s discover which platform you should opt for depending on the 4 product types we’ve mentioned above.

Physical goods

There is a reservoir of platforms you can go for if you want to make money with any legal physical items. In this part, we would like to name some top-trusted eCommerce solutions in the market depending on some criteria. They are the number of users, scalability, features, and coding requirements.

• Shopify

With regular updates and dynamic promotions, Shopify is a prominent eCommerce platform that helps beginners and non-coders create an online store effortlessly. Specularly, this is an ideal option for big sellers and enterprise-level businesses with the Shopify Plus plan. For more information, please take a look at our comparison of Shopify vs Shopify Plus here.

One of the biggest advantages of Shopify is that you can upload an unlimited number of products to your store. Besides, Shopify allows you to develop the wholesale channel once you register Shopify Plus plan. Hence, there’s no need to worry about store scale-up when your business starts to grow.

Another plus point of Shopify that makes it well-tailored for selling physical products is Shopify Payments and flexible shipping options. In terms of payment, you can avail of more than 100 payment processors including PayPal, Stripe, Authorize,…Otherwise, you can become a Shopify Payments user to get rid of transaction fee ranging from 0.5-2.5% depending on your plan. When it comes to shipping, Shopify gives you the freedom to configure the shipping rates.

• WooCommerce

WooCommerce is well-known for being a powerful plugin of WordPress that provides eCommerce solutions for millions of merchants all over the globe. It gets the name on the scoresheet by allowing free download & installation and giving users full control over the website. Especially, WooCommerce doesn’t have a steep learning curve thanks to its user-friendly control panel.

Similar to Shopify, you can upload unlimited products to your WooCommerce store as long as they are optimized to avoid affecting the store performance.

In addition, WooCommerce comes as a rescue for those who’re struggling with managing the inventory level. Apart from basic tasks like creating reports, editing products, creating and managing variable products,…you can group main products and up-selling items to get more sales.

• Magento

Magento appears in the list of top platforms for selling physical products that we highly recommend. As an open-source cart, Magento also gives you endless customization possibilities to enrich your store functionalities. Most importantly, Magento comes with Magento Commerce Cloud, which is an exclusive solution for large enterprises to handle increasing traffic and sales volume.

As a result, you can rest assured that Magento will give you a seamless experience in selling and managing thousands of physical items. However, please note that Magento is truly difficult to learn. This means you need to have firm technical knowledge to maintain and develop your store.

Digital products

Thanks to the rapid growth of digitalization, the selling of downloadable items like music, video, eBooks, templates are more and more popular. Understanding this demand, some platforms quickly update their features to help merchants sell digital products easily.

• Easy Digital Downloads

Similar to WooCommerce, Easy Digital Downloads is a free-of-charge plugin for WordPress. However, it only focuses on digital items and attempts to make selling this type of product simple.

Once you install this plugin, you’ll benefit from:

• Flexibility in payment options

• Easy-to-create discount codes

• Customer account page

• Full data reports

• REST API

All of these features come as a rescue to help you manage your store seamlessly.

• Ecwid

Besides physical products, Ecwid allows its users to create an online store for selling digital items within a few minutes. Different from uploading images to describe your physical products, digital items can be downloaded via unique links. Customers will immediately receive the links after they make a purchase.

As an Ecwid user, you can add an unlimited number of files under one product. Besides, you’ll be able to add new sales channels to enhance the visibility of your digital items in front of more potential customers. Currently, you can promote your products via Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp, Amazon, eBay,…

• MemberPress

MemberPress is also a plugin for WordPress specializing in selling downloadable products as well as membership subscriptions. It’s quite simple to use, but MemberPress won’t let you down as it has robust features that help your business grows effectively.

First, MemberPress gives you a chance to leverage your store with great features from WordPress itself along with other WordPress plugins and third-party services. Thus, there’s no need to worry about tools to manage content, forums, or social communities.

Second, you can integrate MemberPress into your existing website to ensure the traffic and page authority you’ve been building. This is the reason why this superior WordPress plugin is worth using to sell digital items.

Dropshipping goods

Dropshipping is a rising star with an increasing number of sellers, which motivates many eCommerce platforms to quickly embrace it. Let’s see how to choose the right platform for dropshipping businesses

• Shopify

As a giant in the eCommerce platform industry, Shopify has no reason not to offer dropshipping features. With a wide range of high-quality dropshipping apps, Shopify eases the pain of dropshippers at their beginning.

In addition, the collaboration of Shopify and Oberlo makes it easier to find dropshipping products and thus you can start your business flawlessly. Most importantly, there is no limitation on the number of products you can upload to your store. This means you can totally scale up with dropshipping on Shopify.

For more information about Shopify dropshipping and whether it outperforms WooCommerce in this aspect, let’s take a look at our comparison between Shopify vs WooCommerce dropshipping here.

• Shift4Shop

Shift4Shop is also a good place where you can monetize with dropshipping. As an acquirement from 3dCart by Shift4Shop in November 2020, Shift4Shop comes with outstanding built-in features as well as a fully integrated payment processing system.

Indeed, Shift4Shop is a cost-effective solution for those who’re on a budget. Its dropshipping plan is relatively affordable. Besides, it has some great features, for example, you can get dropshipping products from AliExpress. Especially, Shift4Shop doesn’t require you to pay any additional fee for each transaction is made.

• BigCommerce

Undoubtedly, BigCommerce is a fast-growing eCommerce platform in the market. It leaves other competitors miles behind thanks to state-of-the-art features that leverage your high-volume store. Hence, BigCommerce can also be a preferable option to sell dropshipping products.

As BigCommerce is a hosted cart, you don’t need to spend too much time taking the basics. In addition, this platform has enough room for scalability when your dropshipping business grows with a powerful API for seamless integration. Specularly, BigCommerce supports various dropshipping plugins including AliExpress, Prinful, and Wholesale 2B.

Besides Shopify, Shift4Shop, and BigCommerce, you can also choose from a sheer number of options out there like WooCommerce or Magento. Don’t forget to take a look at our recommendation for the best eCommerce platforms for dropshipping for more details.

Subscription service

Subscription service is also an emerging business model that can bring profit to the table. If choosing the right eCommerce platform for subscription-based businesses is difficult, please keep reading to find your answer. We’ll suggest a list of platforms based on transaction fees, subscription plan pricing, customizability,…

• WIX

Besides being a prominent website builder, WIX also gets its name on the scoresheet by supporting a subscription-based model. Especially, this is a built-in feature of WIX, hence, it’s completely free for businesses to offer subscription services.

Once you select the “Create a Subscription” button, you’ll need to fill in some information to get started.

• Title and tagline of the subscription, which appear on the Product Page
• Frequency is the period of time that your customers need to make payment and start a new order
• Subscription duration
• Discount can be a price discount or percentage discount, and this is an optional setup.

Having difficulties building a Wix store? This tutorial video will show you how to create a Wix website from scratch:

• WooCommerce

WooCommerce is truly a one-size-fits-all solution because it’s suitable for all types of products. With WooCommerce Subscriptions, you can quickly offer this service to the recipients without spending too much money thanks to the open-source nature of WordPress.

Here are some highlighted features of WooCommerce Subscriptions that you should take a look at:

• Simple subscription & variable subscription products are available

• More than 33 payment gateways

• Automatic payment option

• Built-in automatic email notifications

• Insightful reports

Besides WIX and WooCommerce, you can opt for Shopify, Magento, Subbly, Sellfy, Recurly, and a lot more when it comes to subscription-based models. For more information, let’s have a glance at the best subscription eCommerce platforms here.

Final words

An eCommerce platform is the backbone of your online business and choosing the right one for your product type is the key to your success. In this post, our recommendation depends on physical goods, downloadable items, dropshipping goods, and subscription services. We hope that you’ll find this article helpful and start your journey effortlessly.

However, you should keep in mind that there are several factors that influence your decision besides types of products. For example, paying attention to pricing plans and other additional fees is beneficial if you’re on a budget. Or it would be a steep learning curve if you choose an open-source platform while you don’t know much about coding.

In case your existing platform isn’t suitable for the type of product you’re offering, a proper migration could be beneficial. With LitExtension – the #1 Shopping Cart Migration Solution, you can transfer data automatically, accurately and securely. Below are some of our suggestions:

• Shopify Migration
• WooCommerce Migration
• WIX migration
• BigCommerce Migration
• Magento Migration

Follow the LitExtension blog for more eCommerce tips and tricks that help you streamline your business. Besides, don’t forget to join our Facebook community where thousands of merchants, experts, and marketers share valuable information you would love.

In case you have any questions, please feel free to contact us. We are 24/7 available to get your problems solved immediately!