Running an online business and storefront is not an easy task. Small businesses often face budget constraints and if they want to sell online they need a user-friendly and robust ecommerce solutions and tools.

For starters, you need an ecommerce platform with suitable options to boost the productivity and performance of your business and help you get up and running faster. When it comes to starting an online business there are many ecommerce platforms to choose from, but you’ll need one that meets your unique business goals.

If you want to sell online with success, here’s a look at eight ecommerce solutions and cool online tools to try.

Ecommerce Platforms

When comparing ecommerce solutions look for the basic features required to setup your online store, which includes an integrated shopping cart, customizable website templates, email marketing, search engine optimization, analytics and inventory management. If you need more bells and whistles, choose the solution that offers them with ease of use and scalability.

Shopify

Considered one of the more popular ecommerce solutions on the market, Shopify lets you choose a website template, add a product catalog, optimize store design, and create company blog posts from a single administration dashboard. Shopify also has built in mobile features that consists of both a mobile storefront and iPhone app.

No development skills are required to create a store, but merchants can easily select from a range of more than 100 website designs and integrate their products. When you create a Shopify website it offers integration of a secure shopping cart, which can accept major credit cards. Best of all, Shopify contains built-in analytics for benchmarking your online store’s performance.

Pricing: Start selling products online for just $14/month along with a 14-day free trial.

Magento

Magento is one of the most powerful ecommerce solutions available today with a host of impressive features. Owned by eBay, Magento makes it easy to sell your products via eBay too. With over 300+ solutions and industry partners; boasting $25 billion+ in transaction volume each year it’s a viable and trusted online shopping cart for many small businesses.

With its advanced features, Magento is the best option for online store owners who want to create a robust, high performance, and scalable online store.

Pricing: Magento offers both the Magento Community Edition, a free version to download and use for medium-large size businesses, and Magento Enterprise Edition, which costs $15,000 per year (enterprise business solution) and is best for large size businesses.

Square Market

If you need to launch an online store in a short period of time, then Square Market is an ideal ecommerce platform. Square Market is an ecommerce play from the mobile and digital payment platform Square. It enables local businesses throughout the United States to sell their products to anyone, anywhere, through the Internet.

Open your free online store with Square using their built-in marketing tools and pickup order system. If you’re a fan of Square, you’ll enjoy their free point-of-sale app and integrated analytics. Square Market is an agile online store solution with loads of customizable features from personalized images and logos, adjustable tax rates, flexible promotional codes, social media links, color and size options, mobile-friendly store fronts, and a set of ready-made online marketing tools.

Pricing: No monthly fees; When you make an online sale, you pay just 2.75% of the sale price. Square deposits payments into your bank account in one to two business days. No listing fees or setup fees required.

BigCommerce

BigCommerce is another effective, user-friendly and trusted ecommerce platform. If you need shopping cart software for your online business you’ll appreciate their bundled features and an expert team that can help you migrate your store from any other ecommerce platform to BigCommerce.

They offer customizable and comprehensive features as Jeremy Wong of Website Builder Experts explains, “Bigcommerce gives you a very comprehensive set of e-commerce tools “out of the box” that packs a huge punch … From integration with email newsletter tools (auto responders), creating coupons / promotion campaigns, unlimited product variations and shipping and tax configurations to secure payment gateway integrations, handling returns, store statistics reporting, social sharing, product wish list, reviews and more;” they set you up to succeed.

Pricing: Start selling at 29.95/month. No contracts. Cancel anytime.