Key Factors for Choosing an Enterprise Ecommerce Platform

eCommerce is one of the fastest-growing sectors as massive users turn to online shopping, even for mere grocery items. According to a recent study, the revenue in the eCommerce market is set to reach US$4,454.00 bn in 2024. And that’s not all. The impact and implementation of this sector are seen in other industries, including healthcare and Fintech. To keep up with this evolving sector, enterprises must upscale their strategy and build a feature-rich and scalable online store. 

To build a robust online store, it is crucial to leverage enterprise-level eCommerce platforms and ensure they choose the best enterprise e-commerce platform. But since there are various eCommerce platforms available to choose from, it can be complex to make the right decision. 

So there are two important steps that can be taken to make a decision. One is to consider the key factors when choosing an enterprise eCommerce platform. The second is to consult a professional eCommerce development company that can build a fully customized online store for your business.

What is an Enterprise eCommerce Platform: An Overview

An enterprise eCommerce platform is similar to an eCommerce platform but built with some added functionality and features.

In other words, an enterprise eCommerce platform is a robust and scalable cloud-based software solution for building an online store for large-scale businesses.

Unlike standard eCommerce platforms intended for small or medium-sized businesses, enterprise-level eCommerce platforms are tailored to meet the complex demands of large corporations or organizations.

These platforms offer a comprehensive suite of features and functionalities to support various aspects of eCommerce operations, including product catalog management, inventory tracking, order processing, payment gateways, customer relationship management (CRM), marketing tools, analytics, and more. 

They offer scalability, enabling your store to handle high traffic volumes, transactions, and data, ensuring optimal performance, reliability, and security.

Additionally, customization and flexibility are key characteristics of enterprise eCommerce platforms, allowing businesses to adapt the software to their specific requirements, workflows, branding guidelines, and integration needs. Some of the top enterprise eCommerce platforms include Shopify Plus, BigCommerce, WooCommerce, and Adobe Commerce. 

Understanding Factors to Choose the Best Enterprise eCommerce Platform

1. Hosting 

Enterprise eCommerce platforms are either self-hosted or hosted. While working with a self-hosted platform can be an extra piece of work, as you will have to deal with the installations and updates yourself, it offers you more control over the platform but also increases your expense. WooCoomerce and Adobe Commerce are the best examples of such a hosting model. 

On the other hand, hosting platforms such as Shopify and BigCommerce follow a monthly subscription model and handle the hosting and store maintenance themselves. These are comparatively cheaper.

Hence, make sure to consider the cost and your hosting requirements before choosing the platform. 

2. Enterprise eCommerce Platform Comparison

You must do an enterprise eCommerce platform comparison to understand each platform’s unique features, advantages, and disadvantages. This will help you make the right decision and shortlist the platforms that can best suit your enterprise-grade requirements. Moreover, check out our blog, which covers the innovative features of an enterprise eCommerce platform.

3. Customization and Flexibility

As we proceed further in the digitally empowered world, it is important to understand that customers today prefer tailored and personalized experiences more than anything. Hence, you must ensure that you choose a customizable enterprise eCommerce platform which also offers the firm offering eCommerce development services extensive flexibility to modify the platform as per requirements and make iterations as and when required.

If you choose Shopify for store development, then ensure to hire a professional Shopify development company that will implement customization into your online store.

4. Scalability

The enterprise eCommerce platform you choose for your business must offer scalability so that your online store can upscale simultaneously as your business grows. A scalable platform will be able to handle heavy, peak traffic situations seamlessly while keeping the store’s performance and UI/UX design intact. Remember that a scalable online store will encourage more sales for your businesses and boost customer loyalty.

5. Security

When we talk about eCommerce, security is always a concern. Hence, this is a very important factor when choosing an enterprise eCommerce platform. Evaluate all the platforms properly and select the one that is PCI DSS compliant and offers extensive security features and SSL certificates required to safeguard customer data and transactions locally as well as all on the global level. 

6. Integration Capabilities

Third-party integrations are a necessity for enterprise-grade online stores. Thus, you should choose an option that offers easy integration with multiple third-party software programs, such as shipment and customer loyalty programs. The platform must also smoothly connect with your existing software, such as ERP and CRM. The best enterprise eCommerce platform will offer APIs, integration software, and plugins to extend your store’s functionality as required. 

7. UI/UX Design

Enterprises can effortlessly boost customer loyalty and enhance customer experiences by building a store with an appealing UI/UX design. This can become possible when you select a platform that offers multiple themes as well as custom theme-building capabilities so that you can build a design that augments your brand image and resonates with your customers.

8. Payment Gateway Support

Payment setup is one of the major elements of an online store and a crucial step in the customer journey. If the payment process isn’t optimized properly, it can lead to increased cart abandonment, customer dissatisfaction, and revenue loss. Remember that different customers will have varied payment preferences, which must also be addressed.

Hence, the best enterprise eCommerce platform will be the one that supports multiple payment gateways and can enable integration with your store. Additionally, in the enterprise eCommerce platform comparison, we evaluated various platforms to understand which can support the best payment gateway the best. BigCommerce is the winner here as it not only integrates various payment gateways but can also help set up a custom checkout and payment page for your online store. With its extensive payment customization capabilities, the BigCommerce development company can build a custom checkout page for your online store.

Want to learn more about custom checkout? Have a read of our blog and understand the role of custom checkout processes in transforming customer experience.

Why Choosing an Enterprise eCommerce Platform an Ideal Solution?

Choosing an enterprise version can be an added advantage for your online store. While the above-mentioned capabilities can be found in a basic eCommerce platform, the enterprise edition adds an extra layer of customization, features, tools, and capabilities that can enhance the functionality of your online store. 

In other words, enterprise-level eCommerce platforms will provide better integration capabilities, customization and flexibility, more scalability, improved security features, and an extensive range of templates for building a more appealing UI/UX design. These platforms are intended to accommodate enterprise-grade online stores with ease.

Bottom Line

There has been a significant increase in online shopping. This is the reason why many businesses, especially large-scale enterprises, are looking to build a custom online store. But the question is, how can they make it happen?  The answer is to utilize the best enterprise eCommerce platform. 

Remember to consider the abovementioned factors in the blog when choosing the platform. Once you do so, you can hire an experienced eCommerce web development company to handle the development process.

Our eCommerce professionals at Successive Digital will work closely with you to understand your requirements and develop a custom solution for your business.