Hello, I’m a Senior Developer here at Dropship Corporation. I want to talk about how to find the best e-commerce platform for your dropshipping business.
An e-commerce platform is just a website that gives your online store both a part that customers can see and a back end where you can manage it.
Shopify is a great platform with a lot of tools and add-ons from third parties. But as great as this sounds, it might not always be the best or only way to solve your problem. Some of the most successful dropshippers I’ve seen have long-term partnerships with e-commerce platforms and service providers other than Shopify.
So take your time to learn about them and choose the one that best fits your needs.
Ok, let’s start with some basic needs that most e-commerce platforms have and that you should look at, from the front end to the back end.
Easy To Use Checkout
Customers want an easy checkout experience when on your store and you don’t want any distractions that can prevent them from paying. A good place to start would be to send them to a consolidated payment platform. You’ll need to be able to connect your e-commerce platform to well-known payment gateways like PayPal or Stripe.
Changes to the template
Your store should have your brand and your colors. Make sure the platform you choose allows you to easily update your store’s look and feel without losing its professional face. After all, we all want a unique store, just not so different that people are scared when they visit, but just enough for them to recognize it’s an e-commerce store and have a sense of familiarity.
Customer Section
Customers are what keep your store going, and you want them to come back after they’ve bought something. It is important to have a customer area that saves their profile information and is easy to use. To make your customers feel safe and cared for, it’s important to use a platform that lets you send emails about order status.
You should also think about having Facebook or Google login buttons because not everyone wants to spend more than a minute filling out forms.
Admin: Things
You want it to be easy to change or add your products. You’ll need a lot of ways to customize, such as variants, the ability to upload images, the ability to set inventory so you don’t sell items that are out of stock, and the ability to set the price and discounts for each variant.
With multiple variants, you should be able to do some of the following:
Get different customers by offering different discounts.
Simple is best, so only show a few different kinds of your product.
Show off a lot of different versions of your products.
Choose which images to show for each option to make the user experience better.
Admin: Orders
Ah, the rewards for doing a good job. Here, you can see each order from your cart that has been checked out and paid for. Your normal e-commerce platform shows your orders as soon as they come in and tells you what their status is. From here, you can process the products you’ve found and send your customers confirmations.
It’s also helpful that orders can be easily refunded. Sure, giving refunds hurts, but sometimes it can lead to another sale, so don’t get mad when you have to do it.
These are some of the most important things a platform needs.
Some of the other platforms that meet these basic needs besides Shopify are:
- CommerceHQ
- WooCommerce
- GrooveKart
So, yes, you can set up your dropshipping store without Shopify, and it’s very easy to do so with the above platforms.
Try each one and see how you like it. Then choose the one that best fits your needs.
Then, when you’re all set up, don’t forget that Dropship Corporation has easy integrations with all of these platforms and can help you find and ship products with all of them.
