Overview of platforms

The future is here. There are so many different types of e-commerce platforms these days. Do you want the platform that's highly intuitive? What about the one artistically sophisticated? Of course, there's a platform that is all about the dollars and cents, helping you maximize your commercial viability. And there's a platform that gives you unlimited customization and freedom. Throughout this course, we're going to be exploring four different e-commerce platforms: Squarespace, Wix, Shopify, and WooCommerce. The goal of this course is to help you choose the best e-commerce platform for your business, and we intentionally limited ourselves to just 30 minutes of work on a platform so that you can follow along with us and try out each platform as we go. I do want to give you a brief overview of these platforms before we start, just in case you really like one platform and you want to start with that one. The first two platforms are Squarespace and Wix, and they're what I call page builders. They're platforms that give you the ability to customize the look and feel of each page. They have tons of options for colors, typography, and adding beautiful images to wherever you want on the page. They have very simple and straightforward e-commerce functionality, and they focus on the aesthetics. If you like customizing your site visually, these platforms are great. The next platform is the most well-known and popular e-commerce platform in the world. I'm of course referring to Shopify. Shopify was designed to showcase hundreds or thousands of products in a store, so all of the product pages look pretty much the same, and the products are easily sorted into categories, tags, and collections, and you can link to those categories, tags, collections, and individual products from your homepage or other parts of the site. Shopify is well-organized for e-commerce brands and to really cement Shopify as the e-commerce leader, they have an amazing app store that adds custom functionality to your e-commerce site and connects your Shopify store to just about any third-party service you want to, such as affiliate marketing programs, abandon cart services, refund and return services, and a whole lot more. Because Shopify is a flagship e-commerce platform, they have integrations with just about every service that works with e-commerce. Shopify is great for people who know they want to run an e-commerce store, who want to bolster the e-commerce store with apps and services, and who want to be on a reputable and reliable platform. The final platform is one of my favorites. If Shopify is the high school jock, WooCommerce is the nerdy kid with a pocket protector, and that's me in high school. WooCommerce is an open-source platform that's free, is built on WordPress, which is also free. If you're a bit more technical and understand how to buy web hosting and install WordPress, WooCommerce is a great choice. It's open-source and the code is yours forever. No one can take it away from you. You can also modify any line of code you want. If you don't like the checkout, you can code your own. No other platform gives you that power. Besides Shopify, WooCommerce and WordPress have more integrations than any other platform. There are thousands of plugins and themes to choose from to customize any part of your site. And unlike Shopify, many of these are free plugins. But because it is a bit more technical, if you run into problems, you don't always have a support team to help you. So I recommend WooCommerce for technical people and people who don't mind rolling up their sleeves to solve problems. I'll dig into each of these platforms a bit deeper in their own chapters. Between these four platforms, there should be one that works for you and your business. Now let's prepare the product data we'll need for this course.