Starting an online business these days is relatively easy than ever before. There are many free or inexpensive open source platforms to develop your business and assist you in creating your online store and, with little knowledge and a few basic information exchange steps, you will have your own website.

Starting a home shop to exchange your handicrafts, eBooks, consumer products, brands, or other local products is a great idea to earn a stable income.

Starting an online business is no problem with the many flexible and inexpensive open source e-commerce platforms available. The only secret to success is not to stop halfway through, but to continue to look for the right two-pronged strategy:
1- Expand the product categories and functionalities of the store from a small startup to a leading online company, by working on highly responsive targeting techniques.
2- Deepen the research and multiply the methods by using trending tools known to specialize in a particular niche.

While we know that for anyone who is not very familiar with how the world of e-commerce works and how things go live, choosing a platform to create your own online store has become a simple task on the Internet. So, here is a list of the most powerful and easy-to-use platforms that can help owners successfully transform their ideas for starting a business from home into a dynamic reality.

#1 Magento


Acclaimed as the leading and most scalable platform, Magento Commerce is the leading platform for E-commerce according to the 2018 Internet Retailer Leading Vendor report.  The report shows that Magento's customers collectively achieved an 82% annual increase in digital sales, 66% more than its first competitor.

Magento's ability to develop channels, attract new customers and foster loyalty by creating unique and innovative business experiences allows you to gradually expand your business across your store and add new features over time.

Don't worry, because the platform supports all business lines and can handle up to 500,000 products and 80,000 orders per hour. With several advanced features, easy integration, SEO-oriented referencing and versatile content management.

Magento supports your choice of online strategy, whether it is: B2B, B2C, D2C, D2C, B2B2C.  Develop your distribution channels and markets at your own pace with you. There is no limit to the number of brands, markets and countries you can target online.

With Magento Commerce:
√ 24/7 support and more than 270,000 developers and partners.
√ More than 1,000 high-quality integrations and extensions.

#2 OpenCart

If you're looking for a simple platform for getting started, easy to use, optimized for SEO and offering a visually attractive interface, it's OpenCart! Therefore, it is exceptionally popular among small retailers, small and medium-sized businesses or home-based businesses.

the platform offers broad access possibilities to easy backend features, extended feature plugins, unlimited product support capacity and reduced server load, which makes it a first strategic choice for those who want to start their business with peace of mind and just focus on their sales strategies. 

In general:
√ The interfaces are very refined, but it's very functional, especially the back office, which reflects such power with an intention to remain simple and professional.
√ Product input is faster in OpenCart than on other international e-commerce platforms
√ On OpenCart most of the important functions are integrated directly into the core of the application notably loyalty points, wish lists etc.... This avoids having modules that do half their job intelligently replaced by common functions.
√ The implementation of the multi-boutique is quite easy.
√ From a pure technical point of view the modeling of the database and the code is much more structured and organized, the management of data models and functions are conventional and the call for data is well indexed... etc.
√ About 2000 themes and 2500 modules cheaper than on other platforms. The themes are also classed, just look at the examples on Template Monster or Theme Forest.
√ In short, a simple, powerful platform that rotates fast.

#3 Shopify

Created in 2006 by three Canadians, Shopify has quickly established itself as a new solution to develop its online store. Its ease of configuration and use has attracted many beginners in e-commerce, but also professionals.

It is a secure platform for e-commerce stores that want to focus on both mobile and social shopping. Easy integrations, fast loading speed, versatile payment gateway integrations, SEO functions, direct social selling are the key features of Shopify offers.

The Shopify platform Unlike Magento or OpenCart, is not available in open-source but works in SaaS, this means that you will not be able to install Shopify on your own computer because it is already installed on remote servers. In addition, you will have to pay a subscription fee to use Shopify and keep your e-commerce site online.

Shopyfy offers the possibility to test the platform for 14 days, the time to create your shop, to test and understand the many features of Shopify.

The steps to follow to create your e-commerce store on Shopyfy has been widely evoked on the web, I recommend for example this link: Beginner’sGuide to the Shopify Store.

#4 bigcommerce
BigCommerce is an E-Commerce solution strategically designed for VSEs and SMEs. This platform provides a viable and powerful interface for your e-commerce needs, by default offers the ability to create an online store where the seller can sell his products, process and ship his orders, manage his inventory as well as customize the design of his store, as well as access to security features, reassuring the customer about any confidential information exchange.

Here is a series of the most attractive advantages for all those who have an ECommerce store on BigCommerce:

√ BigCommerce is fully adapted to smartphones.
√ BigCommerce was the first E-Commerce platform to integrate Google's AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) into an online store that leverages existing web technologies to permit extremely fast page viewing and content loading, eliminating all aspects that affect the shopping experience and allowing the user to immediately access product details.
√ BigCommerce offers templates created specifically for smartphones to its users, allowing the optimization of the shopping cart.
√ BigCommerce allows you to increase your site's traffic by using RSS (Really Simple Syndication) content, a family of data formats used to syndicate web content and purchasing RSS feeds. This platform connects easily to shopping flows such as Shopzilla to generate more traffic to your E-Commerce. In addition, it is connected to Google Shopping, giving you the ability to get more traffic through this channel.
√ It is essential to have the peace of mind knowing that BigCommerce offers support for your online store, 24 hours a day.
√ No need to look elsewhere, BigCommerce has its own applications, created to increase your conversion rate and E-Commerce revenues to apply the right online marketing strategies: some applications allow you to integrate social networks on your online store, others allow you to perform shopping cart retrievals, integrate one-click payment, etc.
√ BigCommerce offers the possibility to integrate your E-Commerce on other online sales platforms such as Amazon or eBay or others by reverse effect, which will certainly attract more traffic to your online store and allows you to invest in the social network through a well-thought-out communication strategy to target a maximum of public and make maximum sales.
√ BigCommerce offers an intuitive interface for inventory management, making it easy to manage returns. Such a management and feedback system are an advantage for an E-Commerce, allowing subsequent customer retention.
√ BigCommerce includes several SEO pro tools that are essential to the success of your online store, allowing your website to generate relevant and natural traffic that can be converted into a customer.

√ BIGCOMMERCE !! offers the possibility to test the platform for 15 days, the time to create your shop, to test and understand a many feature.

Here are some comments made raised by those who have an E-Commerce store on BigCommerce:

√ BigCommerce, significantly increases prices for their most successful customers (generating more than 125,000 revenues per year), making it much more expensive than its direct competitor. Shopify, which has fixed prices.
√ BigCommerce has generally not responded to feature requests, which has prevented many customers to justify the high costs. For example, many features are designed primarily for U.S. customers, which presents features that are unusable for the rest of the world.

√ Except the first basic steps to follow to finish your store in a few seconds, BigCommerce and its direct competitor. Shopify, offer features to advanced developers to better organize your store and better present it to search engine algorithms, which is not within the reach of beginners.

 #5 WooCommerce

Those who are familiar with WordPress, then WooCommerce is the right platform for them. Based on WordPress, it is easy to install, configure and start, so developers will charge you less. In addition, there are a large choose of additional plugins or WooCommerce templates and themes, which will help owners to enhance their stores according to the activity sector and the target audience.

WooThemes has developed the free WooCommerce plugin that allows you to make your WordPress a true Ecommerce with multiple features. The best e-commerce plugin for WordPress. To date, WooCommerce, undoubtedly remains powerful, efficient and complete, it has been downloaded more than 15 Million times, and is rated 4.6/5 by more than 1,500 users.

It really deserves to try the adventure, extraordinary WooCommerce plugins, developed to promote your store, on a very secure WordPress platform, can really help you to enhance your online business and earn extra income.

To start the adventure, I recommend for example this link: WOOCOMMERCE

#6 Wix 

In recent years, the website publisher Wix has built up a strong reputation, thanks to significant investments in marketing. Example: this product placement in “Plus belle la vie”, one of the most famous French television series.

Today, Wix is one of the most important players on the website publisher market, hosting more than 100 million websites!

The Wix website editor permits to create a website very easily. Runned in your browser (you have no software to install), it also includes its own hosting. Sign up, select a template design and you are ready to create your site! You don't need any advanced technical skills (forget HTML!).

Whom is Wix addressed ?

Its visually striking designs are designed for companies, restaurants, online shops and artists such as musicians and photographers. They are optimized for mobile and can be improved thanks to the many applications available in the Wix "App Market" store.

Wix provides a perfect display on mobile devices. A quick solution to build a site without having to worry about security and other updates, which disqualified WordPress. Very easy to use, the Wix editor offered a wide range of practical tools such as photo filters and text animations. Be careful, however, before you take out your credit card: keep in mind that each website has different requirements.

Opinions on tariffs and future Wix

Wix is available free of charge without time limits, but if you need professional services, such as having your own domain name or priority support, you can choose from four premium packages, ranging from "Connect Domain" to "eCommerce".

Its pricing system and the ease with which it is easy to set up a website and more particularly an e-commerce store, with all the interesting features offered, will make Wix, in the coming years, a website publisher who has all the qualities to wreak havoc on the web.

 So create your free website now on Wix.com
Volusion is one of the leading e-commerce site platforms, renowned for its dynamic backend and outstanding support system. With their ingenious store configuration sequence, setting up your online shop is child's play. But it excels particularly in the special attention it pays to each store: Volusion account specialists help you configure your store exactly the way you want it. In addition, the shops hosted on the Volusion platform operate exceptionally well in terms of loading time and SEO referencing.

Volusion's service is different from standard website publishers, since they have positioned themselves in a particular niche, focusing their attention only on e-commerce systems. With most other publishers, you either don't have an e-commerce option or you have to pay an additional fee to unlock these features.
With Volusion, 

you can create a professional looking website with all the features and flexibility of an e-commerce.

Why use Volusion?
Great editor for E-commerce
Many well-designed models
Very good assistance

MODELS
Volusion offers more than 300 professional super designs that are suitable for all types of online businesses. No matter what you sell, from video games to beauty products, Volusion has what you need.

The personalization of the templates is very rich and gives you just enough options to make a great site, but does not have advanced features, with enough audio and video support features available, as well as slideshow to properly manage the multimedia part of your e-commerce site.

FUNCTIONALITIES
Volusion focuses mainly on e-commerce, but on the other hand uses only a few features that you can find on most other website publishers on the market, which can appear at first glance a disadvantage that hinders any interested in a promising e-commerce business.

But believe me, it's a very solid platform to create a professional online store, and the features offered for e-commerce are better than any other publisher. But you can see this when you look at the rather high monthly prices.   

EASE OF USE
The Volusion site editor is surprisingly powerful. Adding new products and new pages and managing the e-commerce side of your site is extremely easy on the one hand, however if you want to change the design of your pages, things get a little complicated.

The learning time is largely manageable, and once it is done, you will see how powerful this editor is. The best part is the ease with which your designs go well together once you understand the trick, allowing you to create a decent and full-featured online store in about an hour.

ASSISTANCE
The Volusion team offers exceptional and highly effective assistance. They answered all my questions quickly and professionally but want to have all the elements of the problem in their possession before proposing a solution. Personally, I have no problem with that, because in the long term, it is better to solve a problem correctly the first time than to have to solve it again later.

RATES
A product of this quality is worth its weight in gold. Volusion may have received average scores, but that's only because it was analyzed as a whole. But as an online store publisher, it is remarkably useful, and its price makes you feel it too.
Volusion !! offers the possibility to test the platform for 14 days. No credit card required.