A Look at E-commerce Platforms and Payment Solutions

With both digital-born and traditional businesses honing their e-commerce strategies, the National Retail Federation predicts online retail sales in the U.S. alone could grow as much as 12 percent this year—up to three times their projection for the industry as a whole.

What does that mean for your online store? From content management to payment solutions, here’s a look at some of the most widely used platforms for you to consider.

ID the right platform

Maybe you’re ready to launch something new; maybe what you’re doing now doesn’t quite cut it. Whatever the case, one of the most important things for you to figure out is which platform should power your online store.

“A common rule of thumb is that what you’ll get in flexibility from an
e-commerce platform, you’ll trade for simplicity.”
— from “A Guide to E-Commerce Platforms”

Before you start looking at platforms and scouring reviews, start your search by considering some of the factors that should influence your decision:

• A prioritized list of features you need in a platform
• Your budget
• The skills you’ll need to complete create the store
• Your project timeline
• The size of your store
• Other add-on features you may need
• Server support
• Security and fraud protection

To help you choose from the many options available, “A Guide to E-Commerce Platforms” looks at some of the more popular ones: Magento, Shopify, Bigcommerce, OpenCart, PrestaShop, and Volusion.

WordPress is another common choice, with people drawn to its feature-rich framework and the thousands of plugins and widgets that can customize a WordPress site to suit what’s needed.

PayPal, Stripe, or both?

As e-commerce rockets upward, online payment platforms are buckled in for the ride. PayPal dominates the market, with 6.1 billion payment transactions in 2016—a 24 percent jump compared with 2015.

While PayPal has nearly two decades as a pioneer in this space, there are many others taking a sliver of the marketplace, including offerings from Google, Amazon, and Visa. Analysis by Datanyze shows one solution has been able to nose ahead of the rest: Stripe.

Launched in 2011, Stripe is a U.S.-based company that now operates in 25 countries, and a growing number of businesses are adding Stripe to their sites—sometimes right alongside PayPal. Expertise with Stripe ranked fifth on the list of the fastest-growing skills on the Upwork Skills Index for Q4 2016.

Want to learn more about e-commerce? Have a look at Upwork’s Hiring Headquarters to learn more about platforms and trends >>

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