 the best e-commerce platform in 2020. Have you been trying to figure out, I mean, there's so many different platforms out there to sell goods on. Where do you go to? What's the best ones? Well, you've come to the right place. In this video, I'm gonna cover the top 12 platforms to sell online, and I'm gonna show you the pros and cons of each one, and we're starting right now. Hey, I'm JR Fisher. If you're new to my channel, welcome. And don't forget to subscribe. There's a big subscribe button down there. Make sure you hit that subscribe button. And don't forget, turn on notifications. There's a bell right next to it. You've gotta click that, and then turn on all notifications so that you don't miss a single video. You become part of the Fisher family, and I can let you know every time I do a new video. Now, on this channel, I teach you how to start, run, and grow online businesses. I've been selling online since 2009. I have my branded products on thousands of websites, including Walmart. And on this channel, I share with you the things you need to do to grow your business. So let's go ahead and get started. I wanna go through the top 12 e-commerce platforms that you can use to sell your products. Also, before I forget, I'm giving away a $97 e-commerce course. You can get the link to it down in the description there. Click that link and learn absolutely free. No credit card needed. Now, the first one I'm gonna go over is probably the most popular one Number one is Shopify. Shopify is a pretty amazing platform. Let's go through some of the pros. Number one, most people use it. Most people use Shopify because of its ease of use. And number two, it was built for e-commerce. When you get a platform that was really designed to do exactly what you wanna do, it's gonna be easier and it's gonna work better for you. So a lot of people have picked it for that reason. Also, down in the description, I'll put a link down there where you can actually get a free trial of Shopify. And then if you wanna go ahead and move forward, you can use that link to get a big discount on it. The next thing that's a big advantage about Shopify is that it has a lot of useful applications and integrations that you can use on Shopify. Since it's been around for a while, there's literally thousands and thousands of them that you can pick from. I guess we gotta go over some of the cons. Really, it's a great platform. I have nothing bad to say about it. If anything, I would say it's a little expensive depending on what your finances are. It's $29 a month. So if you don't wanna spend any money at all, then it wouldn't be the best platform for you. But if you can afford it, I would definitely suggest you starting off with Shopify. Now, the next thing I wanna talk about is big commerce. Big commerce is another online platform that you can use for e-commerce. And it's a good platform. There's nothing really wrong with it. It has some built-in features. It's not quite as good as Shopify, but it's under the same type of design and idea. It also has a 14-day free trial. So you can try it out, not have to spend any money. The next thing I would tell you as far as the cons go is it's expensive. It's gonna cost you a little bit more to use it. It also doesn't have as many features as Shopify has. So you're paying the same kind of money, but you're getting less features. And additionally, it has selling limits. So you're gonna be limited on that. The next one I wanna tell you about is big cartel. Now, big cartel is really more designed for artists, people who are creating things like that. And if you're selling less than five products, it's absolutely free. So it would be good for you if you only have a few products to start with when you plan on building. It is fairly simple to use and design a small store. Now, the cons would be, it doesn't really have that many features and it doesn't have that many integrations. So there's not a lot you can actually do with it to customize it. Now, this site is not really built for e-commerce. So since it's not built for e-commerce, it doesn't have the design that's gonna allow you to scale if your business really grows, you're gonna end up having to move to another platform. Now, the next one we wanna look at is Volusion. Volusion is one of the platforms I actually started with. I actually started on eBay and then had an eBay store and then I moved over to Volusion. And it's a pretty good platform, it too has its pros and cons. Now I would say the good thing is on Volusion, it's got some built in features that on Shopify, you actually have to pay a little extra for. It also allows for different skews and colors. So if you have a lot of variations in your product, Volusion's a good choice for that. Some of the cons I don't personally like are bad business practices. They started upping people's rates without notifying them in advance, which I don't think is a good thing to do. Some people were having issues also with the add to cart button. And if that's not working, that's how you make money. So that's pretty big issue. Now the next thing I'll tell you is the customer support was not good. When I used it, I don't think it's that good today. It's not one of the platforms I'm gonna recommend. I will tell you, I won't even put a link down there to it. If you wanna look it up, you can look it up. It's just not something I would recommend. The pricing is similar to Shopify, but it's not near as good as Shopify. Next one I wanna talk about is WooCommerce. Now WooCommerce is essentially free. You don't have to pay for it. It integrates with a WordPress website. Now it's probably one of the most popular platforms because it's free, because it works with WordPress and you can integrate it. And that's pretty simple. So a lot of people use it for that reason. I don't see a lot of really serious e-commerce people using WooCommerce. They generally will move over to Shopify. But if you wanna get started and you don't wanna pay for a platform, it's an alternative for you. It does offer a lot of plug-ins and add-ons. So you can customize it more so than a lot of the other ones. Now as far as the cons go, it is technically free. But if you have it integrated with your WordPress website, obviously you gotta pay for a hosting. And that's gonna be maybe three or $4 a month, something along those lines, depending on who your hosting company is. I'll also tell you, the next thing is it's not that easy to do. You're gonna need a little bit of tech skills to work in there. It's not as simple as some of these other platforms. Now since it is a, I guess, a free item that hooks into WordPress, it can be easily hacked. And since it can be easily hacked, it could cost you a lot of money to have some tech person go in there and fix things and make things work properly. So that is a warning I wanna give you. Now you'll also find that it has a lot of add-ons, but you gotta pay for the add-ons. And since you gotta pay for the add-ons, it kinda wipes out the fact that it's free to start with. So if you think you're gonna grow your business a little bit, it may not be the best way to start. Now the next one I wanna talk about is Squarespace. Squarespace is a good product and you can make some really cool-looking websites with Squarespace. Now it is fairly easy to use. It's great for a podcast or if you wanna just do a website for a restaurant or nail salon or hair salon, something along those lines. I will warn you though, the cons are it's not made for e-commerce. So if you plan on selling a lot of products online, it would not be your best pick. If you just have a business and you wanna have a website presence, then it would work for you. And the downside also is that it costs about what Shopify costs and it doesn't have the e-commerce capabilities of Shopify, but you're having to pay the same price. So if you're gonna be selling products like that, you might as well go ahead and go with Shopify. Now the next one I wanna tell you about is Magento. Magento is a really cool platform. We actually use Magento for a survival food company. It's really for big commerce. Now the reason we use it is because we have different type of login capabilities. So we have people who sell our products to the general public and we also have the general public coming to our website. So when a regular customer comes to the website, they log in, they see a certain set of pricing. I can set it up for all my vendors out there depending on what their pricing levels are so that when they log in, they're gonna see their wholesale pricing. They can put in their orders and then we can ship it out for them. So that's why we use Magento. Now there's a lot of big companies like Nike and Ford and Coca-Cola that use Magento. But it's a really high level type website. I don't know if I would suggest somebody using it right from the get go if you're just starting a business. Now it is an open source coding website. So you can hire developers and you can highly customize this site. You can do a lot of things with it. You can also handle high volumes of orders. And we are a survival food company. That's one of my companies. And sometimes we'll get 100 or 1,000 orders at a time and that would crash any other cycle with Magento. We can handle it without any problems. Yeah, it also integrates really well with any other high level platforms. And technically the open source one that we use is free. But if you wanna get support and all that kind of stuff it can get really expensive. It can be $10,000, $20,000 a year to use this platform if you're gonna need assistance. Now we have people who work on Magento and I can work on it, my wife can work on it. So we don't have a problem there. We use the free version. However, if you don't have those capabilities, if you don't have those skills you're gonna find yourself spending probably in the thousands of dollars for help. So I guess the cons would be you're gonna need some technical expertise yourself or you're gonna have to hire somebody and the paid version is like really expensive. So unless you have deep pockets in the beginning I would not suggest that. However, for our use, there's no other platform that would do what we need that website to do. So it works great for us. Just to give you an idea I will put some of the costs associated with Magento on the screen. Website development by an agency, you get 25 bucks an hour and then you've got a freelance or maybe 10 bucks an hour. If you've got Magento development by an in-house team it can cost you about 60 grand a year. Themes are gonna run you anywhere from nothing going up to 200. The extensions can be anywhere from 50 to 500. Graphics and brand collateral can be $10,000 to $18,000. Your domain's gonna cost you $10 to $500. Hosting's gonna be roughly $10 a month. If you need SEO help that's can cost you another 60 to 80 grand a year. Maintenance can be 80 to 125 an hour. Not to mention if you buy the support package I'm showing 30 to 40 grand a year here. You can go 10, 20 grand, but it's a lot of money. The next one I wanna talk about is GoDaddy. Now GoDaddy is really simple and easy to set up and it's cheap. But the problem is it's not designed for e-commerce. So if you're gonna be doing any type of e-commerce that you think you're gonna scale on down the road GoDaddy's just not the way to go. Now GoDaddy's fine if you just wanna buy a domain and there's nothing wrong with buying your domain there. You can buy it in any number of places. They're good for that, they have good support but it's just not a place you wanna build your e-commerce store. Next one up is Wix, W-I-X, and you do see Wix advertised a whole lot and it's a great place to really just build a website. If you want a pretty website maybe you're a law office or maybe you're a restaurant or maybe you're a plumbing company and you wanna build a quick website Wix is a great place to do it but as far as actually selling products and doing e-commerce it's just not designed for that. Now there's other alternatives to doing this too. In the next three I'm gonna kinda lump together but those are Amazon, eBay and Etsy. Now you can sell on any of those platforms and they only have their pros and cons. I guess the biggest pro is that they're gonna supply traffic for you. They already have people coming to the site so you don't have to drive any traffic whatsoever. All you have to do is put your products there. It's also super easy to get started. I mean you're not building a website, the site is already there. All you're doing is listing your products on their website. So if you wanna get started you could literally in 10 minutes start putting your products on one of these sites and start getting traffic and start selling. Now the cons, the biggest con I think is that they own the customer. You don't actually own this customer. When they go to Amazon, they go to eBay, they go to Etsy, they actually own that customer and you can't really build your customer list or a marketing list. And the next thing I wanna tell you is that they have super high fees. So you're gonna pay fees on these sites, pretty high fees. So if you've got a small profit margin it's just not gonna work out for you. The other thing is, if you do anything wrong, you violate any other rules and even unknowingly they can kick you off the site, they can put you out of business instantly. So if you build up your entire business on one of these sites you could lose your entire business overnight. And the last thing I would tell you is that they don't allow you to contact customers. They don't want you to contact customers. If you try to contact customers outside of their platform, that is a violation in itself and they can actually kick you off the platform. So bottom line is you can get set up on one of those platforms, Amazon, eBay, Etsy and you can start selling the problem is they're gonna give you all this traffic but they can also take all that traffic away immediately too. So you don't really have control of your business. I wouldn't suggest that being your only way to do stuff. You could still have another website. You could still build your website someplace else and list your products on Amazon, eBay and Etsy. That's not a problem. Now the last one I wanna add is Cartra. I freaking love Cartra. Cartra is really not an e-commerce site. It's a whole bunch of things rolled into one but it's a great place to make your sales pages, your sales funnels, membership sites, all those good things. And you can have that along with a website someplace else like a WordPress website or a Shopify store. But I highly recommend Cartra because it does so much for you. It's inexpensive. I'll also put a link in the description below so you can go ahead and click on that. There's a video you can go watch absolutely free and if you decide to get Cartra, my link will provide you with a $1 trial on Cartra. Now I gotta tell you, a lot of these sites were not even available when I got started in 2009. Cartra wasn't around. I don't think Shopify was around. So what I would have used then and what I use now are two different, entirely different things. So there you have it. I guess my top picks are gonna be Shopify which I talked about in the beginning. I'll put a link down there to Shopify so you can get your free trial on that. I also recommend Cartra. I think that's really good. If you've got a huge e-commerce business already and you need some really high level stuff, Magento is great. And I will tell you all of these things I use personally so I can recommend them in some of the other ones I have used in the past. So that's my recommendation on this video. What have you tried? I mean, what have you done with your website? I want you to put your comments down there. Let me know what you've tried, what platforms you know, you've tried to sell on. If you have questions about any of this, feel free to put those questions down there too. I'll be happy to answer them. Don't forget, I have a $97 e-commerce course. You can get absolutely free. I'll put a link in the description down there. Don't forget, if you haven't done so, to subscribe. Become part of the Fisher family by what? Bringing the bell, turn in on your bell notifications. If you do that, I can notify you every single time I do a video. You won't have to search and you won't miss out on anything. Thank you so much for watching this video and I'll see you in the next one. Hey, thanks for watching my video. Don't forget to subscribe to my channel and click that little bell right there so you can be notified every time I do a new video. Also, click on one of those videos there. Keep watching on my channel.