The Internet has revolutionized retail and it no longer takes big investments to sell products, ideas or digital downloads to buyers. Running your own eCommerce store is fun to do and also has the potential to get you great funds. If you're new to the industry, you can easily combine it with a day job.

With various online tools making website development easier like never before, you'll still need to pick the right infrastructure to get your business up and running successfully. You need a great website for eCommerce, and you'll need to choose an amazing platform from a variety of options available, Shopify, Volusion, Big Commerce, 3d Cart, and Magento with eCommerce extensions.

There are so many to consider; each one claiming to be the best, each one with different benefits. I bring to you some of the best platforms that i think an eCommerce business should be using. Here they are in no particular order.

 1. Shopify

The first eCommerce platform I want to talk about is Shopify. Of course, i am being a little biased here because it's the fastest becoming favorite to every start-up online retail store. The user interface of the admin panel is simply amazing.

Shopify has plenty to offer for small businesses; ease of use is undoubtedly the biggest selling point. It's designed for business owners would simply want to set up and go without fussing around.   Although it has many limitations, there aren’t many things people aren't able to accomplish with it.

It’s one of the more powerful all-in-one and the most popular ecommerce platforms out there as Shopify reports that they have over 100,000 stores using their platform.

The biggest beauty of Shopify, whey makes it scalable for any type of business, is their app store that offers over a 1,000 helpful apps both free and paid. With Shopify, you can upload unlimited products with easy control over variants and overall inventory.

 2. Magento

Magento is an extremely elastic eCommerce platform that can be used as-is out of the box, or you can change everything from how your store functions to looks. It can fit all the needs of small, medium and large businesses, making it the most scalable platform on the list. Part of its popularity lies in eCommerce extensions that are freely available and easy-to-use features. For example, if you'd like to increase conversion and on your store, you can go for the top magento extensions that help you provide a better shopping experience to buyers.

Magento has great features that give you complete control over your online store. Just like WordPress has many plug-ins, Magento extensions allow website owners to add functionality to their sites without any coding knowledge. If you are new to the industry and want to make your site even more productive, top Magento extensions is your cup of tea as they offer extra features to you as far as the functionality of the CMS is concerned.

 3.Squarespace

This fully loaded ecommerce platform makes this list because it's affordable and can actually help you sell as a small business. With countless templates available on the store, one can choose beautiful layouts without having to know a stitch of code. You have a full control of your inventory management, making it easy to offer different variants of the same products. This is the best suitable platform for the eCommerce business that you can run from your living room, while making your store look great.

Although it won't offer you a lot of capabilities in SEO, but it’s a great platform for small retailers to professionals wanting to sell their services.

4.Drupal Commerce

Without a doubt, Drupal Commerce is one of the most actionable and powerful platform, having built within an entire content management system (CMS). This allows the administrator to easily customize the workflow, making it an ideal for marketers who don’t necessarily have a great deal of expertise working in the ecommerce platforms.

The best thing about Drupal Commerce is that it's highly modular and configurable, which means that it’s built to scale. But, one drawback about the platform is that it isn't an option for the do-it-yourself entrepreneurs. One need to be fully equipped with the technical ins and outs of the platform or must hire an expert who can help you set up workflows and the overall configuration of how you want your commerce platform to function.

The Winner

Out of the four hosted e-commerce platforms, Magento is without a doubt the best one. Its popularity can be put down to a number of factors, not least its near-limitless customizability, sizeable collection of features,  eCommerce extensions and invaluable versatility.

Above all, Magento is so powerful that it requires dedicated web servers, but if you can account for this, the possibilities are endless.