There are many, and I mean MANY, shopping cart solutions out there, but three very popular web-based solutions (not self-hosted) that I’ve experimented with: Shopify, BigCommerce and Volusion. I can honestly tell you that all three solutions seem like great, affordable and dependable shopping cart services. All three companies exemplified outstanding sales and support assistance during trials, and all three seemed extremely easy to get started with. In our bout, Shopify vs. Volusion vs. BigCommerce, we focus more on key differences to help you choose which e-commerce solution is right for your company.

Pricing

I like to dig into pricing plans before getting too involved with options. It’s the first thing I look at when considering any shopping cart provider. All three companies offer four to six plans to meet almost any budget and website capacity. It’s hard to say which one is cheapest so be sure to study the plans carefully, but the prices only vary slightly. Try to avoid getting to bogged down comparing the monthly plan costs since the prices are so close.

Out of the three, a huge strike goes against Shopify since the company charges a 1% transaction fee from all revenue. New businesses may consider the fee minimal, but existing online businesses considering moving from another platform may gasp.

Pricing Winner: BigCommerce. I found that BigCommerce’s main business plan seemed the most economical.

Ease of Use

I was impressed with all three companies concerning ease of use, but the company that shined the most was Shopify. If you’ve already established a merchant account and shipping account, then it will be beyond easy to set up on Shopify. Not to mention, they do a wonderful job fine-tuning each page and keeping things ridiculously easy and aesthetically pleasing. Shopify accomplishes this by sacrificing insignificant features common to Volusion and BigCommerce. The Shopify experience still offers a rich and plentiful feature set that should accommodate almost any need.

Ease of Use Winner: Shopify.

Customization

All three companies allow template customization (HTML and CSS knowledge required) so feel free to let your inner control freak go wild. However, Shopify gives more control over the appearance of the actual shopping cart, which I found nice. I didn’t like Volusion’s cart process and ugly buttons and it was annoying realizing I could do nothing about it. If you are only worried about editing the template itself (header, footer etc.) then any of the three will be fine; however BigCommerce and Shopify offer a tad more control. The only drawback for this is the complexity of the process and understanding where you need to go to make the edits since documentation is a bit weak.

Customization Winner: Shopify

Administration Control Panel

If you’re stuck on design aesthetics, there is no way you’re going to like BigCommerce’s backend control panel since it’s ugly. I figured this would be the case just based on BigCommerce’s website versus Shopify’s and Volusion’s. Inputting products and such didn’t seem any more complex (despite the high amount of features BigCommerce offers), yet it does seem somewhat clunky due to the design. Shopify and Volusion both focused on design and appearance of the control panel, and it’s a shame to hold aesthetics against a company when functionality trumps design in any CP, but nevertheless design is still hard for me to ignore.

Administration Control Panel Winner: Shopify. The design of their admin control panel is clean, simple and elegant. Volusion is a close second. Sometime last year, Volusion upgraded their control panel and it is much better than what it used to be.

Mobile

I absolutely hated Shopify’s ONE free template for mobile commerce. They really need to step it up a bit. I did not test BigCommerce or Volusion’s mobile versions, but they both seem to offer mediocre solutions especially in an age where smartphones are outselling PC’s. All three companies allow you to briefly see their mobile solution in action. None of them are excellent, but they’ll get better.

Mobile Winner: nobody

Marketing

All three shopping cart systems offer a number of marketing channels including SEO, YouTube, E-bay, automated Twitter posts, Facebook stores, email marketing and more. BigCommerce captured my attention with an Ebay module. Shopify is the only company to offer an app store and an API which attracts many 3rd party applications to cooperate with it (like MailChimp).

Marketing Winners: All three. They each offer well-rounded marketing tools and SEO. Volusion does the best job demonstrating what they offer.

A few notes…

I feel like Volusion is getting a bad rap with this article. Although they don’t seem to be the BEST at any of the aforementioned items I addressed, they offer a well-rounded commerce package which I ended up experimenting with first since the service seems so well put together.

Big Commerce offers a ton of features and add-ons, but aesthetically they’re lacking. However, they offer tons of control over your website at the cheapest monthly prices.

I would consider Shopify the Apple of e-commerce solutions. Everything is minimal and well designed, but they take 1% of your gross revenue and that isn’t cool.

Final thoughts

Of course, these are not the only e-commerce solutions out there, but I do consider them “The Big 3″ of mainstream e-commerce websites (not including self-hosted solutions). I highly recommend experimenting with all three shopping cart platforms before committing to one.