Best E-Commerce Platform For Specific Needs

[MMatt]

I am building a niche e-commerce store which has maybe ten small-mid sized companies already in the industry. I plan to differentiate through aggressive social media marketing, engaging content (giveaways, contests, informational blog), exceeding customer expectations, have a much better looking and easier to use site, and gain as much of the pool of customers as I can. These websites are mostly owned by people on a selfish premise of doing what they like, therefore are not marketing their brand to potential customers as much as they could.

With that being said, I need the best platform to cater to a few specific needs. Firstly, I have an informational blog I am driving traffic to, and attempting to start a following with before even opening the store. It is hosted with blogger. Is there a platform that I can attach this blog to for seo purposes? I know volusion does not have this feature last time I tried.

I need a very professional looking site that stands out from the crowd. Can any of the e-commerce platforms stand out from the rest using only a free template? I'm no web designer, but the competition's sites look very outdated and some are hard to navigate.

I also need a very effective search engine. With the competitors' sites, you search a product term and often the results are not even related. Is this something I would have to fix with my own tweaking, or is there software that will have a superior search engine from the start?

I have tried using bigcommerce and at the time could not get my dns setting to configure and they did not assist me. I then switched to volusion. They were ok, but the site looked awfully generic using one of their free templates and as stated, I could not use a blog for traffic.

Thanks for any advice.

 

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[DeletedUser2]

dont use free templates

use the paid ones. they are cheap enough

woothemes,
forrest themes
are 2.

you can put a wordpress them for your blog, and integrate it with a Ecommerce theme as well.



get your own domain,

www.domain.com for your ecomm store

and either blog.domain.com for your blog or domain.com/blog. either works.

as for bigcommerce, you can get some one on Odesk to set it up for you for like 20 bucks.

I bet you could even pay a couple people here to help walk you through the DNS stuff.

Z

 

[MMatt]

Ok, so paid theme is a must, and outsource if I need help building it.

As for the domain, i already own the domain to be used for the store. I was thinking www.xxxxxxxblog.com but obviously that is a completely different domain. Is blog.domain.com a sub-domain I would purchase separately or would it be integrated into the site? Also would www.domain.com/blog be setup to redirect you to blogger, or would I have to start from scratch using the provided blogging software? I already have quite a bit of content on blogger which is why i am asking.

 

[Talisman]

Can't comment on other eCommerce products - but don't use BigCommerce if you want a blog. They don't have one built in. They have instructions for setting one up as a CNAME'd subdirectory or link, but it doesn't work very well, nor look/feel integrated. Big letdown.

Subsequently, I'm building my own platform that has everything I want, instead, but that's my skill set, and there are other benefits for me.

Regardless, don't sit on a decision too long - just do your research and get something out there.

 

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[MMatt]

So volusion is out of the picture as is bigcommerce. Who does that leave for reputable e-commerce sites with blogging capabilities? Magneto, shopify?