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How to Start an Online E-commerce Website Using 5 Top-Rated Tools in 2025

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Starting an online e-commerce website can be a transformative step for entrepreneurs and businesses looking to expand their reach in the digital marketplace. This comprehensive guide will walk you through the process of launching an e-commerce website using five top-rated tools. Each platform has unique features tailored to different business needs, so understanding their strengths will help you make an informed decision.

Planning Your E-commerce Business

Before diving into the technical aspects, it’s essential to outline a strategic plan:

  • Identify Your Niche: Determine the products or services you’ll offer.
  • Market Research: Analyze competitors and understand your target audience.
  • Business Model: Decide whether you’ll operate as a B2C, B2B, dropshipping, or subscription-based business.

Once you have a plan, it’s time to choose the right platform to bring your online store to life.

1. Using Shopify to Launch Your Online Store

Shopify is a user-friendly, all-in-one e-commerce platform for beginners and growing businesses. Its pocket-friendly pricing and free period creates an ideal environment for startup businesses.

Shopify

Key Features:
  • Drag-and-drop store builder
  • Over 70 professional themes
  • Integrated payment gateways
  • Robust analytics and marketing tools
Step-by-Step Guide:
  • Sign Up: Visit Shopify.com and start a free trial.
  • Choose a Theme: Select a theme that aligns with your brand.
  • Customize Your Store: Use the drag-and-drop editor to modify layouts, add images, and tweak fonts / colors.
  • Add Products: Input product descriptions, prices, images, and inventory details.
  • Set Up Payment & Shipping: Configure payment gateways (e.g., Shopify Payments, PayPal) and shipping rates.
  • Launch: Preview your store, test transactions, and go live!
Pros:
  • Easy to use with no technical skills required
  • 24/7 customer support
Cons:
  • Monthly fees can add up
  • Limited customization compared to open-source platforms

2. Building an E-commerce Site with WooCommerce

WooCommerce is a free, open-source plugin for WordPress, perfect for those familiar with WordPress.

Key Features:
  • Seamless WordPress integration
  • Extensive plugin and theme support
  • Flexible and customizable
Step-by-Step Guide:
  • Set Up WordPress: Purchase hosting (e.g., Bluehost), install WordPress.
  • Install WooCommerce: Go to your WordPress dashboard, click “Plugins,” then “Add New,” and search for WooCommerce.
  • Configure Settings: Set up currency, payment methods (Stripe, PayPal), and shipping zones.
  • Add Products: Create product listings with detailed descriptions and high-quality images.
  • Choose a Theme: Pick a WooCommerce-compatible theme for a professional look.
  • Launch: Test all functionalities before going live.
Pros:
  • Highly customizable
  • No ongoing subscription fees
Cons:
  • Requires more technical knowledge
  • Potential costs for premium plugins and themes

3. Creating an Online Store with OpenCart

OpenCart is an open-source e-commerce platform suitable for developers and businesses seeking a customizable solution.

Key Features:
  • Multi-store management
  • Broad extension marketplace
  • Support for multiple languages and currencies
Step-by-Step Guide:
  • Choose a Hosting Provider: Opt for OpenCart-optimized hosting.
  • Install OpenCart: Use one-click installation via your hosting control panel or install manually.
  • Configure Your Store: Set up your store’s details, payment options, and shipping methods.
  • Add Products: Upload product details, images, and pricing.
  • Install Extensions: Enhance functionality with extensions from the OpenCart marketplace.
  • Launch: Thoroughly test your store before making it public.
Pros:
  • Free to use
  • Lightweight and fast
Cons:
  • Limited scalability for large businesses
  • Requires technical expertise for customization

4. Leveraging Magento for a Scalable E-commerce Website

Magento (Adobe Commerce) is a powerful, open-source platform favored by large enterprises and tech-savvy entrepreneurs.

Key Features:
  • Advanced SEO capabilities
  • High scalability and performance
  • Robust security features
Step-by-Step Guide:
  • Select Hosting: Magento requires robust hosting due to its resource-intensive nature.
  • Install Magento: Download from Magento’s official website and install on your server.
  • Configure the Store: Customize tax settings, shipping options, and payment gateways.
  • Design Your Store: Choose from Magento themes or create custom designs.
  • Add Products: Input detailed product information with SEO-friendly descriptions.
  • Launch: Perform extensive testing, especially for performance and security.
Pros:
  • Highly customizable
  • Ideal for large-scale businesses
Cons:
  • Steep learning curve
  • High development and maintenance costs

5. Starting an E-commerce Site with BigCommerce

BigCommerce is a hosted SaaS platform designed for fast-growing businesses.

Key Features:
  • No transaction fees
  • Strong SEO performance
  • Multi-channel selling (Amazon, eBay, social media)
Step-by-Step Guide:
  • Sign Up: Start a free trial on BigCommerce.com.
  • Select a Theme: Choose from responsive templates.
  • Customize Your Store: Adjust the layout, colors, and content to match your brand.
  • Add Products: Upload product images, descriptions, and pricing.
  • Configure Payment & Shipping: Set up payment processors and define shipping rules.
  • Launch: Preview, test transactions, and publish your store.
Pros:
  • Easy to use
  • Great for multi-channel sales
Cons:
  • Higher monthly costs
  • Limited design flexibility compared to open-source platforms

Key Considerations When Choosing an E-commerce Platform

  • Budget: Consider setup costs, monthly fees, and transaction charges.
  • Ease of Use: Determine if you need a beginner-friendly interface or are comfortable with coding.
  • Customization: Assess how much control you need over design and functionality.
  • Scalability: Choose a platform that can grow with your business.
  • Support: Look for robust customer support and active community forums.

Final Steps: Marketing and Growing Your E-commerce Business

After launching your website:

  • SEO Optimization: Improve visibility on search engines.
  • Social Media Marketing: Leverage platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok.
  • Email Campaigns: Build a mailing list for promotions and updates.
  • Analytics: Use tools like Google Analytics to monitor traffic and sales.
  • Continuous Improvement: Regularly update your website, optimize product listings, and adapt to customer feedback.

Conclusion

Starting an online e-commerce website is an exciting venture filled with opportunities. Whether you prefer the simplicity of Shopify, the flexibility of WooCommerce, the customization potential of OpenCart and Magento, or the robust features of BigCommerce, there’s a platform tailored to your needs. By following this guide, you’re well on your way to building a successful online business.

Its time to secure your WordPress website with HTTPS

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Over the couple of years, Google has progressively stressed the importance of HTTPS encryption for websites. It has marked certain HTTP pages as “not secure” if they contain data input fields for things such as passwords, personal details or credit card information.

Domain name without HTTPS status can also influence a website’s search engine ranking. With the release of Google Chrome 68, Google has announced that all HTTP pages will be marked as “not secure” in an effort to phase out the older, less secure web protocol.

As this helped to make the internet a safer place, but it has also created some issues for site owners who have not encrypted their domain yet with HTTPS. Google Chrome handles the majority of browser traffic worldwide, and websites that show up as “not secure” face a probably huge dip in traffic.


Check your encryption Status

To check if your site is already HTTPS-encrypted, visit your domain using “https://” in the URL. If you see a green padlock next to the “https://” your site is encrypting its traffic and you are safe to go:

If you see something else, you have to take action before Chrome 68 is released. Because it may lead to some of the negative results e.g might low your website ranking. The best thing is that securing your site with HTTPS is a easy process. HTTPS encryption is done through SSL (Server Security Layer) certificate, which helps authenticate websites and ensures that hackers cannot see or intercept data of your users who share on your website.

To add https encryption with SSL certification to a WordPress website, site owners need to purchase an SSL certificate. Once the certification has been purchased, it will need to be installed on the server where your website is hosted.

With SSL certification and switching over to HTTPS, you will not only securing yourself on the web but also protecting your potential users/customers from crucial information hacks.

[su_button url=”https://www.riacube.us/contact” style=”flat” background=”#f3bc7f” size=”5″]Purchase SSL[/su_button]

Need help? Give us a call: +91 (980) 3069 555, +91 (931) 7729 555

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Https doesn’t means 100% Security

SSL certification is one of the component in web security. While adding HTTPS encryption to your website is highly recommended. It will benefit you and your business users and customers, it is not a singular security solution.

Each and every website is unique itself and requires different levels of security—HTTPS encryption is just one part of that security layer. However, adding this layer of security will go a long way towards keeping malicious users away from your website and the data of your vendors/users entrust you with.

Conclusion

Google’s HTTPS encryption is an effort to make the web services safe for every internet user. Google helping users to understand that HTTP is not secure, and the information shared over HTTP connections can be altered by malicious users over the internet. Also it is raising awareness of the security risks that exist in today’s technology world of cybersecurity.

With SSL certification and switching over to HTTPS, the website owners not only securing themselves on the web but also protecting their users/customers from crucial information hacks. By acquiring SSL certification, website owners enable themselves to join a continuously growing community of safe web users over the internet.

Still have questions about HTTPS encryption and SSL certification? Give us Call: +91 (980) 3069 555, +91 (931) 7729 555

Why and How My Website Got Hacked?

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Have you thought, why anybody will hack your business website? It looks very exciting in movies, but in actual practice its all about envision human interests, taking an opportunity, and veritable perseverance.

Learn how hackers think, and how you can protect your business website.

WordPress is the Market Leader

Certainly, WordPress is the most popular content management system (CMS) for designing websites. It covers an impressive 59% of the CMS market share. This popularity also leads to a prime targeted platform for Hackers and other malicious users. Commonality, we think that why anyone will hack my website? I have nothing valuable for anyone on my website. It is the wrong perception to approach the web with.

A wretched statistic shows that there are roughly 25% users globally who are well informed and able to handle medium-to-high difficulty tasks. In this article, we go through some of the common practices in which a website can be compromised, some reasons why websites get hacked and what users can do to protect themselves.

How Are Websites Hacked?

When we hear the word “hacker”, the most common image that comes in our mind is
a black hooded man sitting in front of dark screen running lines of code. In fact, the most common hacks are quite simple in nature. Not all types of hacking stem from code either. Social hacking – attacks are still some of the most threatening ones.

According to Wordfence (WP security plugin) monthly security reports, the majority (91%) of attacks are actually brute force attacks.

A brute force attack is a very simple concept. Just try to login someone’s website by putting /wp-admin at the end of the url, try to login with different combinations of usernames and passwords. In this way you are essentially commencing a brute force attack. Now imagine if you had access and a script that automatically tries to log in using different combinations of usernames and passwords. There is a high chance for insecure accounts to be cracked this way.


There are other ways also that Hackers use for their malware injections. As we know WordPress themes use a number of plugins to function properly. Sometimes because of poor code quality and innovations in the field of hacking – exploits can be found by the hackers. Hopefully, a white hat hacker, was the one who found the exploit in the theme plugin files. In any case, after exploits are known, they are added to vulnerability lists which are easily accessible over the internet on the websites. There are also malware attacks that are aimed directly on the server. It is a very complicated and broad term of hacking.

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Why Are Websites Hacked?

Now We come to know that how websites can be hacked, but the question is why it was hacked? And it still remains unanswered. There are so many reasons that that why hackers target your website with malware injections and viruses. The most complicated form is Advertising: there are many ways to ad injection attacks, as they are known.

Another common source of hacking one’s business website can be to simply deface it as a part of hacktivism. These causes vary as per the groups who are carrying these websites. Unfortunately, all hacks are not visible and some of them can be quite difficult to track. If you are using wordpress as shopping portal then you might save your client’s details like credit card details or any personal information. This information is quite valuable for hackers and they will not make their presence known so that they can keep exploiting this information from the website.

How Can I Protect My Site?

There are few basic steps that you can take as a protective user to protect your business website. Here is a simple security checklist you can use:

    • Keep your passwords secure: always use a strong password as for admin levels and force user as well for strong passwords. For this you can use iThemes security plugin. Do not repeat your password on multiple sites. Update your website passwords every two months.

    • Never use admin or publicly available emails for your admin account: always use a different username for your website. Never use ‘admin’ as your username.

    • Update your website time to time: As we know, that recognised exploits are made public. If you are using outdated versions of plugins or themes then you are might be at risk.

      • [su_quote cite=”GET UPDATE” url=”https://www.riacube.us/wordpress-update/”]We highly recommend you to Update your WordPress Version![/su_quote]

      Need Help? Call Us: +91-(980) 3069 555, +91-(931) 7729 555

    • Use a reputed web hosting company: hosting services provided by an non reputed company may lead your website being hacked again and again because another website on the same server was compromised.

    • Only grant access to users you can trust: don’t give access of your website to everyone or who you don’t fully trust. Not everyone needs to be an admin.

    • Use a security plugin: similar to antivirus programs, there are security plugins for WordPress websites. iThemes security and Wordfence are popular security plugins for wordPress.

    Stay safe, stay informed!

IMP: WordPress Brute-Force login attack proactive mitigation.

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sql-injection-wordpressIn an ongoing effort to make you aware of security and performance concerns, we wanted to inform you of an ongoing event.

There is a brute-force login attack targeted at websites with WordPress. Due to the nature of the attack, memory consumption on targeted servers has increased. In some cases this has resulted in degradation of performance, and unresponsive servers. This is due to a high volume of http requests which can cause some servers to start swapping memory to disk, and possibly run out of memory. The most impacted servers tend to be those with limited memory resources, especially those with 1GB of RAM or less.

Our monitoring team has been proactively restoring service to managed servers which have been affected. We have taken proactive steps to reduce the impact of this event. We have tested a new ModSecurity rule, and deployed it via our ServerSecure service to customer servers. This new rule will block http requests to the WordPress login page after 10 failed login attempts. The attacking IP address will then be blocked for 5 minutes.

WordPress DDOS Attack & How to Login on WordPress Site

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ddos-attackThis information concerns you if your have bought Linux Hosting from us and especially if you are a WordPress developer or administrator of its installation.

Since last week there has been a Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) Attack on WordPress Installations throughout the Internet.

Since yesterday this attack has increased in its severity leading to service disruptions of many hosting providers including ours. This DDOS involves 90000+ IP’s and has impacted even major web hosting companies.

More details of this DDOS attack are mentioned at :

http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/04/huge-attack-on-wordpress-sites-could-spawn-never-before-seen-super-botnet/

http://thenextweb.com/insider/2013/04/13/brute-force-attacks-on-wordpress-continue-as-cloudflare-fends-off-60m-requests-in-1-hour/

http://krebsonsecurity.com/2013/04/brute-force-attacks-build-wordpress-botnet/

You can learn more about DDOS at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denial-of-service_attack

At RiAcube we have taken several steps to mitigate these attacks. One of the step is that we have dis-allowed direct access to wp-login.php. Instead please point the browser to wp-login-rn.php . Directly accessing wp-login.php may lead to blockage of your IP in certain scenarios.

Also please refer to https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/better-wp-security/ to learn about how to ensure better security for your WordPress setup

For further details/clarification, please call us at (+91) 980 306 9555, (+1) 571 229 5559 or email us at [email protected] . In-case your IP has been blocked, please visit http://whatismyip.com and email us your IP so that we can un-block it.

WordPress DDOS Attack – How to Logout

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This information is in continuation of our previous post ‘WordPress DDOS Attack and How to Login‘. This concerns you only if your have bought Linux Hosting from us and you are a WordPress developer or administrator of its installation.

To properly Logout after you have logged in via wp-login-rn.php, you have to put wp-login-rn.php instead of wp-login.php in the browser’s address bar when Log out is clicked. Please press the enter key after making change in the address bar.

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