What Features Should an Ecommerce Platform Include?

Applies to Cmsmart Product Designer (NBDesigner) 2.17.0 · Updated October 2026. A buyer's checklist for choosing an ecommerce platform: what to check, what it costs each year and what it takes to leave.

In short

  • Outcome: pick a platform by checking who owns the store and its data, which features are built in versus add-ons, the real yearly cost and the effort to exit, not by comparing feature lists alone.
  • How it works: score each platform against one checklist (ownership, features, cost, exit), then test the finalists on a free trial with your own catalogue before you commit.
  • What it takes: a short list of must-have features, 30-60 minutes to price the yearly cost formula, and a trial store to prove it works for your products.

What features should an ecommerce platform include, and what do they cost you?

Beyond the sticker price, an ecommerce platform costs you the plan fee, every add-on it doesn't include, hosting, payment processing fees and the staff hours needed to run it. Cmsmart bills one annual fee, with hosting and add-ons stated up front, so the formula below has fewer hidden rows.

Most owners compare platforms on price alone and then discover the real cost later:

  • A free or cheap core plan that needs five paid add-ons to reach checkout parity.
  • Manual re-pricing every time a supplier changes a material cost, because the platform has no price-matrix or quantity-break logic.
  • Developer hours billed by the hour for changes a built-in setting would have handled.
  • An exit bill nobody priced until the day they tried to leave: export fees, rebuild hours, lost SEO rankings.

Work it out with your own numbers before you sign anything:

FormulaWhat goes in it
Yearly cost of ownershipPlan fee + add-ons + hosting + payment processing fees + developer hours
Cost to exitMigration hours × your hourly rate (or a migration quote)

A data protection law such as GDPR (2018, still the reference standard for EU customer data) also puts a cost on the wrong platform: if customer data sits in a system you cannot export cleanly, a subject-access or deletion request becomes expensive to honor.

What would a modern ecommerce platform look like for your store?

A platform that fits looks ordinary from the outside: a fast catalogue, a checkout that does not lose carts and an admin screen where your team can price, pack and ship without calling a developer. Cmsmart aims for that ordinary reliability on top of WooCommerce, where the day-to-day runs without custom code.

Example scenario: A small home-goods store owner opens the admin each morning. Overnight orders are already listed with their options and files attached, the catalogue page shows which products are live, and the owner changes one price without touching code. No step needed a developer; the platform did the routine work so the owner could spend the morning on sourcing and marketing instead.

How does Cmsmart answer the key features of an ecommerce platform checklist?

Cmsmart Ecommerce runs on WooCommerce and groups the key features of an ecommerce platform into five building blocks: catalogue and options, checkout and payments, order management, mobile layout and data ownership. Each block ships in the plugin today; anything beyond it is scoped as custom development.

Use this as your working checklist. For each row, check what the platform you are evaluating actually ships, not what its marketing page implies:

Checklist itemTypical manual or bare-bones approachCmsmart on WooCommerce
Catalogue and product optionsOne SKU per variant, or a spreadsheet of combinations kept outside the storeProduct designer and option builder with price rules per choice, managed from Cmsmart > Printing Options
Cart and checkoutGeneric checkout with no record of the buyer's chosen options or uploaded filesCart line carries the design or file through to WooCommerce checkout, order and reorder
PaymentsA single gateway, added by hand, with no stated security standardWooCommerce payment gateways under PCI DSS-compliant processors
Order managementOrders tracked in email or a spreadsheetCmsmart > Orders list with production status, filters and CSV export
Mobile layoutA desktop layout that is merely resized, slow on a phone connectionResponsive product and checkout pages; see Core Web Vitals for how speed is measured
Data ownership and exportProducts, orders and customers locked inside a closed, hosted systemWordPress and WooCommerce database you hold on your own hosting
Product page example answering what features should an ecommerce platform include, with catalogue, price and options together
A product page on Cmsmart's own demo store: catalogue, price and a design option together on one page.

Catalogue management is one of the checklist rows worth testing yourself rather than taking on trust.

Admin product manager screen listing products enabled for online design, with status and template counts
Cmsmart's product manager: every design-enabled product, its status and its templates in one list.
Order management screen showing production status, payment status and totals for a list of print and design orders
Order management built in: status, payment and totals without a separate tool.
Mobile view of an ecommerce product page with the add-to-cart button reachable with one thumb
The same product page on a 390px mobile viewport.

Cmsmart insight: The checklist row that gets skipped most often is data ownership. Teams compare price and features, sign up, and only ask "can we export everything?" the day they want to switch. Ask it on day one instead: a platform you cannot export cleanly is not free, it is a cost you have postponed.

What's the business value of getting ecommerce platform features right?

The right platform turns features into fewer support emails, fewer abandoned carts and fewer hours spent on manual pricing. Cmsmart's answer is to put option pricing, order status and mobile checkout in the box, so the business value shows up as time saved rather than a promised percentage.

BenefitHow it shows up in your businessKPI to track
Fewer abandoned cartsBuyers see the final price and their chosen options before checkout, so fewer carts are abandoned over a pricing surpriseCart abandonment rate
Less manual pricingPrice rules run automatically instead of staff calculating each custom order by handStaff hours per order
Faster order handlingOrders, options and files sit in one admin screen instead of email threadsTime from order to production
Lower exit riskStore, data and customer list stay on infrastructure you controlHours estimated to migrate

Rough cost-per-order worksheet: (plan fee + add-ons + hosting + payment fees for the year) ÷ orders placed in the year = cost per order. Run it once for your current setup and once for a platform you are evaluating, using your own order volume and fees, before you compare headline prices.

What should a small business look for in an ecommerce platform?

A small business ecommerce platform rarely needs every feature on a long list. Prioritize, in order: a catalogue you can edit without a developer, a checkout that works on mobile, order status your team can see at a glance, and a way to export your data if you outgrow the plan. Everything past that — multi-vendor, ERP sync, private B2B stores — can wait until the order volume justifies it.

How do you choose a low-cost ecommerce platform?

Judge a low cost ecommerce platform by the yearly-cost formula above, not by the plan fee alone: a cheap plan with five paid add-ons can cost more than an annual plan that includes them. Cmsmart's plans are billed once a year, and every plan opens with a free 30-day trial, so you can price your own catalogue before paying anything. See the current plans on the pricing page.

Cmsmart insight: In our project work, the stores that regret a platform choice almost never regret the features. They regret picking the cheapest plan on paper, then paying for the add-ons that plan was missing. Price the full stack once, not the headline number.

How do you set up a 30-day trial to compare ecommerce platforms?

Set up a trial on each finalist platform, load one real product with your actual options, and run it through checkout before you decide. Try Cmsmart free for 30 days to test the catalogue, pricing and checkout on your own products, with no commitment until the trial ends.

Five steps to compare platforms fairly:

  1. List the features your catalogue and checkout actually need: custom options, file uploads, B2B accounts, multi-currency.
  2. Price the yearly cost of ownership for each finalist with the formula above, using your own order volume.
  3. Check who owns the store and the data, and what it would cost to leave in year two.
  4. Install or sign up for a trial and build one real product end to end, including checkout.
  5. Decide, migrate or launch, and set a date in twelve months to run the checklist again.

What a 30-day trial should prove before you pay for anything:

  1. Your most complex product can be set up without a developer.
  2. Checkout completes on a phone, not just a desktop browser.
  3. An order arrives in the admin with every option and file attached.
  4. You can export the catalogue and orders you just created.
WordPress plugins screen showing the Cmsmart plugin active, its version number and that it requires WooCommerce
Cmsmart installs as a WordPress plugin on top of WooCommerce, so your trial runs on the same stack you would keep.

Cmsmart plans are billed annually by PayPal, with automatic renewal you can cancel before the next billing date; see the pricing page for the current terms and what each plan does not include (your domain, hosting beyond the included months, AI tokens beyond the yearly allowance, paid third-party plugins and custom work, which are quoted separately).

What's the best alternative to a custom-coded website — and what can Cmsmart build on top?

A platform plus plugins is the practical alternative to a custom coded website for most SMEs: Cmsmart runs on WooCommerce, an open-source base, so you get the built-in checklist items above without paying to build them from scratch. When your business needs something the platform does not ship, Cmsmart builds it as custom development on the same store.

A fully custom-coded site gives you unlimited flexibility and an unlimited maintenance bill: every security patch, payment-gateway update and browser quirk is now your team's job. A platform such as WooCommerce with Cmsmart on top keeps the maintained core (checkout, catalogue, security updates) outside your budget line, and reserves custom work for the parts that are actually unique to your business:

  • A private, login-only store for one business client, with its own prices and branding.
  • Customer-group or contract pricing instead of one public price list.
  • Connecting the store to an ERP, MIS or a supplier's price file.
  • A print-ready PDF pipeline tuned to one printer's exact specification.

None of these four is in the core plugin today; each is scoped and quoted as custom development once we understand your catalogue and your production process. Custom work follows the same ecommerce project delivery model on every engagement: discovery, solution design, build sprints, QA and launch, then ongoing support.

Get a store-setup quote

Why work with Cmsmart on your ecommerce platform decision?

Cmsmart has run WooCommerce and web-to-print projects since 2012, as a Netbase JSC division, with more than 6,300 client projects and 1,800+ live stores. That history is why the checklist above is built from what we have seen go wrong, not from a features page.

In numbers: 6,300+ client projects and 4,600+ projects delivered since 2012, 1,800+ live stores running today, across 80+ countries, rated 4.2 on Trustpilot (404 reviews). See the work behind those numbers in our ecommerce project delivery model, browse the Cmsmart Ecommerce product pages to see each module, or read the ecommerce platforms hub for more comparisons like this one, including the features a store's shoppers actually notice and a look at open-source and free platform options.

Frequently asked questions

Which features does every ecommerce platform need?

A catalogue with options, a cart and checkout, payment processing, order management, a mobile-friendly layout and a way to export your data. Treat anything beyond that list as a bonus for your specific business, not a requirement for every store.

How is Cmsmart billed?

Annually, by PayPal, with automatic renewal you can cancel before the next billing date. Every plan starts with a free 30-day trial, so you can test the catalogue and checkout before you pay. See the pricing page for the current plans and what is billed separately.

Can I move to another platform later?

Yes. Because the store runs on WooCommerce on your own hosting, you hold the product data, orders and customer list. Moving platforms is still work, so we offer it as a quoted migration service that starts with a free assessment of what would move and what would need rebuilding.

What are modern ecommerce platform features to look for?

Beyond the basics: online product personalization, AI image tools such as background removal and upscaling, automatic print-ready file generation for physical products, and B2B features such as quotes and reorder. One named example: Cmsmart's print-ready PDF that matches the order, shipped since version 2.17, renders the same page size the buyer actually chose instead of a generic template size, so production does not have to rebuild the file. Check each feature against the plugin's current feature list rather than a general trend article, since platforms differ widely on what ships versus what is custom work.

How do you choose a low-cost ecommerce platform?

Run the yearly-cost-of-ownership formula for each finalist, including add-ons, hosting and payment fees, rather than comparing plan prices alone. Cmsmart bills one annual fee with a free 30-day trial; see the pricing page for current plans before you compare.