You'll notice that we cover numerous different topics here at ecommerce-platforms.com.
Every month, we publish multiple reviews, comparisons, and tutorials that boil down complex topics and then present them in easily digestible chunks.
Most of what we do revolves around finding, analyzing, and then showing you the best tools and resources in their respective categories.
No matter if the topic is ecommerce platforms, website builders, email marketing services, payment gateways, or whatever else it might be, the process of evaluating them remains functionally the same. We hope to show you some of this process here.
This short page highlights our research methodology, how we put together reviews, comparisons, and other content for the site. You'll learn why we focus on the tools that we focus on, what drives our recommendations, and how we go about presenting them to our readers.
The “readers first” approach 🤝
We are all about honest and unbiased information that our readers can rely on and benefit from when building their online stores.
The focus on ecommerce-platform.com is to have a “readers first” mindset. Here's what that means in practice:
As we see it, the main obligation we have is towards our readers and not the companies that we cover on the site. Another way to say this would be that we work for our readers.
This may sound like something you'd find in a corporate brochure, but, for us, it's really not just an empty slogan. The thing is that “working for readers” is actually the only viable approach for the long term existence of any publication that wants to make an impact on the market.
We value the trust that our readers have put in us and the feedback we've gotten over the years. All this gives us confidence to continue and deliver more on-point content, but on the other hand, it also puts a spotlight on us and forces us to be even more responsible when recommending a solution or taking our readers through a tutorial.
The more responsibility we get, the more seriously we treat it.
What this means in practice is that we always try to put ourselves in the reader's shoes and understand what their real expectation is when searching for a particular comparison or review.
Most of the time, things are not as straightforward as just pointing out the cheapest (or most expensive), or most feature-rich solution available. We understand this and always try to examine each topic deeply enough so that the reader can be sure that whatever they read on ecommerce-platforms.com has been thought through carefully.
Over the years, we've built a number of processes and guidelines that we follow when working on any content piece.
Below is an explanation on how some of these processes work:
How we decide what to feature on the site 🤔
At the core, we believe that every tool or solution deserves an honest look and equal treatment no matter if it's a market leader or a new player that hasn't been able to build a bigger user base yet.
We love to scan the market in search for what's new and interesting, and then boil it all down for our readers.
That being said, there are so many viable solutions out there that we can't give them all enough coverage on the site. This forces us to narrow things down in a way that's, again, useful for readers first.
Here's our approach and research methodology when it comes to identifying top solutions:
Discovery
Our main process of discovering new solutions worth featuring on the site is based on a couple of elements:
- Paying attention to trends on social media and other industry websites, as well as news outlets throughout the web.
- Monitoring other publications to learn what's being covered about a given topic, tool, or range of tools.
Each tool we discover this way goes onto our initial list to then be evaluated based on the needs of users and what the expectations on the market are overall.
Evaluation and testing
There's no better way to test anything than to actually buy it and examine the thing in detail by hand. This is exactly what we do.
We maintain accounts with every one of the ecommerce platforms and other tools that we review, test, or write tutorials about.
We use those accounts to gather our own data in terms of performance or reliability of each tool.
Doing these regular tests allows us to make sure that our recommendations on ecommerce-platforms.com are as current as they can be.
Deciding what to feature
There are several factors that come into play when deciding what gets featured on the site and to what extent.
This is how we decide which tool deserves our main recommendation:
- Price to value ratio. No matter how you put it, the price we pay for things and the value we get in exchange is always closely correlated. Or, better yet, we want it to be as positively correlated as possible. We understand this and we make this one of the key factors when deciding which solution to recommend above others.
- Ease of use. Different publications treat the topic of ease of use differently. For some, it's only a factor that's vaguely relatable – reasoning that every tool becomes easy to use eventually once you spend enough time with it. For us, ease of use is a key factor to consider when looking into a solution or a process, since it has a huge impact on your initial experience with the thing.
- Reliability. This doesn't apply to everything – especially when discussing processes or writing tutorials, but for web tools, ecommerce platforms, or hosting setups, reliability is key to making sure that you're getting a good experience over a longer period of time. We test reliability by actually paying for most of those tools on a regular basis and tracking their condition over time.
- Performance. We consider how fast, how effective, and how efficient the tools that we're reviewing are. With platforms for hosting, ecommerce website builders, and other web tools, it's key that they load fast enough for the end user to be able to have a good experience.
- Features. This one is a no-brainer. If a tool or a solution doesn't offer a good-enough set of features (as compared to the competition) then it has no place on our lists.
- Last but not least, we look into help and customer service options offered by each tool or solution. With most things, you will need some assistance once in a while. For that reason, we're making sure that the tools we cover are ready to offer you help in case of any challenges.
How we write our content ✍️
Based on the research and the findings from the previous steps, we start working on putting together outlines and coming up with the first key points that we want to convey to the reader.
Our writers also have first-hand experience that we can draw from and depend on. This, we find, is an invaluable element when working on any content piece.
All of our content follows specific editorial guidelines that have been crafted over our 8+ years of experience in this market. This ensures that every article is always useful and answers the reader's most frequent questions and doubts.
On top of that, each of our writers has the freedom to investigate the topics they're working on according to their own take on them, experience, and what they think is right. We don't influence their work in this regard and don't impose any solutions on them.
Here's how working on certain content types in particular gets done:
Comparisons
The goal of each comparison is to look into the top solutions in their market or niche – the solutions that most users will consider when making their pick.
As mentioned here before, we always start working on a comparison by compiling a big number of solutions and then progressively narrowing the list down to just the top 5-10.
That way, we get a genuine outlook on what the market offers and what the customer is likely to stumble upon when searching for a solution.
We often remove some of them from our comparisons if they go above the expected pricing brackets or are missing significant features.
Once we pick the final lineup, we describe what “living with it” is like, and what you can expect using a given tool on an everyday basis.
We try to focus on the main aspects of these solutions that most people will care about and benefit from having.
Reviews
A good review should have a certain structure that ensures that the most common questions or objections are answered.
First, there's the obvious things: we look at the features, price to value ratio, ease of use, reliability, performance, help and customer service, and point out the pros and cons. But that's just the tip of the iceberg.
To make the reviews more useful to our readers, we've decided to focus on reviewing the most popular tiers / pricing plans of the products since those are the ones that the majority of people will choose. That is unless the review is about a specific tier or product variation.
Lastly, we always offer some alternative solutions to the one that's the topic of the review.
Tutorials
Our tutorials usually follow the most typical path a user has with a given tool. This makes the tutorials practical and relevant to the majority of readers.
When doing so, we always try to highlight the possible obstacles the user might have on any given step and also offer solutions to those obstacles.
Similarly to how we do things with reviews, here we also try to offer alternatives for those who don't enjoy a particular aspect of the process in the tutorial or the tool used for it.
Reasons to trust our methodology and research ⭐
The ecommerce-platforms.com website is dedicated to delivering only the most unbiased and honest research and content we possibly can.
Ever since our beginnings in 2014, we've published hundreds of articles, comparisons, reviews, and tutorials covering various aspects of using ecommerce tools and building online stores.
In our writing process, we don't influence our writers' work based on any partnerships with third-party companies, our affiliate partners, or anyone else who might have a stake in certain outcome of a comparison, review, or product walkthrough.
Ultimately, as we've highlighted here, we don't write to serve our affiliate partners or sponsors. Our obligation is to our readers first, and that's what drives the entire process from start to finish.
We know that the only way to make a splash in this market long term is to be honest with our readers and always show them every tool, offer, or promotion “as is,” and then leave it up to everybody to make an educated decision as to what to do with this information.
All combined, this makes ecommerce-platforms.com one of the top resources for finding accurate information about online store software, payment gateways, dropshipping suppliers, point of sale systems, hosting firms, and other tools that aid online businesses in running their operations.
We hope that what we've said here resonates with you and that it's a message that speaks to you and your impression of what a quality publication should look like. If you have any questions, feel free to contact us here.
