WHICH IS THE BEST ECOMMERCE PLATFORM FOR YOUR BUSINESS?

eCommerce is a global phenomenon, and growth of this industry is fabulous. Most of the visionary people think about starting an online business. To help, we’ve put a lucid comparison of famous four eCommerce platforms.

WooCommerce vs OpenCart vs Shopify vs Magento - all come with the latest features and all of them are wildly popular. It has never been easy to make a choice of right platform. In this article,  we’ll explain few points which help you to decide the best eCommerce platform as per your requirement.

WooCommerce

WooCommerce is the most customizable platform built on WordPress. WordPress is world’s popular free open-source CMS.

If you’ve used WordPress, and want to convert your site into eCommerce website then WooCommerce is the best plugin for you.

WooCommerce provides hundreds of free and paid extensions, spanning all your logistical & technical requirements, and you can rest assured thinking that there's an extension for your specific needs.

It's been only 6 years to first release of WooCommerce plugin and it's website count is cross over the 22,097,921 which is really astonishing.

WooCommerce Features:

• It’s free platform.
• You can add unlimited products.
• We can also add the 3 party extension from its official site.
• Provides basic security features for securing your store.
• It’s WordPress plugin so it is amazingly easy to use.

These are the key features of WooCommerce. Let’s see the pros and cons of the platform.

Pros :

• Setting up a store is free and easy but web hosting expenses are much high.
• WooCommerce has its own official documentation available to its users. You can contact the woocommerce team if you have any queries.
• It also provides the extension to Integrate with Google Analytics.
• Supports SSL but you need to get SSL Certificate on your own.

Cons :

• If you are not familiar with WordPress, then you need to learn two new platforms.
• It availability is limited to WordPress only.
• You need to install premium extensions because the base plugins are not enough.

OpenCart

OpenCart might be good an option for you to consider. OpenCart,  an Open Source Platform, is a system based on the Model View Controller (MVC) pattern which makes it powerful, customizable and scalable. It’s very easy to develop an extension If you’ve knowledge of PHP and MySQL.

Let’s see the pros and cons of OpenCart.

Pros:

• It’s an easy to use platform.
• It provides free or less expensive extensions and themes.
• It provides its own official documentation.
• It has responsive theme and nimble admin UI.

Cons:

• It gives limited cache and SEO functions (we need to install extensions for it).
• It’s not good for the big store.

Shopify

It's an award-winning eCommerce platform. Shopify won the Best eCommerce Software Award for 2016 and Supreme Software Award. It comes with handy features and tools that enable the eCommerce site to build, operate and sell the products in person.

Shopify is a commercial product (that you need to pay for every month).

With Shopify you can build the site in days. There's no need to code, just pick up the template and you’re ready to go.

Let’s see the pros and cons of the Shopify.

Pros:

• Shopify is User-friendly.  it gives the basic store functionalities that are fairly useful compared to other eCommerce platforms.

• You can launch the website in days.
• Shopify is not free but affordable (plans start with the $29/month) + 24*7 Shopify team support
• Bunch of apps available to use in the app store.
• Shopify comes with the POS(Point of Sale) System.

Cons :

• We can’t customize the theme. It comes with the limited customization option.
• It also has the limited template options.
• It also has the limited reporting tools.

Magento

Magento, Commerce without limits, is world’s #1 eCommerce platform. When it comes to flexibility, scalability and capabilities Magento is the best. Unlike other platforms, Magento is purely eCommerce tool. Your aspiration of developing an eCommerce website with all the world class features can be satisfied using Magento.

• Magento Community Edition (free)
• Magento Enterprise Edition ($15,550/year)
• Magento Go (paid & hosted on Magento’s servers)

Let’s see the Pros and cons of Magento

Pros :

• Magento is Highly scalable.
• Extremely Customizable.
• Magento is the best solution for Enterprise,
• Great support of Third party free and paid extensions.
• Comes with Integrated Payment Methods.
• Magento provides huge amount of features.

Cons :

• It's not easy to use with the technical knowledge.
• Much expensive than other ecommerce solutions when it comes to hosting and designing.
• Extensions are very expensive.
• Magento Documentation is mostly online, support options are quite limited.

Now, You’ve got a basic idea about famous eCommerce platforms. Let’s move towards the conclusion:

• WooCommerce has all basic features that are needed to setup eCommerce site like Payment gateways, Delivery settings, Tax control, Stock tracking, etc. Integration of WooCommerce with WordPress is very easy. No technical expertise is required.
• Powerful community supports, plugins and extension of OpenCart secures its position in your list. With not so high budget, OpenCart can be your first choice.
• Shopify is the best ready to use eCommerce platform as it provides lots of app to install. With this platform, you can host a website in days. It also comes with all basic eCommerce features like product cards, order CRM, built-in analytics, payment gateway integration, fraud analysis, blog, social networks integration, etc. It's not free you need to pay $180/monthly + transactional fees to get all these features.
• Magento is SEO friendly, fast growing and customer friendly eCommerce platform. With powerful features, you can create anything you want. Magento store also provides lots of free extensions that can extend Magento's default functionality, for example, we can extend the SEO Feature with SEO Plugin.

Let’s compare the number of plugins available in the most important categories:

1. Marketing extensions
   1. Magento – 1817
   2. OpenCart – no such category in its extension store (need to search exactly what you need in other categories)
   3. WooCommerce – 70
   4. Shopify – 287
2. Shipping
   1. Magento – 422
   2. OpenCart – 420
   3. WooCommerce – 41
   4. Shopify – 96
3. Payment gateways extensions
   1. Magento – 906
   2. OpenCart – 873
   3. WooCommerce – 11
   4. Shopify – 41 (for US)

Price Comparison of eCommerce platforms:

• WooCommerce

WooCommerce platform is the open source plugin with free updates. It comes with lot of features. It that's not enough for you, then you can buy the paid extensions from the WooCommerce store. Its Official extension pricing starts from $49.

• OpenCart

OpenCart is free eCommerce platform, you can download it from it's offical site & even upgrade for free. That doesn't mean that you can run your store without any charges, there are some charges like hosting and security of the store. You can also buy extensions so that you can run your store effectively. You have to spend some money for buying domain name and getting SSL certificate.

• Shopify

Shopify is a commercial product that comes with 14-days trial. After that you need to pay monthly for your store , the pricing starts from the $29 (which does not include credit card charges).

If you pay online, then there is no transactions fees via Shopify payment system. But if you choose paypal or any other payment gateway then you have to pay additional 2%.

That makes the maintaining the store much difficult.

• Magento

Magento offers 2 types of version Magento CE(Community Edition) and Magento EE(Enterprise Edition) when it comes to pricing. Magento CE is open source and free version of the Magento and you also don't need to subscribe for it. It also provides you with the updates. If you have small and medium sized business then Magento CE is perfect choice.

Magento EE is most suitable for the large business. It’s price depends on size of your business. To find the specific price you need to contact the magento specialists and request for the quote.

Magento performs better on dedicated Magento configured servers which costs you a bit higher.

 

Conclusion:

Now, you have adequate knowledge of all the famous eCommerce platforms. So which is the best platform for your website? It’s time to decide it by yourself, decide a platform which suits your business requirements.

If you want to setup your store fast and easy, then the ideal choice would be shopify with all its built-in features.

If you already have the website in WordPress and want to add eCommerce features then your ideal choice would be a WooCommerce plugin for WordPress. It gives you eCommerce features out of the box.

If you have the small business or startup, and just want to start eCommerce with a low budget, OpenCart would be the best choice for you.

If you need quality, full-featured eCommerce website, Magento would be the best choice for you. It gives you the power of customization that no other platform can provide you.

Before making a decision, It is important to have an understanding of your requirements and future enhancement which helps you to select the best platform.

At Elitech, We have an expert web development team of exceptionally talented, trained and well experienced front end developers and PHP Programmers who have strongly contributed in producing outstanding custom Magento eCommerce web applications.

We provide custom Magento development services including theme customization, payment gateway integration, and Magento2 latest version up-gradation. Our developer’s strong technical & domain expertise can contribute immensely to grow your business online.

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