Blog.

Choosing the right e-commerce platform

Posted on 11 February 2014

Over the years, we have tested many e-commerce platforms. Some are badly designed, some lack support & features and others are just difficult to use.

We regularly use 3 platforms which we believe are the best on the market. They are quite different from each other and choosing one would depend on your requirements.

Woocommerce

Pros

  • Works with WordPress
  • Easy to update
  • Easy to use and customise
  • Very powerful Content Management System features available (because is uses WordPress)
  • There are many WordPress developers available
  • Most popular e-commerce plugin for WordPress 
  • Many professional themes on the market
  • Custom theme development
  • Everything in the website can be content managed

Cons

  • Limited e-commerce features and not as powerful as a stand-alone e-commerce platform
  • Plugins/addons are expensive
  • WordPress is known for security issues

Opencart

Pros

  • Many e-commerce features
  • Many professional themes on the market
  • Load of plugins/add-ons available
  • Custom theme development
  • Easy to use

Cons

  • Difficult to update
  • Basic out-of-the-box-features
  • Lacking good content management features
  • Limited areas can be content managed by the client

BigCommerce

Pros

  • Quick to setup
  • Monthly plan
  • They host and manage the website
  • Easy to use admin
  • Alot of features out-of-the-box
  • Custom theme development
  • Automatic updates

Cons

  • Monthly plan
  • Code restrictions (limit on what you can change)
  • No blogging options
  • Limit to features that they offer
  • Company owned. If they go bust, You lose your website

Magento is another very popular e-commerce platform. We have tried and tested Magento on a number of occasions. Magento has 3 options that we don’t recommend for the following reasons:

  • Enterprise Edition – This option costs around $10k per year to use and is not suited for our clients.
  • Community Edition – This version is built for developers and we have found the administration very difficult to use for our clients. It is also very expensive to develop websites for, due to its heavy code.
  • Magento Go – This is their ’cloud’ option. We have found it very restricted in customising the layout and design.

In conclusion, we have started recommending Woocommerce more often than the latter two. This is mainly because it uses WordPress as its CMS.

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