E-commerce business owners have many choices when it comes to shopping carts or e-commerce platforms — almost all of which claim to be easy to deploy and manage. In reality, however, most business owners wind up hiring a designer and a Web developer to help them create the perfect eCommerce site.
The first step when starting out is the eCommerce platform and the number of such platforms and content management systems available has grown over the years. In such a scenario, figuring out which platform to use when you’re looking to build your online store can be a fairly confusing task – especially if you aren’t from a technical/e-commerce background. This post intends to make your research work easier by helping you choose the platform best suited for your needs.
There are two options available for building an e-commerce website – one can either use managed (hosted) e-commerce platforms like Shopify and BigCommerce or open-source Content Management Systems (CMS) like Magento.
As the name indicates, a hosted eCommerce platform is hosted on a server that you will not have access to, while CMS-based websites are self-hosted on server space (such as Bluehost) you will have to purchase. Which option to choose will depend a lot on your specific needs as well as your level of technical involvement. Below is a list of benefits of both which could help you make a choice between the two based on your business’s current requirements:
The server can also be an important aspect of how your e-commerce site is built and we usually use the Linux-based servers being provided by Bluehost or Amazon Web Services. We usually refrain from using Windows-based servers.
You could use this flowchart below (Click on the flowchart to enlarge) to help you arrive at a decision on whether you should go ahead with a hosted e-commerce platform or with a CMS, based on your requirements:
Once you’ve made your choice on going ahead with either of the two platforms, here is a list of the 5 best options you could explore in each niche:
If you’ve decided that a CMS is what will suit your needs best, then below are the 5 best e-commerce CMSs available in the market at the moment. The most important factors that will come into consideration when zeroing in on the CMS would be the availability of extensions, availability of support, functionality, customizability and the cost of development and maintenance. All of them are open source and have free community versions and paid enterprise versions.
Top 100,000 websites using E-commerce technologies – Source: Builtwith.com
With nearly 21% of the world’s top 100,000 e-commerce sites built on the Magento platform*, it is by far the most popular and one of the best e-commerce CMS being used today. Its biggest advantages are the large number of plugins and extensions available which allow the addition of any new functionality, the ease of availability of experienced developers as well as a lower overall development and maintenance cost.
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Cons:
WooCommerce is a WordPress plugin used for building e-commerce websites on the WordPress platform. A large number of WordPress themes have the WooCommerce functionality built-in. The plugin provides almost all the features that are available in the other open-source CMS’ listed here. WooCommerce might work out more user-friendly and cost-effective for smaller businesses as well as for those familiar with WordPress.
Pros:
Cons:
osCommerce is a fairly popular platform as well, with about 11% of the top 100,000 sites built on open-source technologies using osCommerce. Being one of the earliest open-source platforms available, it has a huge support base and a very active forum, though some users find that updates to the platform have not kept up with the times.
Pros:
Cons:
Drupal is the second most-used open source website content management system after WordPress and Drupal commerce is the plugin for ecommerce sites built on this platform. Its seamless integration with Drupal makes creating a blog or forum much more convenient than most other ecommerce content management systems.
Pros:
Cons:
Opencart is another open-source CMS for ecommerce. Though it has one of the easiest to use backends, its support systems are not as comprehensive as compared to the other platforms listed.
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Cons:
Magento vs Woocommerce vs Drupal Commerce vs Opencart vs osCommerce
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