The e-commerce industry is thriving on an impressive number of platforms that promise to bring your startup to a new level. No doubts, choosing the engine is a key aspect for turning a starting online store into a profitable and expanding business. Fortunately, there are many effective and affordable options to choose from. Let's consider the best platforms, or the so-called e-commerce CMS (content management system) for small businesses.
The e-commerce industry is thriving on an impressive number of platforms that promise to bring your startup to a new level. No doubts, choosing the engine is a key aspect for turning a starting online store into a profitable and expanding business. Fortunately, there are many effective and affordable options to choose from. Let's consider the best platforms, or the so-called e-commerce CMS (content management system) for small businesses.
Types and differences of CMS for online stores
There are a number of different platforms (CMS, frameworks) for developing and managing online stores today. The effectiveness and popularity of each depends on a number of factors, starting from its capacity and interface and a choice between commercial or free version. Each factor should be considered individually for your project. At the same time it’s not less important to understand the hidden rocks of such platforms. The best approach is to consult with specialists and describe them the features and perspectives of your online store.
In this article I bring your attention to consider the four most popular systems for creating and managing an online store: Woocommerce, Shopify, Magento, Opencart. Let's have a look at each individually:
Wooсommerce
Wooсommerce is a multifunctional open source platform with free plug-ins (additional features) with about 1,986,393 online stores easily integrated with Wordpress. According to statistics, this is the most widely used e-commerce platform, and the reasons for this superiority are obvious. Wooсommerce offers great customization options with dozens of gorgeous themes. The system requires some skills to be able to use it..
As for the price, Woocommerce is free to download and use. It offers more than 300 hundred extensions, most of which are free-of-charge as well.
Shopify
Shopify, is the fastest growing platform on the USA market; it occupies an honorable place that amazes millions of store owners for its easy to use design, flexibility and, at the same time, great customization options. The interface is quite simple to understand, which allows beginners to maintain the website without requiring technical assistance. This is one of the many reasons why Shopify is a one-stop solution. Another strong peculiarity of Shopify is its advanced integration.
As for the price, Shopify As for the price $29 to $229 some additional fees, which are up to 2% up to. As we can see, this is not the cheapest e-commerce solution, but it is the one that can make your store look nice and have rich functionality. A significant "disadvantage" is that the control penal supports only English version, which limits its understanding.
Magento
Magento differs from most popular e-commerce systems by its complexity: it offers more features, so it is mainly used by e-merchants who work in professional e-commerce stores with several tens of thousands of products or want to use features that are simply not available in other lower performance systems. This platform provides an amazing amount of features like setting up a store, optimizing purchasing processes, arranging products in the best possible way, or even requesting data about the client’s activities and the operation of your online store.
OpenCart
OpenCart – is the best solution for small online stores. It is an open source platform. No doubt, the development of an effective online store will require intervention in the code, modifications, configuration, etc. The platform is a perfect option for those who don’t have a large budget for development and not willing spend time with the setup. The up-to-date features would be enough to maintain SEO at the right level. For example, you may not create individual URLs, but generate them with just a single click. Also, it is important to add that you will definitely have to install extensions in order to be able to use all the capabilities of the system.
Conclusion
It is important to keep in mind such parameters while choosing an e-commerce platform:
- the amount of goods you are planning to have in the future (platform capacity defines the ability to handle a large amount of goods);
- free or paid installation and support;
- free or paid modifications, in case you will need to expand your online store;
- system popularity as a dependence factor on the developer.
So, we have reviewed the details and differences in the use of the most popular systems for creating and managing an online store. Choosing a platform is an important basic step in the planning of all e-commerce activities. In order to avoid dependence on CMS restrictions in the future, in order to use the budget in a right way and ensure stable and optimized operation of the online store, we strongly recommend to consult with professionals and think twice before you start taking actions.
