We have many Ecommerce platforms available that are continually evolving, it can be smoke and mirror and very tricky to decide which shopping cart platform best meets all your needs and suits your company. If you are planning to start your own store or perhaps have gone through the idea of building your own online store, you must have gone through this ordeal at some point.
It is difficult to chose the best alternative when you are spoilt for choices. But don’t sweat it, my job is to make your life easy. Below are my reviews of some of the popular eCommerce platforms you can look for development.
The points to consider are these platforms being mobile friendly, scalable and transparent. Let us understand how these technologies stand out from each other.
PrestaShop
Prestashop is an Ecommerce solution that is self-hosted. This is written in PHP programming languages support of MySQL, available in 60 languages and used by 250,000 shops around the world. It is valuable as it offers more than 41 languages, easy to install and can be highly customized. It has lower monthly maintenance cost and also contains 310 features including SEO, marketing, Analytics, reporting, shipping and payments and site management.
Those are some big numbers to gaze at but there are drawbacks. It does not have a built-in tool for exporting and its importing tool is limited. This platform is best suited for small business. With purchase of an additional module, it is easy to create shopping feeds for Google Shopping and other marketing channels using PrestaShop. It can be a very good platform if developed by someone with very good development skills. Prestashop includes 2,000+ professional templates and out of the box themes which can be highly customized by changing fonts and colors with live configurators. It provides mobile -responsive designs.
Shopify
Shopify is the WordPress of E-commerce business. It is easy to utilize and has a intuitive UI that is easy to understand. Shopify is a completely hosted Ecommerce solution which implies that it is easy to use and set up. Furthermore, Shopify is economical, and it offers wide range of free and paid themes, and gives excellent user support.
The cons to Shopify includes lack of exporting tools, few features than other platforms and limited customization powers. This platform can be a good option for small businesses for small site development and relatively small product inventory. Shopify own a very intuitive design due to which it is easy to use user interface which is also one of the asset of Shopify.
With latest Shopify Plus, it will be very easy to manage business rather than focusing on IT. Through its highly scalable Saas platform will give customer a new experience and will help in cutting down IT expenses similar to traditional. It has 99.99% uptime with 200 TB storage, unlimited bandwidth to handle thousands of orders with an ease.
Magento
Magento is an ecommerce platform based on open source technology with over $50B in gross merchandise volume transacted on the platform annually which offers various options for various sorts of businesses – Magento Go, Community Edition, and Enterprise Edition.
Community and Enterprise are self-hosted, while Go is completely facilitated. Magento has been allowed by various editions to work for businesses of any size; be that as it may, these propelled features are a much costly than other platforms. Magento is extremely customizable and SEO friendly. It even offers advanced options for inventory management and offers wide variety of templates and third-party integrations extending from open source, to diversified, substantial scale venture SaaS based frameworks.
With release of Magento 2.0, it will be very easy to built-in full page cache. It is also declared to be much faster platform in comparison with its previous versions. Its FPC supports Varnish as backend which will significantly increase page load in the browser. It servers better catalog, faster guest checkouts. It has a great potential to empower your web store but in addition, it requires some investments in your hardware and software.
With short summary of each, it will be easy for you to know benefits of each platform. My personal favourite is Magento as it has good ability to grow website, gives good access to third-party integrations and provides good custom development. It’s you who has to analyse which fits your Ecommerce business more.
I hope your ecommerce decisions would now be slightly easy and I would be glad if this post would be of any help. If you're still confused about which e-commerce platform to choose and need an in-depth comparison, click here. For more of such posts around the best technology news, subscribe to the blog and we will keep you posted.