Choosing an ecommerce solution

[North_Wind]

Magento is by far the best platform.
Mike

Hmm - we just migrated off Magento as we had to upgrade to v2 (which essentially required a full recode) so we undertook a full review of our £3.5m pA turnover online operation. We decided against upgrading to Magento v2 for three main reasons: (1) it seems prone to being hacked and having malware inserted; (2) customising seemed to be harder/more expensive than on competitor platforms; and (3) it was recently sold to Adobe who are not shy about being very aggressive on price increases/licence fee increases. After doing a full review we rewrote the site to sit on BigCommerce. We are very happy with the results.

 

[theroo]

Just my two thoughts, I think woocommerce is a good solution for people who know what they're doing from a website perspective. But I think shopify is appealing and works better for those that just want the shop done.

I have a woocommerce store and currently have about 6,000 products on it. It works great, loads fine. I have found that the problem with woocommerce sometimes stems with the host (was on Hostgator and it was terrible).

Agree with previous posters about plugins clogging up the system. It's true, just because its free doesnt meant it's good! Be smart about it.

 

[Will - clook.net]

Every business has different needs and requirements.

Which e-commerce platforms will suit your business depends on a number of factors:
- what's your budget to build/revamp the site
- what experience do you have in-house
- do you have enough margin in your product to look at platforms that charge per transaction
- how many SKUs (products) do you have

If you have a limited start up budget your options narrow. You will most likely have to look at developing the site yourself (which generally rules out platforms such as Magento which are difficult for a novice to develop and development costs are expensive). WordPress & WooCommerce could be a good option, if you are patient and prepared to invest some time learning WordPress and WooCommerce. If you have no coding experience at all, you can still use WordPress - tools like Elementor really reduce the amount of knowledge you need.

If you are on a limited budget, have little time to invest learning new skills AND importantly have the margin in your product to look at hosted ecommerce platforms such as Shopify, Wix and bigcommerce are all good options but cannot be fully customised.

We host many different types of ecommerce stores at clook.net. If you want some friendly advice, feel free to contact myself. Don't worry, there won't be a pushy sales pitch, just friendly advice.

 

[Larry Fong]

I have tried various e-commerce platform. Like the website of HKQCC is based on Wordpress. I find it can be managed easily and the loading speed is very fast. Another good platform is Shopify. It is especially suitable for online retailing.

 

[lazal2us]

I would always spend the extra and go for a self hosted solution like magento or woocommerce. You are able to customise more.

 

[Elena Steiner]

Each platform has it's own pros and cons and you need to fully understand your needs to make a reasonable decision. For my website, I decided to use Magento as it provides a wide range of tools for visual customisation and I think that visuals are crucial. I use Awesomic subscription to design all the elements and then implement them on my website and Magento suits it perfectly because it doesn't take much effort to change something here and there if needed. This way I have a website that constantly looks fancy and the numbers show that this strategy pays off.

 

[pkpolymers]

WooCommerce and Opencart are pretty easy to manage and play around with if you want customisations. Magento can become a nightmare if you go about tweaking with it.