Choosing an ecommerce solution

[davidjohnfarmer]

Good post, good advice, my summary:

Magento: If multi-lingual and/or multi-storefronts are needed (or just a big store)
Opencart: Large catalogue start-up businesses
Woocommerce: Band's selling merchandise, florists etc.
Bespoke: High volume/high transactional websites/bespoke ideas

 

[Andrew Beardlsey]

webitet, can you give any info (no names needed) on how a woocommerce installation you have carried out, is performing?
I am looking at upgrading an oscemmerce 2 to version 3, but know that woo is far better for SEO.
How does it measure up on , say, order screens and other functionalities?

 

[Pushpendra Singh]

If you have a small budget, Open Cart might be the right choice. This is a powerful ecommerce solution and geared towards start-ups. It also only requires a small investment compared to some of the other choices.
The control panel is made for new users and many find it to be self-explanatory. You can find plenty of tutorials within the opencart website developer community and you’ll be able to accept PayPal, WorldPay, SagePay and many other forms of payment through Open Cart.

 

[andrewjohn1317]

Choosing E-commerce platform or way also depends on Need of Online business Entrepreneur Social media is the best way to promote your services online, through which you can offers your services
to online audience and convert these audience to business using social interaction. Today social media is
one of the best platform where we can get a huge amount active targeted audience. Some social platforms
are - Facebook, twitter, Google +, pinterest and many more.

 

[Nick Alderson]

I think I can save most e-Entrepreneurs a lot of time here. A free Open-Cart Solution will cover nearly all e-Commerce needs.

The important thing about it it’s easy to upload & implement. The dB’s a synch to configure. The C.M.S is user friendly.

Many useful extensions are free & simple to include.

It’s a no-brainer & should be the first place you look…

 

[whitts93]

HEY EVERYONE IM DOING A DISSERTATION ON PERCEIVED RISK IN ONLINE SHOPPING, WOULD GREATLY APPRECIATE IT IF YOU COULD TAKE TWO MINUTES OUT OF YOUR TIME TO COMPLETE THIS QUESTIONNAIRE

 

[Graham Curtis]

Host has the most

 

[monica_cruster]

The hosted solution is seemingly best for the novice.
But it has a drawback that was yet unmentioned.
If someday, for some reason, you’ll decide to say goodbye to this big host, you’ll spend a lot of time and money to transfer your data to the new CMS (content management system).

 

[trevorpp]

I'd go for Magento. I've been using it along with finestshop hosting for several years, and they both work great for me. I recommend Magento

 

[Rijalda]

It all depends on what type of shopping cart you are looking for - hosted vs self-hosted. Each has its pros and cons.

Personally, I find hosted shopping carts to be easier and faster to set up. These kind of carts also let me focus on my business more without having to worry about doing everything on my own.

 

[abellina]

Nice post. I think choosing an ecommerce solution depends upon the requirements of your website or product that have to be developed.If any one have technical skills than that person should go with the open source solutions.

 

[knoxleonard]

It is really helpful. This custom solutions can help solve the problem that how many products and categories you need to maintain.

 

[Iancs]

A great post. My recommendation is Magento, but this is only having been through years of getting used to it, and painfully learning not to customise too much. Although we have customised for certain situations where it was required, 99 times out of 100 we find that there is an extension that fits the client's need.

When setting up hosted solutions there is very quickly too many restrictions, and a business owner will find them quickly, and they are not always the lowest cost options if you factor in the length of time it will be used for.

 

[colour24]

A smaller firm with no in-house technical knowledge could do worse than start off with bigcommerce as a platform. Their templates are pretty well optimised for SEO too.
Just for the record I have no connection to them at all.

 

[Harris_78]

Apart from Magento their are many other frameworks available that can be used for making a highly scalable and professional e-commerce websites. "Emicart" is one of the recent frameworks that has been launched in the market it is relaible, secure and provides ON page SEO also.

 

[InternetMarketingPlatinum]

For it's simply a case of Opencart for smaller sites, Magento for larger sites (in terms of number of products and projected bandwidth usage) and obviously Magento pretty much requires a well-optimised dedicated server (managed if there's budget for it). Beyond that it's a custom build.

 

[ukbf0001]

All requirements are different - however for total ease of use, cloud security, and it's the most popular embedded ecommerce software for facebook apparently then I would use ecwid create in the cloud and then copy and paste 5 lines of code on any website you have

 

[Andrew Scarre]

I would agree with Trevor - out of the box Magento is really easy and well supported.

 

[ukbf0001]

Magento - ah Magento - you will spend hours and hours and then more hours of your time getting it to work, then configuring it, then patching it and making sure all the security fixes are up to date - then you'll spend lots of time trying to get it just right and then eventually you may start selling things.

I know as I have tried it and spent the long hours trying to get it right etc. If you go for this (or any other) solution where you host it yourself - you really need to keep on top of it - I have done websites where I have used Magento, OpenCart, Prestashop, WooCommerce, xcart (one of the better ones).

In a pure business (not techy) world I think (and I maybe be presuming here) what people want is a solution where you can install and set up in 5 minutes and be selling your products / services straight away. Maybe a solution that integrates easily into any new or existing website (copy/paste 5 lines of code - and done), works directly with wordpress / joomla / drupal and any other CMS and a solution that also integrates directly into FaceBook - and even allows you sell directly within FaceBook so people dont even have to leave their facebook session.

For any new project and or customer that wants to just sell and to sell immediately and not have to worry about servers / security patches / vulnerabilities etc - and is mobile friendly etc I now only ever use ECWID - horrible name - stands for ecommerce widgets - but it is the most elegant / easiest and ingenious cart I have ever used and like it says - 5 minutes and done - techies are not definitely NOT needed - which is a shame as I am one

 

[Pish_Pash]

As an ex-techie, I'm not particularly off put by Magento ...indeed, the test site I'm building has been enjoyable (but there again, I'm using Linnlive to populate my magento site with products). I think the basic problem for most new online sellers is that the allure of 'free' is strong, but actually the free isn't what it turns out to be be....example....opencart is free, but there is so little meaningful 'slickness' out the box, that you *have* to start buying extensions ...but they are a minefield (often don't work well, poorly supported, inter-extension compatibilities)...therefore I really do understand why something like bigcommerce has been a roaring success ....but frankly, anything that's subscription based slowly but surely erodes my confidence that I'm in the right game! Therefore for me, it'll always mean trodding the self hosted path...but at least by going with Magento, there are so many people using it, that it's safety in numbers....also becuase Magento is such a big player, you can bet your bottom dollar that there are good extensions provided by the other big players (Amazon, Paypal, Ebay etc)

 

[ukbf0001]

Try ecwid mate any total beginer will be setup in 5 minutes and ready to go - whereas your Magento install wont even have got past the installing files stage. I think what most people who have products to sell concentrate on - is actually making sure the content is great and getting sales conversions. ,You will spend more time phaffing around with Magento than is healthy for you - when all you want to do is sell and make money - just my 2p worth.

Take a look here - this shop sells directly from within FaceBook
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Picture-Mounts-Picture-Frames/166881426689344?sk=app_251458316228

The exact same shop is also here in this domain http://www.photo-mounts.co.uk/photo-mounts-shop/

One shop - multiple locations for different types of customer, ecwid is also in many other places - plus you can import all your products / images / options etc so no duplication of effort etc

 

[Charlie Kellner]

I can recommend Opencart, it's not overburdened by diff. functianality.

 

[amitajohnsy]

I use shopify and it serves my purpuse very well..

 

[Harry.D88]

I think Magento is the best ecommerce platform

 

[AJA SoftTech]

We are working on various eCommerce solutions, as per the extensive experience in eCommerce solutions we suggest Magento.

 

[Lenka Pollak]

I would recommend Prestashop. If you are familiar with php, you might code your own modules, if not you can download a lot of free modules (or buy paid modules).

 

[TianaRodriquez]

I have tried some free wordpress plugins and they seem to work right, just chek the reviews before installing it

 

[Bartholomew Hearn]

My girlfriend runs a baby shop with baby clothes, blankets, etc. It's powered by woo commerce (I think). It's been a few months and it seems to suite her needs.

 

[Piter]

Magento is good choice if you think about SEO and PPC compaign, which can not be said about every software...

 

[Groggy]

Having tried Volusion and Shopify, we now use Bluepark and couldn't be happier! They are UK based and support is excellent.

 

[Mksmart]

rất hay

 

[SEOpremo]

its gotta be woocomerce with wordpress all import

 

[makeusvisible]

It totally depends upon your budget and needs. The cost of coding a Magento site from the ground up is quite high....because it is quite complex. If you are looking for a site designed from the ground up, Magento is likely to cost you £3k+

the positives are that you end up with a highly customised site which is extremely SEO friendly, and can be designed and coded to fit your exact needs.

If you want something cheaper and less extensive, then you can look at platforms such as shopify using templates. This is a good solution if your budget is low.... but of course you loose the control of design and bespoke functionality.

 

[Pish_Pash]

It totally depends upon your budget and needs. The cost of coding a Magento site from the ground up is quite high....because it is quite complex. If you are looking for a site designed from the ground up, Magento is likely to cost you £3k+ .

I'm puzzled at this....I've downloaded the community edition of Magento & I am about half way through populating it with my products...total cost thus far £0 ...what have I missed?!

 

[makeusvisible]

I'm puzzled at this....I've downloaded the community edition of Magento & I am about half way through populating it with my products...total cost thus far £0 ...what have I missed?!

From what you say, it sounds like you have cut the cost of a designer's time, and cut the cost of development time if you are doing it yourself.

 

[SEOpremo]

Woo Commerce is so easy with Wp all import add-on $250, import csv Xml, I have imported sit 6000 products with custom fields complex navigation and php mods.

 

[Granulr]

I'm puzzled at this....I've downloaded the community edition of Magento & I am about half way through populating it with my products...total cost thus far £0 ...what have I missed?!

It's all about the theme, and customising things to exactly what you require, but if you have managed this yourself, you have pretty much cut out the development jobs.

 

[namviet123hnvn]

It's not hard to choose a suitable e-commerce flatform for your business. it depends on how many products are there in your online store?

• For small online store with under 1000 products: Choose Open Cart
• For medium and large online store: Magento is the best.

it's my opinion!

 

[MilesWeb]

For a startup online store, you need to start with selecting the appropriate web hosting package. Make sure to select the shopping cart that you would like to work with and then you can start uploading the products and other website content.

 

[TianaRodriquez]

I use shopify also and am pleased with it!