If you could point out an advantage or how Open Cart is effectively 'better', maybe more people would opt for it.
We tried out WooCommerce for setting up an eCommerce site which was to be a counterpart to a couple of other online shops we manage,
Vape Liquid UK (running OpenCart) and
Disposable Bar (PrestaShop). We found it to be practically unusable for two main reasons:
1. Speed.
Time to first byte of a fresh new WooCommerce installation was around 5 to 6 seconds. That's 5 seconds of waiting after clicking on any link! We tested this with a clean install of WordPress and WooCommerce to be sure this wasn't the result of any plugins slowing the site down.
On the same server, pages in OpenCart load in around half a second, and in PrestaShop loading times were around 1-2 seconds max. Even using one of the many caching extensions available for WooCommerce - we tried out
WP Rocket,
LiteSpeed Cache (dependent on special server-installed software) and
WP Super Cache, among others - although they improve performance for 'static' pages that look the same to everyone, as soon as you add something to your cart, the page has to be generated dynamically and you're back to waiting around for 5 or more seconds every time you click on a link. For an eCommerce site, that's not acceptable. Customers will simply go elsewhere rather than twiddling their thumbs.
2. Lack of (practical) customisability.
This may sound silly to say about the platform that seems to have the most themes out of any of them, but if you look a little deeper you'll find that most themes are extremely limiting, or unreasonably expensive. A lot of the most popular themes have next to no flexibility if you don't use their 'premium' version, which in many cases require you to pay monthly to use them! A lot of them bolt their own page editors on top of WooCommerce as well, further increasing the complexity of an already extremely bloated platform.
On top of that, the way that WooCommerce themes are structured internally is frankly bizarre. Coming from OpenCart and PrestaShop's relatively sane template engines (
Twig and
Smarty, respectively), WooCommerce (and WordPress in general) is a tangled mess of
numbered events and actions in an unclear order, global function overrides and PHP archaisms held over from WordPress's legacy days. I'll spare you the gory details, but to summarise, if you're a developer then you will regularly run into some major headaches when trying to customise a WooCommerce theme.
Compare OpenCart - practically all plugins are available or a one-time payment, and most themes are more of a fresh coat of paint as they should be. Themes such as
iStore or
Electron simply revamp the appearance of the site without trying to replace a whole load of its functionality, and are super simple to refine to your needs if desired. On the other end of the scale are heavyweight themes such as Journal - while it does come with its own complexity, a single payment will give you everything you see on its
multitude of demo sites, with no recurring monthly fees.
Suffice it to say, we found WooCommerce impractical for use as an eCommerce platform. OpenCart is all around far more nimble and light weight, easier to work with and miles more developer-friendly for tailoring to your unique requirements as a business owner.
Joe, Senior PHP Developer, Antropy
