Which Platform is best for Ecommerce Website?

[aimaxorg]

Hi

I Have to sale cloths, apparels online and i want to make a proper website for this. so would you please suggest me where i can do this and which is the best platform for this online shopping cart website.

 

[ServWise]

I have always recommended OpenCart as a good option.

 

[Michelle Murphy @ Yoma]

Hi aimaxorg,

It depends on what your budget is really, but I have always favoured Magento.

Thanks,
Michelle

 

[Bart Simpson]

There are many options and if you want to develop yourself and not use a website builder then you can look at opencart, zencart or prestashop. Magento is good but it eats up resources fast.

 

[zaen__]

Hi,

I recommend Magento, we have always used it any never had any problems

 

[easidoo]

I second the suggestion from @Michelle Murphy @ Yoma . Magento would give you the flexibility from business and technology perspective to grow organically. The beauty of Magento is that you can truly use technical capabilities to expand your marketing reach. For example, you can have a master catalogue of your products and a store listing all the products. You can use a subset of the products from your master catalogue to build another store that focuses on specific type of products (perhaps based on season, age range, style, geographical location, language,...) and have multiple stores (i.e. different website domains) with exclusive look&feel. All that from one magento platform. btw, you can even use the community edition (open-source) to achieve this.

The platforms you might want to stay away from are - Prestashop (open-source, unreliable and not coded properly) and woocommerce (growing fast but still not stable enough to be considered for a true e-commerce platform).

 

[antropy]

Magento, while full of features is complex to develop with and will not really run at an acceptable speed on lower end hosting.

Prestashop (open-source, unreliable and not coded properly)

Prestashop is a good platform with a lot of features and is pretty user-friendly. I'd like to see some examples of where it isn't coded properly?

I'd agree that WooCommerce isn't a proper ecommerce platform.

OpenCart is probably the best of the open source platforms though. It's very well written, very simple in terms of code and user interface, has all the features you'd expect. Because of this it also runs very fast on almost all hosts until you start getting very large numbers of products and categories.

 

[Jeff FV]

The platforms you might want to stay away from are - Prestashop (open-source, unreliable and not coded properly)

Our shop is built using Prestashop - works well, brings in the dosh and have never had any reliability problems with it. We sell circa 600 different items through it.

 

[Deleted member 136029]

I'd agree that WooCommerce isn't a proper ecommerce platform.

What makes you say this? (also to @easidoo) What problems does woocommerce have?

 

[Money Talks]

I have tried and test all major carts over the past 5 years and Magento has always topped the bill for me, it does everything and if you can't find something you want it to do, someone can make it happen for a relatively low price.

 

[webhostuk]

One more vote for magento.. but just make sure you buy host on VPS or server with good resource if need require good performance as its quit resource consuming shopping cart.

 

[easidoo]

@fruch I can only say it from my personal perspective and I do not claim that this is "the" universal fact. I appreciate that everyone's business needs drive the technology decisions and at times one solution might be a more pragmatic way forward than the others. In other words, the business needs drives the technology and not the other way around. For an ecommerce platform, one of the key business drivers is to have several flexible ways (like up-sell, cross-sell, coupons, discounts, user group pricing, multi-stores,....) of selling the products to increase the market reach and thus the revenue.

Wordpress, in my opinion, is absolutely fantastic blogging platform. Yes, it is relatively easy to deploy, easy to tinker with and build a reasonable website. Last I checked, over 33% of www sites use wordpress. But, asking wordpress+woocommerce combo to do "true" ecommerce functions, is a bit of a stretch for the wordpress core. For example, the use case I described in my previous post (multiple store views & domain management) is impossible to do in woocommerce. Relatively, woocommerce is not as flexible as magento. But, equally one can argue that not anyone would need or want all the functions available in magento.

@Jeff FV Great to hear that your ecommerce platform uses prestashop. Pls take my point about prestashop as my personal view. I was referring to it's code because it uses a smarty templating language in addition to the normal CSS, html, js, php and mysql. Just the fact that it uses smarty is a reflection that the developers have forgotten the original purpose of php. Let's put it in a different way - how confident would you feel about upgrading your prestashop software to a newer version? From our experience, there have often been a few hiccups.

I also understand that woocommerce hold 5.82% of market share as compared to magento community edition's 18.13% and magento enterprise's 4.67%.

 

[easidoo]

forgot to mention - @webhostuk is right about the resource consumption of magento, esp. the enterprise version. However, we've helped several customers address this by improvements at the network and the OS level. Happy to share the details or write an article on this point if there is interest.

 

[fisicx]

@fruchLast I checked, over 33% of www sites use wordpress.

Where did you get that bit of info?

Even WP only claim 60million users. With nearly 1 billion websites that's only about 6% using wordpress

 

[Food From Cyprus]

We use Prestashop and are very happy with it. I would thouroughly recommend it.

 

[easidoo]

@fisicx I had to recheck the figure and yes, I made a mistake there. It's infact closer to 20%.

> 2012: ~16%. source: forbes [dot] com/sites/jjcolao/2012/09/05/the-internets-mother-tongue/ claimed 1 in 6 website are powered by wordpress.
> 2013: ~19%. source: thenextweb [dot] com/insider/2013/07/27/wordpress-now-powers-18-9-of-the-web-has-over-46m-downloads-according-to-founder-matt-mullenweg/ where Matt, founder of wordpress, claimed ~19% of the sites are powered by wordpress

some more sources for stats on wordpress:
en.wordpress [dot] com/stats/
premium.wpmudev [dot] org/blog/brief-history-of-wordpress-in-numbers/

 

[Deleted member 106254]

Another vote here for Magento. I used to build e-commerce systems from scratch for many years and Magento does (almost) everything a bespoke system does and usually better.
Do NOT use Zen Cart. The code hasn't been updated in 4 years and is full of security holes.

 

[fisicx]

@fisicx I had to recheck the figure and yes, I made a mistake there. It's infact closer to 20%/

Nope.

It's closer to 6%. do the sums yourself. 60million/988million = 6% (ish).

 

[easidoo]

@fisicx sounds like this figure is close to your heart. No offence but I don't give a monkey about how many sites on internet use wordpress. All I care about is, sticking with the original question on this forum, that everyone here gets as much reliable information as possible about different e-commerce platforms to be able to make their own decision.

I've given the sources of all the figures I've shared so it's not what I think but, rather, what's been reported out in the public. I've no idea where your figures come from and perhaps you could share your source?

 

[Deleted member 136029]

Thanks @easidoo. Interesting. I've just given the go ahead for a new site based on WooCommerce. I believe it can cope with our needs. It better had!
Magento obviously has great flexibility but I've seen so many horrible Magento sites, it seems as though you need to put a lot of money in to it to get something half decent.

 

[Alan]

The best platform is the one that best meets your requirements. Sounds obvious doesn't it, but how many people list their requirements before looking for solutions?

Personally I have built carts in ZenCart, PrestaShop, OpenCart and WooCommerce.

They all have plusses and minuses, and all do roughly the same job, but currently I'll only build ecommerce sites in WordPress/WooCommerce.

 

[Alan]

Do NOT use Zen Cart. The code hasn't been updated in 4 years and is full of security holes.

I wouldn't recommend ZenCart either, but 1.5.1 was released 20 months ago

 

[VoodooSMS]

Hi,

I personally would recommend Magento, it's really easy to add new products, pages, offers etc and there are loads of free plug ins such as SMS alerts, Follow up emails etc. which can really enhance your website.

 

[SamiKhan]

Hi,
I am not an IT expert. We are using Big Commerce which is quite useful. We are also selling Apparel. But at some places we feel restricted. I must suggested Magento as most of retailers are working on Magento platform.

Thanks
sami

 

[principal360]

Virtuemart on the Joomla! platform works great for me - both open source.

 

[jimbola]

I All that from one magento platform. btw, you can even use the community edition (open-source) to achieve this.

The platforms you might want to stay away from are - Prestashop (open-source, unreliable and not coded properly) and woocommerce (growing fast but still not stable enough to be considered for a true e-commerce platform).

I recommend Prestashop.

@easidoo I don't understand your comment that a reason to stay away from Prestashop is that it is open source?So is Magento and PHP.

With regards to the 'not coded properly' element where you later state it's because it uses Smarty, the reason for that is to separate presentation from application code. You can read more on the smarty engine using the link below, it also covers specifically why use Smarty when you have PHP.

smarty(dot)net/about_smarty

 

[StartUpC]

I have worked with WooCommerce + WordPress. I think it is a good start and due to WP support you will be able to merge to another system / combination when and if you needed it.
According to my opinion one of the main advantages in WP/WooC that the on site SEO work will be easier (with plugins) - so all in all you'll have good chances that your shop and products can be found in SERPs.
My friend started with WP and WooCommerce pair and run the business for a year or so successfully on that platform but moved to Magneto some months ago and the transition went smoothly. The main reasons to abandon Woo were lousy support - namely topics regarding the issues have never been answered - and security issues with PCI DSS payment gateways. Magento needs more resources to run so you may need to upgrade your webhosting to maintain speed.
Regards,
Chill

 

[senses]

No right or wrong answer here.

The right product will depend on your requirements!!!

If you have huge sales volume, (like 200 per minute) then its Magento.
Other than that, its really depends on what you need it to do.

 

[RogerLoyyd]

Generally there are so many platforms are available for e commerce business website but i prefer to use management platform that is best suited to run your business website successfully.

 

[senses]

Magento is the more enterprise, no doubt. But (no matter what people say) its for the upper tier. It eats resources and you need a strong host. Its also not for the average web builder either. If you are not using a dedicated server, then its not really suitable. (Yes you 'can' make it run on lesser machines, but its a compromise and you will hit issues.)

How do I know this? Well I was senior project manager for the UK leading Magento agency.

I have heard good and bad things about presta, so cant really comment too much on that.

Opencart, I have personal and company experience with. Runs very well, very easy to get going will, and based on Codeigniter Framework. Couple with VQMod extensions runs rather well. Once you get to big categories / product numbers you have to refine it somewhat (www.uber-interiors.com for example) but in doing that it runs very quick - if you know what your doing.

WooCommerce - only for the very small stores with a handful of products. If you need Wordpress and a 'shop' - you can integrate it into Opencart (not easy, but for example Uber Interiors has that integration.

Hope this helps! PM me if you need any more comments.

 

[senses]

Generally there are so many platforms are available for e commerce business website but i prefer to use management platform that is best suited to run your business website successfully.

Strangley, there isnt that many, which to this day I find surprising.

 

[serpyre]

All SME platforms are in the lower 50% of commerce solutions, it just depends where. You have the instant builds (GoDaddy), then Shopify/WooCommerce, then Prestashop, then Magento CE, then Magento EE - now the top 5% of stores on the internet generate 50% of all online revenue, those all use the top 50% of platforms - Hybris, Demandware, ATG, Websphere.

Basically the average WooCommerce/Shopify site tops out at $50,000revenue/yr (figures given to us in USD), a Magento CE site averages $120,000/yr revenue (not profit). So you need to decide how much revenue you want to, people will say $250,000/yr, so then you need to allocate $12,500/yr to your IT budget. Go to builtwith.com and find the platforms in there for you budget, and then fine tune down.

Here's one to hurt your head, so take WooCommerce, hosting at $20per month (Tier 7) will generate ~$400/mth revenue and 125visitors organically without marketing topping out at $50,000/yr. A Magento CE store on $50/mth Tier 5/6 hosting will generate $2,500 revenue/mth and 750visitors/.mth organically without marketing topping out at $120,000/yr. You get out what you put in - everything above those figures is you hard work, time, experience, luck and timing.

 

[leshka_uk]

I would go for Magentom because eBay invests millions every year developing it. Last year eBay purchased braintreepayments so I expect Magento having fully integrated top notch payment system soon.

 

[ParcelBright]

If you have the budget you can always go with Shoppify if not WooCommerce will be a good choice where you can add a lot of function to it by installing plugin

 

[Festoon Lighting]

It really depends on what you want to achieve but my preferred option is Woocommerce.

 

[RanjeetJS]

We are been using prestashop for one of our stores , it's good. Also , Avactis has released their free version which is also quite good and they have kept all the current extensions free

 

[Laura Cioclea]

It all depends on your needs & budget. As a Magento store owner I can say the following: the community edition is free & it has lots of out-of-the box features, but NO support - so if you have no programming skills be ready to hire a developer. Magento is deadly flexible, so you can customize your store whatever you want with 3d party extensions (average price $150. unique & powerful solutions will cost you $400 and more) + hosting.

 

[Timothy Willis]

If you're looking for an open-source (free) eCommerce platform, then Magento wins hands-down in my opinion. However, if you have limited knowledge of selling online, you will probably struggle using this platform without an agency/freelancer on board.

 

[ukbf0001]

It all depends on what your requirements are.
Magento - overly complex and resourceful
Xcart - very stable - lots of plugins - you may need some coding knowledge to gets things exactly as you want.

If you just want to sell - and concentrate on your business rather than messing around with security, PCI compliance, backups etc - then look at something like ecwids the beauty of it is that it lives in the cloud - so to put in your website - or anyother website it's a simple cut/paste job - it also fits directly into facebook - so punters can your stuff from within facebook - without having to even visit your site if that makes sense - it's free up to a certain number of products

 

[Amy@ Filplastic- Racking]

I've always found Shopify easy to use, and there are loads of free apps to add, such as a Facebook Shop.