Which Platform is best for Ecommerce Website?

[undercover]

I've developed sites in the past using OS Commerce, BigCommerce and Magento.
I would say Magento is the way to go as you can upscale easily and add the necessary options you need. OS Commerce is ok, but getting a bit old now and you need to install alot of modules just to get the store up to a modern standard.

I would forget BigCommerce as they are not very flexible in terms of customising the back end to make your life easier. Plus there is very limited support in accessing the database directly and you can never make a full export of all options in BigCommerce. So you'll never have a complete backup of your database. Where as the other two, you are able to make a complete backup and restore at any point.

 

[JodieVeeqo]

It depends on your budget, your sales volumes, how competent at web design you are etc, but our customers mostly use Magento, Shopify, and WooCommerce. I'm a big fan of Squarespace, personally, because I like the design templates and it's easy to use for a beginner.

 

[magdev]

Magento definately, its really going high in the market...

 

[sisindia]

If you are looking for huge e-commerce store and this is your long term business model then megento is best choice. Other wise prestashop is very nice for small stores.

 

[Andrew Scarre]

Old post but hopefully offering some useful information. I build Magento websites and would always recommend this platform if you are looking for a stable, flexible open source solution. If you are wanting a cheap option - don't go for Magento. If, however, you are wanting to spend over £10k - Magento can produce an extremely versatile and reliable ecommerce website and as long as you have Magento optimised hosting - you will also have a very fast site.

 

[mtools]

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.

i do more than that in my woo commerce site in only a few months, as do many of my friends who have businesses using woo commerce, so i call horseshit on that. not sure where you plucked these numbers from. that being said I'm aware of the limitations of woo commerce (everything is extensions and plugins, and updating them can be tricky as they can conflict), but i have a good web guy who helps me when i've got any issues. in his opinion opencart2.0 is the best ecommerce platform but everyone has their own opinions ;-)

i used prestashop originally and thought it was terrible.

 

[antropy]

i do more than that in my woo commerce site in only a few months, as do many of my friends who have businesses using woo commerce, so i call horseshit on that.

Agreed, this is total random gibberish. You should choose a platform based on the features you need, not on the expected revenue with the exception of hosted platforms that charge their fee based on revenue.

in his opinion opencart2.0 is the best ecommerce platform but everyone has their own opinions ;-)

For this sort of site, he is correct. I mean some would say it's an "opinion" that Firefox is better than Internet Explorer, but I think we all know this is just true.

i used prestashop originally and thought it was terrible.

It's actually very good but it is more complex than OpenCart.

 

[exom_expert]

My recommendation is Sellbeing
It's a perfect solution for a small business, since you don't have to hire someone to help you running your online store
You'll be able to do everything by yourself

 

[JodieVeeqo]

The most popular sites are probably Shopify, Magento and WooCommerce. They're all good, but for different reasons.

Shopify - Good if you have the money to spend on a read-to-use straight-out-of-the-box ecoomerce store, and want support from a dedicated team of pros. Shopify has people on hand to help with all aspects of your business, and their resources are absolutely amazing. I tend to recommend Shopify for those who don't have much experience with coding/web design. It can be a little restrictive though because the code they use is hard to play around with and they only let you change what they choose

Magento - This is the most powerful of the three. There's two versions - Community which is free, and Enterprise which costs depending on how large your store is. The pros normally use Magento - huge, well-established businesses and people who are extremely comfortable with web design/development. The free version is great if you are okay with building your store from scratch - you can play around with the code as much as you want though, so you're not limited as to what you can do with your store. It can easily handle 10,000 more products.

WooCommerce - Probably the best middle-ground between the too. Similar to Magento, it lets you play around as much as you like with the code. It's a WordPress addon for turning your site into an ecommerce store. There's a huge community that offers help and support, and it's not quite as powerful as Magento. This might be a good starting point if you want to start your store for free just to play around.

I will say, however, that I work for an inventory management software (Veeqo) and the vast majority of our customers use Shopify, making it very popular.

 

[TotalWebSolutions]

The most popular sites are probably Shopify, Magento and WooCommerce. They're all good, but for different reasons.

Magento - This is the most powerful of the three. There's two versions - Community which is free, and Enterprise which costs depending on how large your store is. The pros normally use Magento - huge, well-established businesses and people who are extremely comfortable with web design/development. The free version is great if you are okay with building your store from scratch - you can play around with the code as much as you want though, so you're not limited as to what you can do with your store. It can easily handle 10,000 more products.

Just bear in mind that Magento CE (Community Edition) is known for being very resource hungry and not best suited to standard shared hosting. Instead you will want optimized hosting for Magento, usually VPS or Managed Sever depending on how big/busy the site is.

 

[Dan_HiHosting]

There are so many opinions thrown around, and a lot of bias here.

@JodieVeeqo your post was quite helpful, thanks.

If you're self hosting, the popular choices are OpenCart, PrestaShop and Magento.
We list some of the other alternatives here: http://www.hihosting.co.uk/ecommercehosting.html
However the likes of Zen Cart and so forth are either rather outdated, not popular or both.

In terms of weight, OpenCart is the lightest weight, Magento is the heaviest, and PrestaShop sits somewhere between the two.

PrestaShop is perhaps easier to make look good out of the box than OpenCart.
But then you can just add an excellent premium theme such as Journal to OpenCart, which many of clients use, for a really professional and good looking store.

PrestaShop is also harder to customise than OpenCart.

Magento scales the farthest, and so is the most suitable for massive stores. However it's heavyweight, so performs worse on the same level of hosting, and is harder to use.

OpenCart is probably the easiest to use.

For that reason we normally recommend OpenCart, unless you have specific needs for features only provided by Magento.

Magento does have more extensions available, and specific features not provided by other open source shopping carts.

PrestaShop to us just sits a bit uncomfortably in the middle, having neither the lightweight flexibility of OpenCart, or the rich feature set and scalability of Magento.

There are a whole host of hosted solutions available, Shopify probably being the most popular.
If you're wanting to build the website yourself, and aren't very technical, then it can be the easiest way to get started.
However it's also the least affordable, and least flexible.
By combining the website and hosting, you can't easily scale up or use another provider.
When your business grows, and you need specific functionality not provided by Shopify, you'll then have to find a work around - or get your website redeveloped using a platform such as OpenCart or Magento.

It can actually work out more cost effective, especially in the long run, to simply use an open source eCommerce platform, and get a designer or developer to create your website for you.
Obviously if you're comfortable doing it yourself, or with just a little assistance, then this works out far cheaper.

So if you're starting out we normally recommend OpenCart. It performs very well, is lightweight and easy to use, and as your business grows you can easily scale both the hosting - by moving to a VPS or Dedicated Server, and the design - by paying professionals to build upon what you've already built, and easily add a professional design that takes it to the next level - without having to switch platforms, migrate data, and so forth.

Obviously we're biased for self hosted solutions, but they certainly are the more flexible and affordable option.

 

[Parcelhub]

Depends on how many SKUs you have, some platforms are better suited to vast product ranges.

Beginner - Shopify
Large product range - Magento, WooCommerce
Selling via multiple channels - Linnworks, Brightpearl