Woocommerce - Bluepark ?

[mrsmcy]

We are looking to move our site from Bigcommerce after their price increase. I'm debating Woocommerce and Bluepark at the moment. We sell personalised products so have lots of variations. We also sell products in lot of colours so it would be great to have colour swatches on the category pages. We currently use Linnworks for order management, printing invoices and interlink integration. Sagepay and paypal for payments.

Woocommerce - I like the designs you can have, found lots of templates that are lovely and could fit with a gorgeous re-brand of the whole site. Looking for a very image focused site. Plugins look good and a nice way of giving our site the edge in a highly competitive market. Unsure about the backend in wordpress. Can you mark orders as dispatched, email customers their order has been sent, etc?? I like that its good for SEO.

Bluepark - Backend looks good, like they are UK based. Support seems incredible. Adding product variations looks harder than big commerce but doable. Biggest draw back is the look of the sites. Very template looking. They said they have new templates coming out but haven't been able to see an examples. Worried they will look very template like still. But i'm so tempted as their support seems so good.

Does anyone use either platforms and have any thoughts or suggestions?

 

[Keithy]

Don't have any experience of these but would be interested in others experience as we too are looking at leaving Bigcommerce due to price increase and lack of features.

One thing i noticed with Bluepark is the lack of apps that integrate with it. We use Veeqo for order processing although currently manually import order from BC. Amazon and Ebay are automatic.

Currently looking at Shopify as we are at the early stages of launching a different site with this platform. Plenty of apps and features just don't like having to use their card processing as we get a much better deal through the FSB scheme.

 

[Tin]

The Bluepark system is excellent. Personally, I don't have an account with them but I have worked with a few of their clients and used their admin system, it's very, very good in my opinion. Support is excellent too, no waiting around and it's always been an informed person who's picked up the call. They host in the UK, I don't know where Woo host but I would make sure you choose someone whose servers are UK based.

Yes, they do have a small number of design templates but they do also have some very decent designers behind the scenes who (for a fee) will come up with something good and unique for you if you're prepared to pay.

In my mind, they've got the best all-round system in the UK.

Hope that helps

Ray

 

[kulture]

I use woocommerce and linnworks. The interface is a 3rd party program but it works well.

 

[Alan]

Can you mark orders as dispatched, email customers their order has been sent, etc?

Yes you can

 

[mrsmcy]

Thanks everyone for your replies. As much as I want to go with Bluepark there are a couple of things that put me off. Mainly they don't have API so can't work with Linnworks cloud which is how we currently manage our orders etc. It seems that woo commerce can with an app. Woo commerce is a plugin for wordpress so we can use UK host. It's really the support I like Bluepark with but think at the moment woo commerce might be better suited to us. I hate making big decisions like this!

 

[neils3]

I've used woo commerce and would def recommend it. You can actually create your own custom design if you don't like the themes available but there seem to be quite a few options compared to when we first used it 4 years ago.

 

[Linn Systems]

Hi Mrsmcy,

As much as I want to go with Bluepark there are a couple of things that put me off. Mainly they don't have API so can't work with Linnworks cloud which is how we currently manage our orders etc. It seems that woo commerce can with an app.

Its worth mentioning that we are currently in beta testing of a direct integration with WooCommerce for Wordpress. This will mean you will not have to use the 3rd party integration of incur fees for doing so.

Please keep an eye on our Blog articles and emails over the next few weeks and we should announce the release of the integration.

If you have any further questions please get in contact.

Kind Regards,

The Linn Systems Team.

 

[goodweb171]

+1 for woocommerce I've used it on lots of clients websites, it's a very good ecommerce system.

 

[anthonyd]

We use Woocommerce + Linnworks for our site, +1 for a good setup with lots of flexibility once you have it all going.