As businesses are increasingly showing interest in selling their products and services on the web, Ecommerce is facing widespread interest and drives of integration. With the increasing adoption of Ecommerce across websites of small and medium-sized businesses, it is upon Ecommerce platforms to shape the web trends and how the business will be done on the web.

But for making your web store one should have a clear idea of the tools, interfaces, risk factors and cost associated with the ecommerce platforms. This is precisely why you need to engage in a comparative study of the various ecommerce platforms before choosing one for your web store.

There is a whole range of options for a perfect ecommerce solution, whether paid or free. The good news is that until now most of the robust ecommerce platforms are free and one can integrate ecommerce capability in its website almost without much of a cost. WooCommerce from the WordPress family in this respect is most recommended because of its easy interface, robust scalability, extensive features and flexible design attributes. Let us now have a look at the various aspects that make WooCommerce the best ecommerce CMS for any business.

Ease of use

The best thing about WooCommerce is that even when you don’t have a WordPress website but you are nevertheless a beginner WooCommerce comes as the easiest and most powerful option.  If you are already WordPress user, you do not need to think any further than WooCommerce to integrate ecommerce capability into your website as it comes as a free plugin. WordPress is irrevocably easy to use and WooCommerce coming as an extension makes WordPress even more popular.

The interface of Magento is also easy to use and on top of that, it offers tutorial videos and detailed documentation for anyone to have a solid grasp. It comes packed with a fully featured installation wizard as well. The only minus point with Magento is that when you start adding extensions and plugins, it becomes complicated and difficult to use. So, for adding a lot of extensions and plugins you may require the help of a specialist web application developer.

OpenCart, on the other hand, is pretty easy to install. But you have two different ways to setup, respectively as manual installation and the single click script installer.

While the manual option is a lot complicated and the beginner can perceive it to be little tiresome at times, this will also offer a lot of scopes for customization. A script installer is a good option for fast-paced installation. To install OpebCart you can use one among the Softaculous and SimpleScripts installers.

Features

When it comes to ready to use features, Shopify can be considered as the best. Moreover, it offers all the basic features required by any small business when coming to the web with their products and services. But the main drawback is the huge $180 plus monthly fees that for any beginner can be quite troublesome to manage.

WooCommerce, on the other hand, offers all the basic ecommerce features including payment gateways, on-page traffic analytics, delivery settings, tax control, stock tracking, etc. Moreover, WooCommerce has robust SEO friendliness compared to any ecommerce platform listed here. On top of these, WooCommerce is highly flexible with an array of native plug-ins whole array of extensions as well as custom solutions.

OpenCart is also another feature rich platform with a shopping cart, the capability of displaying an unlimited number of products, extensive product categories, etc. The unique element of this platform is that it is capable of working with diverse languages and currencies allowing the great scope of marketplace development. With a lot of extensions, you can add any custom feature to the platform.

Magento offers all the features and capabilities for the fast growing and user-friendly business stores. Besides being tremendously SEO friendly it offers a lot of powerful web store functionalities. Besides the inbuilt features and functionalities, there are a lot of plugins and extensions available to add any custom feature to the platform.

Design

Shopify also offers a theme store with many well designed and responsive themes to design your web store. But Shopify is a hosted and paid platform and that is why you cannot add custom elements to make a look and feel of your choice. Only a handful of free themes are available in the Shopify store and the premium themes are available from $80.

WooCommerce may earn its name as an independent ecommerce solution but it is also a WordPress plugin and so all WordPress themes will just work fine with WooCommerce. Among the diverse themes available in WordPress you can pick your preferred one and let a web designer work on it integrate with your own design.

You can find a lot of paid and free themes in the extension store of OpenCart. You can further customize them to create your preferred look and feel.

Magento offers a whole array of highly customizable, responsive and mobile friendly themes in its extension store. After WooCommerce, it offers the largest number and variety of responsive themes for any custom designed web store.

Costs

All the ecommerce platforms discussed here including OpenCart, Magento and WooCommerce are absolutely free and offer a rich set of features. On the other hand, Shopify for almost the same range of features takes a price of $79 plus per month.

Except the enterprise version of Magento, all the open source platforms are offered for no cost. All  you need is to download them and build the web store at once. WooCommerce in spite of its limitation in basic options offers good extensibility with the addition of plugins and extensions.

Support

The ecommerce platforms mentioned heretofore are already well acclaimed and adopted widely. So, you can find help through an array of tutorials and manuals to create your custom web store with features and design elements of your preference. All the ecommerce platforms have robust communities to address any issue and seek design help. In respect of community support also WooCommerce comes as a clear winner with millions of users worldwide.

Author Bio

Keval Padia is a Founder & CEO at Nimblechapps, a fast-growing Android app development and WordPress website development company. The current innovation and updates of the field lure him to express his views and thoughts on certain topics.