There are many E-Commerce platforms available in the market that can be used for your Business. In order to determine which E-Commerce software is best for your online business, it is essential to understand different characteristics and functionality of these E-Commerce platforms.
Therefore, you can pick the best suited E-Commerce solution for your website according to your business requirements like shopping cart, Ordering capabilities, User accounts, search, navigation, reporting etc.
Most popular E-Commerce platforms and their characteristics are as below:
Magento
Magento is the high performance, scalable e-commerce solution. It has class features and the flexibility required to create E-commerce solution.
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Pros
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Cons
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- Manage multiple store, multi-language & multi-currency support and is mobile and search engine friendly.
- The store is well organized and the administration area is user friendly.
- It provides template Architecture.Which enables to customize the site as required.
- Advanced SEO features that can be exploited to make all the difference, bringing organic traffic, reducing the costs of digital marketing.
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- It is an extremely large system thus requires expert developer to deal with.
- Magento requires dedicated servers to host otherwise it will run slow thus frustrating the user.
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- Magento provides 2 platforms
Magento Community: It is Free Edition. Its functionality can be extended by installing extensions.
Magento Enterprise: it is design for large businesses and charges annual maintenance fees.
Shopify
Shopify is an amazing platform for building an online retail business.
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Pros
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Cons
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- Provides complete integrated eCommerce platform.
- You only need to sign up and everything is handled in one place.
- Provides huge array of additional functionality.
- Provides iPad integration and payment processing which makes it complementary to a retail store.
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- Themes are not well-designed, thus proper coding knowledge is required for tweaking their appearance.
- Running cost is higher as compared to other ecommerce platforms.
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Virtuemart
Virtuemart is an open source E-commerce solution designed as an extension of the Joomla.
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Pros
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Cons
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- Virtuemart requires less technical knowledge.
- It allows you nevertheless to quickly put your shop online and maintain it easily.
- There are many extensions readily available so you don't have to program this yourself.
- It offers a catalog mode where the shopping cart features are turnoff.
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- Virtuemart has slow development process and lacks default advanced functionalities.
- Limited control over the platform.
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WooCommerce
WooCommerce is an open-source eCommerce platform that takes the form of a plug-in that runs on top of the WordPress Content Management System (CMS).
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Pros
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Cons
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- Woocommerce runs on WordPress and it’s completely free.
- The store’s look is clean and modern; it works in mobile device as well.
- It provides free plugging.
- Store configuration and product uploading is simple.
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- Technical knowledge is required, although the key skills are easy to learn.
- WordPress sites do require some regular maintenance in order to keep them secure.
- Updates are fairly frequent.
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The pros and cons of all the e commerce software are mentioned here. Choose the one that best suits your requirements. If you find this article helpful or if you wish to add something kindly let us know in the comment section.