The Best Platform for eCommerce Website Development

Featured article by Dmytriy Petrov, Independent Technology Author

You sell your T-shirts in the brick-and-mortar store and have 5 clients on Tuesday and 15 on Sunday. Great T-shirts, they are cotton and stuff! Still, this damn Steve sells 100 a day, although you began on the same ground. And his T-shirts are 80% viscose! What the…?

Well, Steve is keeping up with the times. He made his online shop long ago before you even googled eCommerce.

To approach Steve’s T-shirts’ success, launch a store website. If you want to beat the hell out of him, make it appealing and user-friendly. The first step on your way to the online retail world is choosing an eCommerce platform. Better than Steve’s. You’ll need the best one.

How to choose the best platform?

We will consider open-source platforms, as for them you need no license. First, know all the details of your business. Understand your market and target audience. The best platform is the one that fits your needs. If your T-shirts are popular only among the teenagers of Belgium, you can go for less complex apps. Those are WooCommerce, OpenCart or PrestaShop. For medium-sized and small businesses they will be enough

WooCommerce is so simple, that even IT devs with little experience can help you launch the website. The drawbacks are that the apps will work slow from time to time. With more customers coming, it will fall. The thing is that WooCommerce was first created for blogs. Facebook and Instagram came, and it lost popularity. So the blog turned into the platform for eCommerce. Now it provides different themes (because you cannot sell lipsticks and spare tires with one design). You can add categories, tags, and attributes to each T-shirt. Steve has WooCommerce. But you need something better, right?

OpenCart and Prestashop

These platforms are suitable for small- and medium-sized businesses. Unlike WooCommerce, they were originally designed to meet the needs of eCommerce. So, you will require a crew of devs that know how to rock the online retail world. Sapient Development Team works with these platforms. OpenCart has additional features, like multi-languages, different payment getaways, image zoom.PrestaShop has 300 built-in features. They manage catalog, payments, shipping, manufacturers and suppliers. You don`t need to set these plugins additionally up.

Magento

What if you earned enough money to sell not only T-shirts, but also jeans, and cups, and books, and spare tires…. What if you need to create a website for thousands of products? Big business requires a more elaborate and convenient platform, like Magento. Why is it so great?

1. In 2018 Adobe bought it, providing with powerful support. It can work with great amounts of products, unlike WooCommerce, Opencart, and PrestaShop. 

2. 5000 items – simple platforms break and, well, let`s thank them for trying to bear it. With 5000 and more items, Magento won`t even budge in the wrong direction. 

3. For a large number of products, it is usually difficult to build a flexible discount system. Magento brings it to reality.

4. Magento uses Progressive Web Apps integration. It enables the website`s style and logical functions to be cached, meaning it can work offline. It also looks like a native smartphone app. PWA is fast, needs fewer resources and less Internet traffic. On top of that is the fact that Google prioritizes the sites which use PWA.

With Magento, you can choose a community edition which is free. The only thing to pay for would be the maintenance of the website. There is also an enterprise edition available for purchase only. Consider it when your business grows so much, that you don`t even remember Steve and his viscose T-shirts.