How to chose the right E-commerce platform for you

By Gabor Imre + Daniel Kerek

How to choose your ecommerce platform?

Whether you are an ecommerce manager working for a large retail company or the owner of a downtown boutique, once you decide to launch (or migrate to) a new ecommerce store, you face the question:

Which ecommerce platform should I choose?

You have probably heard and read about a bunch of systems, but still struggle with getting an objective overview about them.

Here’s some help for you. This guide will summarize and cover the main points, as simply as possible, on which you can make your decision.

Also, you will learn about the main features and characteristics of the 5 most popular ecommerce platforms so you’ll see which may suit your needs the best.

The Market

Today, there are about 400 ecommerce platforms globally (according to Datanyze), which is quite a lot considering you need only one at the end of the day.

We have mercilessly narrowed this plethora of options down to 5 platforms that we believe would serve the needs of the great majority of e-tailers.

If you have extremely special requirements, you still have the option to have your own online store developed from scratch, but that, of course, is a different story.

These 5 platforms are the following:

• Magento
• Shopify
• WooCommerce
• PrestaShop
• BigCommerce

If we take a look at the market trends, we can see how these platforms have performed against each other during the past few years (based on Google Trends data):

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2015-01-01%202017-08-17&q=magento,shopify,woocommerce,prestashop,bigcommerce

Although this chart is rather “general”, taking only search trends for these keywords into account, we can still conclude that while Magento and PrestaShop has lost some of its popularity, WooCommerce and BigCommerce are on a rather flat curve, and Shopify has been growing remarkably.

The combined market shares of these platforms take up approx. 56% of ecommerce sites among the Alexa top 1 million websites globally (data from Datanyze):

• Magento: 20%
• WooCommerce: 17%
• Shopify: 10%
• PrestaShop: 7%
• BigCommerce: 2%

https://www.datanyze.com/market-share/e-commerce-platforms/Alexa%20top%201M/

Basic Requirements

No matter what kind of online business you want to pursue, regardless of size, revenue, product range, etc., there are certain criteria that any ecommerce platform simply must meet in 2017.

Page Speed

Nowadays users are very sensitive to page load times. Half of them expect a website to load under 2 seconds and even a 1 second delay reduces conversions by 7%.

Furthermore, Google also measures load times and ranks those pages higher that load faster.

Therefore, for an ecommerce business it crucial to have a fast website, basically as fast as possible.

Mobile Friendliness

Today the number of product searches on mobile devices is higher than on desktop machines.

This means that every e-merchants should follow a “mobile first” approach making sure their store looks good, runs smooth and fast, and also can be used conveniently on mobile devices.

When looking at a specific ecommerce platform, always test if it works seamlessly on every device, most importantly on the most popular smartphones used by your target audience (e.g. iPhone 7 or Samsung Galaxy S).

Security

Since an ecommerce business handles sensitive customer data on a daily basis, it is of extreme importance that it runs in a highly secure environment.

Tens of thousands of websites are hacked each day which means that the threat of breaking your online store is constantly “in the air”.

Basic Payment Methods

No ecommerce store can perform its basic function, selling, if a shopper cannot pay for the products he puts in the cart.

Your store’s payment system should be able to handle at least Visa and MasterCard transactions. That’s the bare minimum.

But there can be significant regional differences, so you should study very carefully your target market’s preferred payment methods as well.

For example, in North America, approx. 90% of all online retail transactions are made via credit cards whereas in Western Europe digital wallets are also very popular.

In the Netherlands iDEAL, a national payment method, is used for online payments more than 80% of the time. In China and India people rather use so called smartcards because of security reasons…

Minimal SEO Features

We assume that at least 90% of e-merchants want to have shoppers coming via search engines, especially Google.

If you want to get your online store (your products and product categories) found by customers using search engines, there are a number of features that you need to have.

Setting H1, H2, Title, Meta Description tags and URLs for products and product categories is a minimal requirement. The option of Adding Alt Title and/or Title elements to your images is also a necessary feature.

These are “must-have” functions that any ecommerce platform should provide. But to be successful with your ecommerce business you’ll need a lot more additional features.

What are these features? Well, here comes the part where you should examine, as completely as possible, what your needs are.

Let us help you by popping up some questions. By answering these you’ll have a better understanding about your needs and expectations as well as your objectives and strategy of your online business.

• How many products do you sell?
• What kind of products do you offer?
• How many visitors do you expect to have daily?
• Are you a small business or startup?
• Are you a large enterprise?
• What is your budget?
• Do you have specific design and branding ideas?
• Are you OK with a standard ecommerce theme for your website?
• Do you want your store kept as simple as possible?
• Do you wish to have everything customized (layout, graphics, admin area, etc.)?
• Do you want to connect an ERP system to your store?
• Who are your target customers?
• Do you want to sell on social networking sites as well?
• Do you want to have a blog page on your ecommerce site?
• Do you want to run promotions regularly (with coupons and discounts)?
• Do you want to create a marketplace?
• Do you want to run a dropshipping business?
• Do you want different language versions of your store?
• Do you want to have some extra / special payment methods?
• Would you like to self-educate yourself and do everything yourself or do you plan to hire someone to manage your store?
• When do you want to launch your store?
• Do you have experience in ecommerce or are you a newbie?
• Will you need support?

Now that you’ve given some consideration to your own needs, you probably have a more precise idea about what kind of ecommerce store you’d like to have.

So now’s the time to have a look at our selected 5 ecommerce platforms more in detail along different parameters, so that you can see which would best fit your requirements.

Small business or enterprise?

Probably the most important aspect when choosing an ecommerce platform is defining the “project size and complexity”.

In general, a small ecommerce business or startup has much more modest needs or at least it has a much more limited budget.

If you want to launch your first store to test the market or gain some initial experience in ecommerce, it’s better to go for a SaaS (Software as a System). In this case you do not have to worry about hosting, updates or security, these are all included in a subscription package.

Shopify and BigCommerce are such systems where the basic plans have such features with which you can easily get a first glance at how ecommerce works on an introductory level.

You can choose your free theme, upload your products, add titles and descriptions, start blogging, etc.

WooCommerce is still a rather simple solution for similar purposes. However, it is not a dedicated ecommerce platform, but a plugin of WordPress (so you should find a hosting service provider), with which you may need to ask an expert to help you set up your store – add a theme, security, SEO and other plugins to make it work as you wish.

PrestaShop is a more complex and costly process to implement and as an open source system, you are responsible for hosting it and you also may rely on a web developer to make everything functional. Therefore using it is recommended only after you have serious plans with your ecommerce business and have gained some experience in it.

Magento is clearly for more serious companies. Since developing a basic Magento store costs at least approx. $2,000-3,000 and a tailor-made, complex store costs $100,000+, we recommend it for larger companies and enterprises, especially Magento Commerce (formerly Magento Enterprise).

Additionally, Shopify Plus and BigCommerce Enterprise also target the enterprise segment offering SaaS solutions tailored to the specific needs of the big e-tailers.

There is no official pricing information concerning these systems since companies are given quotes directly from the service providers.

However, it can be said that a Shopify Plus store costs a minimum of $2,000 per month. BigCommerce states that their Enterprise solutions come at a lower price than that of either Magento or Shopify: you can have a basic enterprise store for $1,000 a month.

We’re not going into more detail about the different enterprise solutions since it’s a rather complex topic and also in all cases it depends on the specific needs of each company what kind of (partially or fully) customized ecommerce system is delivered at the end of the day.

Now we are taking a look at the different features and characteristics of the 5 selected ecommerce platforms compared to each other.

Pricing

We’ve already mentioned the costs of enterprise ecommerce solutions.

Now we’re describing the price ranges of the different platforms that are applicable to small and medium sized businesses.

Magento

Creating even a very basic Magento store is not cheap since it requires some expert help right from installation. It costs at least $2,000 and if you want a “decent”, custom store with more features, extensions, and also ERP integration, it can easily pump up your expenses to approx. $40,000–$100,000.

The hourly rates of Magento development range between approx. $50–$200, depending on the region and whether you want to work with independent developers or agencies.

In addition, after you have launched your store, you’ll need to pay for hosting, maintenance, and probably support as well. Shared hosting services cost $50–$120 / month while a dedicated server costs approx. $500–$750 / month.

Maintenance, support and some additional developments are needed to “keep your store on track”, which takes about 50-100 hours of work per month. Again, depending on whether you assign a freelancer or a development agency, this can cost you between $3,000–$20,000 per month.

Shopify

The pricing scheme here is much simpler. There are three subscription plans for which you get maintenance, hosting, security, support, and bandwidth.

You need to note, however, that on top of credit card transaction costs, which are applied with any ecommerce store, you need to pay transaction fees (2%–0.5%) based on your annual revenue if you use external payment gateways (other than Shopify Payments).

WooCommerce

To add the WooCommerce plugin to your WordPress page does not cost a thing.

However, making your WooCommerce store fast, secure, optimized, and fully functional, you will most probably need a programmer or development agency and also a reliable hosting company.

First, you need to find a theme that usually costs $20-$100, either on a one time or yearly basis.

Security, payment, shipping, marketing, and other plugins cost approx. $300-$500 per year.

Freelancers are much cheaper than agencies and Indian developers are also much cheaper than Americans. So you can have a “normal” WooCommerce store created for $1,000-$7,000. Yes it’s a huge difference and generally you have to pay special attention to developers on the low-end of the spectrum in terms of risk (deadline, functionality, support, bugs, security, etc.).

Hosting costs generally start at $10-$100 and can rise into the thousands per month if your traffic grows and you want to make your load speed faster.

All in all, keeping a WooCommerce store roughly costs $500-$1,500 a month.

PrestaShop

Although it’s free to download, setting up PrestaShop and adding modules is not simple. Therefore you’ll most likely need to hire web developers.

To have an “average” PrestaShop store created roughly costs $1,000-$3,000.

Monthly hosting costs, depending on your traffic, can start from $10 and can go up to several hundred or even several thousand dollars if you have a lot of visitors and orders.

If you need support, it’s $300 (3 hours) a month or an annual $480 (6 hours), which seems to be quite expensive.

Modules, add-ons and integrations are not cheap either, on average $20-$50 (one time), but some are much more costly, e.g. Amazon Marketplace add-on: $240.

BigCommerce

Similarly to Shopify, BigCommerce has monthly plans for having an online store including hosting, security, updating, and support services.

The prices are also similar to that of Shopify:

However, you don’t have to pay any extra transaction fees other than credit card transaction fees.

On the other hand, you have to keep in mind that you can stay with a certain plan only up to a sales limit. E.g. you can use the Standard plan until your online sales per year reach $50,000. Above that you need to upgrade to the Plus plan.

Security, Reliability, Speed, and Scalability

We’ve already mentioned security as a basic requirement.

To make it short, we can state that all 5 of the selected platforms meet the highest security standards. Shopify and BigCommerce, the two SaaS platforms are continuously monitored and updated in this respect.

Magento, WooCommerce, and PrestaShop, being open source systems, always need to get updated and the appropriate patches or plugins deployed manually. If this process is in “good hands”, there’s no need to worry about the security of your ecommerce store.

Reliability, speed, and scalability largely depend on the hosting environment.

Shopify and BigCommerce have their hosting capacities “in house”, both promising 99.99% uptime. They also ensure that your store loads fast and even in peak periods (e.g. holiday seasons), thanks to automatic upscaling, it won’t suffer any crashes.

Hosting for Magento can be just as efficient if a dedicated managed hosting service is applied. There is a good number of providers specialized in Magento hosting.

For WooCommerce you can choose any service provider, but the simplest way is probably selecting one that WordPress recommends (Bluehost, DreamHost, SiteGround). They all provide infrastructure that makes your store fast and reliable.

The hosting partner of PrestaShop, 1$1 hosting, also offers high standard security and performance.

So basically all these 5 platforms can be operated in a world-class hosting environment.

What you need to note is that in some cases your store’s performance and user experience can be deteriorated by plugins or modules interfering with each other, especially in the case of PrestaShop.

Customizability

If we were to rank the selected 5 platforms from a customizability point of view, we’d list them in the following order:

1. Magento
2. PrestaShop
3. WooCommerce
4. Shopify
5. BigCommerce

Our basic ranking criterion is the ability to create a totally custom store, including frontend design, backend and admin features, and integrations (CRM, payments, etc.).

Here, we believe, Magento is the winner. A professional Magento developer team can virtually create any store you wish for – with all kinds of features, design elements, dashboard functions, etc.

Similarly, PrestaShop is highly customizable, but it may be harder to find a dedicated developer who knows all the ins and outs of the system. You can even make some minor changes to the default theme (add your logo and new banners, change fonts and colors) without any coding.

Although WooCommerce is open source as well and you can alter the code any time, it takes more effort to make it fully customized. Users and developers rather go for the readily available themes and plugins they prefer and build up their store that way. If needed, some further modifications can be made to these to even better suit your expectations.

Customization of Shopify and BigCommerce stores is basically limited to storefront design (frontend) changes.

Shopify has more options, there is a good number of free and premium themes in which you can modify colors, fonts, language strings, etc. In terms of backend, you can make some changes, but since it’s not open source, the vast majority of the code cannot be altered.

BigCommerce is a similar story. You have some customizable templates, but not as many as with Shopify. You can even change CSS and HTML according to your needs. However, although they introduced “Stencil”, their theme platform, lots of developers still complain it’s too restrictive.

Backend functionality is basically “set in stone”, so there’s not much you can change there.

Features, Plugins, Extensions, & Apps

All together, for these 5 platforms, there is a plethora of different core features, add-ons, extensions, and apps. Many of them perform the same or similar functions, some are more developed and user friendly than others.

It’s impossible to compare every solution of each of these platforms, so we are focusing on the basic differences and highlight some exceptional features that are truly worth mentioning.

The default features for each of these 5 platforms are different. For the SaaS systems, Shopify and BigCommerce, it depends on the selected plan what kind of features you get right away.

It seems, for the same amount of money you’ll get more from BigCommerce than from Shopify. For example, gift cards and professional reporting tools are included in BigCommerce’s Standard plan ($29.95), while Shopify offers these in its $79 “Shopify” plan.

On top of that, Shopify offers some advanced tools, e.g. product reviews and recommendations, only in their App Store.

On the other hand, Shopify offers a lot more storefront theme options than BigCommerce does, including more than 20 free themes.

The total number of apps & integrations is approx. four times larger in the Shopify App Store than in the BigCommerce Ecommerce Apps Marketplace (2,000 vs. 500).

Should you have any problems, you’ll get 24/7 support from both companies including email, chat, and telephone, and you can also have access to a great number of tutorials.

If we take a look at PrestaShop, we find that it includes over 600 features already built in (free), so that’s most probably enough for any kind of e-merchant starting his ecommerce site.

Some of these are worth highlighting: unlimited products and categories, bulk import/export, tax rules, 65 languages, abandoned cart information, automated follow-up emails.

On top of these, there are over 2,000 mobile friendly design themes (all paid, $70-$400) and 3,500 free and paid modules in the PrestaShop Addons Marketplace, so you’ll most probably find the kind of solution you’re looking for.

But you should be aware that all these have been created by hundreds of different developers, and a number of them may be of poor quality or interfere with other modules. Therefore you should take care of what kind of solutions you select – check the ratings, reviews, and forums beforehand.

WooCommerce also offers a wide range of functions, such as pre-installed payment gateways, automatic taxes, product variables, inventory management, product reviews, and reporting, just to name a few.

A great advantage of WooCommerce is that, since it’s WordPress based, its content management system is highly advanced and easy to handle. You can easily publish blog posts and also build additional portfolio or news sites if you’d like to.

Since content marketing is a must in today’s highly competitive environment, a state-of-the-art content management system is a big pro here.

There are approx. 300 extensions for WooCommerce, which is not a lot compared to the rest of the platforms, but since it already has many “out of the box” features, we can say that with the help of the extensions, you’ll be able to create a fully functional store serving all your needs.

Magento’s core feature list is quite lengthy. From all kinds of marketing, promotions, SEO, and catalog management tools to sophisticated checkout, order management, and analytics solutions, you’ll find basically everything you can think of in the first place.

Should you need more extra features, you can get them from Magento Marketplace or even have your custom feature developed and integrated in your store.

That’s the beauty of the Magento ecommerce system: you can have anything you like.

But, of course, it has its price: you need to hire a developer or an agency to deliver the solutions you wish to have.

Summary

As you can see, there are lots of aspects you need to consider before choosing an ecommerce platform.

But the most important is your own business objectives and needs. The more precisely you can define them, the better and easier you can make your choice.

As a final takeaway, let us sum up in five points the basic characteristics of the 5 platforms we’ve been talking about.

Magento

A fully customizable, state-of-the-art ecommerce platform with lots of built-in features. Creating and maintaining a Magento store takes time and money since it requires an expert team for development and hosting. It’s recommended for mid and enterprise sized businesses.

Shopify

It’s a great option if you are a small business and want to start selling online. You can start with the Basic package, comprising the fundamental features, and, as you get more experience and start growing, you can upgrade to more advanced plans. You get 24/7 support and there’s no need to worry about hosting, security, and upgrading.

WooCommerce

If you’re already familiar with WordPress and you know a reliable developer or agency who can help you, setting up and managing a WooCommerce store, which suits your expectations, will be relatively easy. Managing your content marketing projects (creating blog posts, inserting videos, podcasts, landing pages, etc.) won’t be a challenge.

PrestaShop

It comes with 600+ features by default and you can add a lot of extras to your online shop to further match your needs. You’ll need a specialist to make everything work fine – storefront, security, add-ons, backend, hosting, etc.

BigCommerce

As a SaaS, it’s similar to Shopify, but gives you more features for the same amount of money. It’s easy to set up, use, and integrate with social channels, though it offers only a few free templates. It’s ideal for starting your first e-commerce store fast and easy.