Which eCommerce Platform is the Best Choice

By: Mark Tillison

Starting an eCommerce business sounds like it should be easy, but users quickly get stuck on which eCommerce platform is the best choice for their business.

Around 75% of the world’s eCommerce stores are based on just five eCommerce platforms, the most widely used being Magento, WooCommerce, Shopify, BigCommerce, 3dcart and PrestaShop. In addition to those, you’ve the question of whether you go hosted, or self-hosted, not forgetting which payment gateway you should choose and even where to host your eCommerce platform.

Given the multitude of options, which eCommerce platform is the best choice for your business?

Which eCommerce Platform is the Best Choice

Let’s start with narrowing the options to create an eCommerce shortlist. Remember that you need to consider where your business will be in 2-5 years, not just for launch:

1. How many different products do you expect to list on your store?

2. Will you need the eCommerce platform to integrate with other systems you use for processing, shipping and accounting?

3. Are the products simple – a book or a DVD is easy, but what about clothes which come in different sizes or colours? How about products which can be ordered by length?

4. Do you have a heap of data which you need to import from an existing system, and will your choice of eCommerce platform support the importing of that data?

5. How portable is your data once you’ve chosen the eCommerce platform – if you need to move later on, how easy or tough is that going to be?

6.  How strong are your technical skills? Some platforms could be implemented yourself with some skills, whereas others will need services from an experienced specialist to both implement and support.

7.  How many orders do you expect to process per month and what do you expect the annual eCommerce turnover to be?

8. What budget do you expect to spend building an eCommerce store, migrating or populating data and on hosting, maintenance and support?

Knowing the answers to those questions before you start comparing different eCommerce platforms will help make your journey more productive, help you avoid wasting time investigating the wrong platforms, talking to the wrong providers and worse still, ending up with an eCommerce platform that doesn’t support your needs.

eCommerce Platform Comparison

We checked out a few of the primary eCommerce platform candidates to compare the offerings and find out what eCommerce platform is the best choice for each business situation.

Magento

Starting with what many may argue is the market leader, Magento has been around for many years and has a huge developer community. In terms of customisation and scalable performance, Magento is among the best your search for an eCommerce platform is likely to reveal.

We caught up with Adam King, co-founder and Magento guru at Bournemouth-based Media Lounge, where a team of 15 have been working with the Magento platform for 8 years since it was launched. They’ve designed, programmed and supported over 160 Magento eCommerce websites to date. They’re fully Magento certified and also run their own eCommerce store so truly practise what they preach!

Why Did You Chose Magento?

We adopted Magento when it first came out 8 years ago as it seemed to have thought more about the scalability of eCommerce and the future growth of businesses more than any other platform. It’s also programmed in the most common programming language PHP.

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