Thinking about making the shift to online sales? It is a no-brainer, right? But what you are going to find out real quick is the abundance of e-commerce platforms available, everyone has their favorite and there are benefits and disadvantages to everyone. As an e-commerce developer, we have done our homework!
In our position all we can do is learn about the product as much as possible, test it and adapt. This helps us provide the best recommendation for that client's needs. From over 30 years combined development experience comes a lot of opinions, testing and knowledge and this is why we put together our top three E-Commerce products and why.
#1. Big Commerce: www.BigCommerce.com
BigCommerce is probably the fastest growing e-commerce platform out there. They are focusing on features and making a mark in the e-commerce world.
Pros: They have a huge application base that you can add on to your store with free and paid options. They have baked in options like cart abandonment, upselling features and a very easy to use payment system. Support is also top notch.
Cons: If you are looking for a lot of custom work done in BigCommerce it isn’t an e-commerce developers dream but it can be done if you know the product. This is something they are working on though. Their user base and the team are too large at this point not to address something like this.
PS. We are a certified partner of BigCommerce so if you do want something custom, we are the only certified partners in Atlantic Canada.
#2 Shopify - www.shopify.com
Shopify is almost a basically a household name due to their marketing push they put on in 2016 resulting in gaining a large part of the market share. They have an easy to use product for a customer with little knowledge of web development. Our feeling is that shopify needs to make big moves or its going to be less common of a choice, but for now, its still one of the best.
Pros: They have their own POS system which is a huge plus, people want their stores to connect to a POS and having one specifically for the product they provide is nice.
Cons: Customization is poor, you basically have to hack the product in order for it to do the things you want it to do. These are obviously problems as an e-commerce developer, but to get the product you want, it could end up costing more because of the extra development time.
#3 Woo Commerce - www.woocommerce.com
Woo Commerce is a free application that can be used on any Wordpress site. Set up is easy and it’s used by over 100,000 people. While wanting to keep your existing Wordpress site, adding the WooCommerce plugin is your best bet to start selling online quickly.
Pros: Very easy to add to your existing website. The forums are fantastic because of its mass user volume. Where Woo-Commerce is widely used developers can create add-ons for purchase to help get you the features you might want.
Cons: Some say that Woo-Commerce is made for mass scales, but we feel that it isn’t. The multiple add-ons needed to run the store make it a slow application compared to the previous examples. Also where Woo-Commerce is a free add-on there is no support provided beside forums, which can be hit or miss if you need a quick answer.