Which e-Commerce Platforms Is Best – OpenCart, WooCommerce, Magento, or Shopify?

If you are planning on building an online store, selecting an e-Commerce platform is one of the most vital steps you will take as an entrepreneur. When you analyze e-Commerce platforms it can be extremely difficult to tell how minor differences in functions and performance can majorly affect your sales.

In this article, we will compare features like user-friendliness, pricing, SEO optimization and designs of the best e-Commerce platforms to empower you to select the appropriate platform for your business.

The market of e-Commerce platforms isn't a small one, there are truly many alternatives available – some may have a simple feel; however, that isn't generally enough, while some may feel to a great degree jumbled and give less expensive rates and costs. We hope after reading this article, you will be able to decide which platform addresses your issues and plays out the best.

1. Shopify

With a number of online customers; Shopify is undoubtedly the leading online platform when it comes to building an e-Commerce store. It is a hosted shopping cart that implies all the code issues are taken care of by Shopify, in spite of that; it gives you full control over the coding (HTML and CSS) of your site.

Today, Shopify is the most reliable e-Commerce platform that serves more than 325,000 businesses around the world. If you are planning to build a complex, still simple to-utilize online platform to offer products, Shopify is the thing that you require. It is a great e-Commerce builder.

The real advantage of Shopify is the community support that you can get if there is ever any issue that may happen amid the setup and post-setup process.

A few advantages of Shopify include:

User-friendliness: It has simple tools, drag and drop interface and simple theme altering advantages that give seamless user experience even to beginners. It has uncomplicated steps to check out as well.

Pricing: It offers 14-day free trial, after that, you have to purchase a month to month subscription, where the costs begin from $29 for the basic plan.

 SEO Optimization: It incorporates essential SEO features in all plans: editable Meta descriptions, title tags, pages URLs, ALT labels for pictures and so on.

Templates and Designs: It has a huge, imagery theme store where you can get wonderfully designed and responsive e-business layouts.

2. Magento

Second on our list is Magento. It is presently known as the most flexible e-commerce platform. Being actually a perfect work of software craftsmanship, it offers boundless possibilities for technically savvy store proprietors.

Magento supports numerous currencies and tax rates per area, item type or client group. It has the simple integration with various payment frameworks such as Paypal.

Magento comes with a professional look and well-organized classes. It offers the first class e-Commerce functionality and loads of choices to enable you in building your ideal online store. Everything is incorporated into it from promotions to private deals and client segmentation.

A few advantages of Magento include:

User-friendliness: With the arrival of Magento 2.0 the platform moved toward becoming easy to use. But, when compared with Shopify, it lacks somewhere in user-friendliness. Hence, it isn't the best alternative for the individuals who have less tech knowledge.

Pricing: When it comes to cost, Magento can offer two options; Magento CE (Community Edition) and Magento EE (Enterprise Edition). The EC version is free to download and utilize and you don’t require any month to month subscription for EC. While the pricing for EE will rely on the size of your business.

Search engine optimization: Here Magento is among leading e-Commerce platform since it is to a great degree SEO-optimized and offers a lot of SEO functionality. Bunches of SEO settings are accessible in Magento out of the box. Among them are Meta tags for home pages, products, image optimization, canonical tags for products and categories, alters of robot.txt, and so on.

Templates and Designs: Being one of the most popular e-Commerce platforms, Magento offer its users extremely beautiful and attractive themes and templates. Its design options are extremely clean and friendly to responsive designs. Magento offers both; free as well as paid templates.

3. WooCommerce

WooCommerce is among world's most loved e-Commerce platform. It comes as a free module to Industry ruling content management system (CMS) WordPress. It is an ideal solution for the individuals who need to build their own web store from the beginning or begin offering products utilizing their current WordPress blog or site.

WooCommerce is an adaptable open source platform. That implies its code is openly accessible for you to see, alter, and contribute. It makes WooCommerce a profoundly adaptable platform.

A few advantages of WooCommerce include:

User-friendliness: It is a user-friendly platform. But, it's a little more challenging than Shopify, when it comes to setting a store.

It is a plugin, not a membership-based platform like Shopify, which implies that you have to deal with a few things before working with WooCommerce. After all, it is less confounded and less demanding being used than Magento.

Prices and extra costs: It is free of cost e-Commerce plugin with free updates. However, if you require something more than just basic options, it provides priced extensions for Search Engine Optimization, more payment gateways and others. Its official extension pricing begins at $29.

SEO Optimization: WooCommerce just takes benefits of WordPress content integration, or what's accessible through outsider plugins. Thus, WooCommerce gives you to great degree SEO-particular alternatives. It is because of the fact that WooCommerce is based on WordPress, which offers boundless SEO potential.

E-Commerce Templates and Design: To be straightforward, WooCommerce has major benefits over Magento and Shopify with regards to designs. What does it mean? Putting aside particular WooCommerce themes, you can make any WordPress theme work with your plugin. There are many those layouts on the web.

4. OpenCart

It is a free open-source platform and an ideal match for small or medium-sized organizations. This platform is based on PHP, therefore, any individual would benefit from the background in PHP.

OpenCart also offers a core extension model, so if a greater functionality is required, you need to install a few add-ons. Luckily, OpenCart has a tremendous range of extensions, around 14,000.

OpenCart can give great site speed because of running on AJAX technology. It is stacked with every single function client needs from e-Commerce solution. Also, OpenCart multi-store function enables its clients to monitor and manage various stores from a solitary Admin panel. Furthermore, OpenCart permits to have shopping cart facilities, upload boundless products, categorize them, and so on.

A few advantages of OpenCart include:

User-friendliness: It is a fairly user-friendly and powerful platform which accompanies an exceptionally intuitive and well-designed interface. It's simpler than Magento, however more troublesome being used than WooCommerce. Even with constrained technical knowledge, you can without much of a stretch add, change or alter inside OpenCart without any headaches.

Prices and extra costs: When it comes to e-Commerce open-source platforms, the word 'free' sounds dubious. Obviously, OpenCart is free to download, utilize and even upgrade, but, it doesn't imply that you will run your store without any charges.

Considering that you are responsible for your security and hosting, fundamental costs will incorporate the domain name, SSL certificate and hosting. So, this is clear that you have to spend a significant sum of cash for purchasing different extensions.

Website optimization: When it comes to SEO, OpenCart is neither preferred nor worse than any other platform mentioned in our list. It has all fundamental SEO features you'd anticipate from a top of the line e-commerce platform and can take your products into the top positions easily. There are also a lot of amazing plugins if you need to give your OpenCart SEO performance some additional boost.

E-Commerce Templates and Design: OpenCart offers a lot of professionally designed and responsive templates. There are a number of them accessible, both free and paid, capable of giving your store the exceptionally alluring look. All things considered, you'd need some fundamental knowledge of CSS, HTML and JavaScript to apply them to your store legitimately. This makes template administration in OpenCart more mind-boggling than in WooCommerce or Shopify.

Conclusion

Taking everything into account, it is worth saying that all the above-mentioned platforms in our comparison list have bunches of comparative and diverse dazzling features they can gladly boast of. If the post helped you in finding the e-Commerce platform that matches your objectives and desires that implies we were striving not for nothing. If you are still confused, you can always contact the experienced web developers at Seasia Infotech for help.