Having an online store allows you the independence of selling your products 24/7 across the world. It costs much less than a regular brick and mortar store and can give you customers from across the world.

With the multitude of options out there, it’s hard to decide which platform to use. And the decision is an important one as the platform you choose may be the one you will have for years, if not decades to come and will be the foundation of your online store.

If you want to build an online store you have several options for eCommerce software, a platform you could use for your site. We decided to find out which is the most popular choice.

We reached out to 48 eCommerce experts and asked them one central question:

What is your favorite eCommerce platform and what features made you choose that particular software?

The results are:

Let’s dive into the expert’s answers and find out what are the advantages and disadvantages of each platform.

Anthony M. Spallone

Anthony M. Spallone

~ Anthony is currently the Chief Technology Officer at InstaViva & Hope Shades. He is also the administrative director at Arctic Grey, Inc. He is often asked to speak at events for various tech companies around the world to discuss design trends, branding, advertising, SEO and more.

My name is Anthony, and I’ve been designing websites for more than a decade. When choosing a favorite eCommerce Platform, there are two main things I look at, one being functionality and the second being ease of use.

Functionality. Shopify is the best eCommerce Platform out there concerning functionality with a wide array of plugins and apps from Shipping Modules, Fulfillment Solutions, over 70 Payment Gateways, Product Suggestions, and much more.

Shopify allows you to build responsive websites, so it’s perfect for all devices, and it’s very fast to load. This is a great solution for someone with a basic understanding of coding and web development.

Ease of Use. Wix is the best eCommerce platform out there regarding ease of use with a drag and drop editor and very intuitive for just about anyone. The best thing about Wix is that you don’t need to know how to code to build a website.

When building websites for clients, they tend to come back with a lot of changes and updates and are in constant need to pay a developer, but with Wix, we can build the site out and then the client can take over the daily management with ease.

Wix is a fixed view (not responsive), but there is a great mobile editor to convert your website into the perfect mobile experience.

Arturs Kruze

Arturs Kruze

~ Arturs is the CEO of Magebit, an eCommerce agency specialized on Magento. He is also a certified Magento developer and solution specialist. Arturus has more than six years professional Magento experience.

It is not possible to tell which eCommerce platform is the best. It depends on the customer needs which eCommerce platform to use.

My favorite is Magento, but it is not a good fit for small sites as the hosting and maintenance expenses are pretty high in comparison to Shopify or any other open source eCommerce platform. For medium and big sites, I suggest Magento (CE or EE) as Magento is very scalable and secure.

Around 90% of Magebit clients use Magento, and with the right developers and guidelines, this eCommerce platform is the path to success.

In my opinion, these are the main reasons to choose Magento:

  • Very large extension base (free and paid)
  • Easy to customize without touching core functionality
  • Secure with regular security patch releases
  • Fast growing community
  • Regular eCommerce events (Meet Magento)

Not every platform is perfect, and there are also cons for Magento:

  • High hosting cost in comparison with other eCommerce platforms
  • Expert developers needed for work as a developer with poor Magento knowledge can easily screw up the store

I have also used Shopify, Woocommerce, and others, but they are definitely far away from my favorite Magento because of the way other eCommerce platforms architecture look like.

Amit Bhaiya

Amit Bhaiya

~ Amit is the co-founder and CEO of DotcomWeavers, an award-winning web design, and development company with offices in Paramus, New Jersey; Orlando, Florida; and Hyderabad, India.

In my experience, Magento has several key features that make it stand out as one of the more robust and scalable eCommerce platforms.

  • Catalog management – Users can upload thousands of items in a single import.
  • Multiple pricing options – You can easily price different items, set up customer group pricing and hide prices from visitors to incentivize them to log in. This helps in gathering important customer information on product preferences.
  • Product alerts – My clients see an increase in sales from using simple alerts, such as letting customers know that a previously out-of-stock product is now available.
  • Multi-store enabled – Magento enables you to create a multi-language website that automatically loads store views in specific languages. It also makes it easy for B2B sites to simultaneously manage multiple product catalogs through a common back-end system.
  • Customized user interface – The platform has the ability to alter designs and modify themes based on categories. A business can have multiple storefronts with a single back-end management system. This is a powerful tool because of the more targeted the user experience, the greater the potential for conversion.
  • Order processing integration – Magento’s integration partnerships are second to none offering a host of order fulfillment solutions. These include NetSuite, QuickBooks, and ShipStation.

Praveen Dagdi

Praveen Dagdi

~ Praveen is the CEO of Achintya Tech, a company he started in 2013. Their specialties are mobile development and designing along with web designing and development.

Magento is free to download and install. You can tweak the source code anyway you want to suit the type of website you are building and install extensions that are easily available through the Magento Connect Marketplace.

Magento Connect, by the way also happens to be the world’s largest e-commerce app marketplace

One of the main complaints from users of other e-commerce platforms is the incremental cost that comes with every little feature that is added to the site.

With Magento being open source, that issue is a complete non-issue. Add as many features as you want to your site, without spending a dime.

Another problem is the limits on the number of products, product lines, and SKUs that can be uploaded and displayed on a platform. As you grow bigger, and your online store becomes more prolific, you start paying exponentially higher fees to your e-commerce platform provider.

This is another area where you end up spending nothing on Magento. Expand and grow as much as you like, and Magento will grow with you at no additional expense.

47% of today’s web users expect a site to load in under 2 seconds. Any longer than that and they simply close the tab and move on with their lives. Every customer that leaves without buying leaves behind yet another dent in your overall conversion rate.

With such pressure on performance, you would want a platform that loads fast, allows caching of pages easily, while still enabling you to have as many bells and whistles as you need on your e-commerce site.

We all know how important it is to make our websites as SEO friendly as possible. We also know the drudgery involved in optimizing every single aspect of each page on the site for SEO. This can be a bigger drag for large e-commerce sites running into hundreds or thousands of pages.

Hassan Bawab

Hassan Bawab

~ Hassan is the founder and CEO of Magic Logix, a Dallas, Texas-based agency specializing in customized marketing automation solutions for businesses worldwide.

My preferred E-commerce platform is Magento Enterprise.

I mainly like the performance and scalability of this platform along with out of the box functionality and long list of available plugins that can be integrated on the fly.

Also, I like the engaging shopping experience that you get with Magento and customer loyalty functionality.

David Holander

David Holander

~ David is a CEO and Co-Founder of Vaimo, one of the top global eCommerce solution providers on the Magento platform.

‘I would have to say it’s Magento. It was our platform of choice when we started the business in 2008 and Magento has been 100% our focus since.

We liked the fact that it was open-source, fully customizable, and it has allowed us to build many modules, deployment tools, hosting tools tied directly to Magento.’

Rehan Fernando

The Expert Name

~ Rehan is the founder and CEO of EIGHT25MEDIA is a Silicon Valley-based web design and development company.

Magento

  • It is open-source.
  • It is the #1 rated e-commerce platform.
  • It is extensible.
  • It is vast amount of extensions.

Amin Ghale

Amin Ghale

~Amin is an enthusiast eCommerce developer working as a consultant on Nirmal Web Design Sydney. He also loves to share his experience with the community through blogging. He has been working in the field for over 4 years now and excels on eCommerce platforms in PHP.

I have worked on several eCommerce platforms such as WooCommerce, Open Cart, and Magento. I found Magento most effective, feature-enrich and powerful platform for eCommerce web portals. It provides a complete package for online business and contains most of the required constraints for an eCommerce site.

What I most like about Magento are:

1) The multiple stores – Multi-store management has been such a pain for developers from past few years, but Magento made it easy for me with simple back-end tweaks.

2) Ads and event management – Magento Provides options for multiple layout settings for events and offers such as in a festive season we can set layouts for sale offers and other advertisements.

3) SEO management – Magento provides different tools and packages for SEO the Url rewrite, Headers Meta type settings, sitemap and the SEO friendly templates made it easy to work with.

4) Modular Design and Templating with blocks and layouts – The configuration based MVC design pattern and its modularity give developer a standard for working with Magento and the code consistency, reusability is the most for Php developers, particularly in eCommerce based sites it’s not feasible to write code from scratch for the concepts provided by client and Magento has taken care of it.

5) Wide Range of package availability – Magento Community provides many packages for specific client requirements such as social media sharing, SEO, and payment systems which are a boon to developers and they can save a lot of time from these.

6) Multiple payment gateway support – We can have variety of payment gateway integrated thanks to Magento Connect

7) Mobile Platform Support – We can find a variety of mobile-friendly templates at Magento Connect and it is really simpler to work with Magento M-Commerce where we can preview the mobile versions of different components of a site.

8) Flexible customer service and support – Magento provides ready to go features for customers, such as product delivery, shipping, wishlist cart management out of the box and what I like the most is the printed invoicing and bills that can be easily managed with Magento.

9) Multi-Language support – it provides localization features with cookies and also multi-currency, taxes options.

10) Web Services – Magento provides inbuilt functionality for web services such as SOAP, REST, XMLRPC incorporated with secure authentication techniques such as OAuth for products, categories, and other data which comes out of the box.

Joe Balestrino

Joe Balestrino

~ Joe is the founder and CEO of 4PointDigital is a veteran in the search space and former owner of Mr-SEO. Joe has helped hundreds of clients over the years and continues to be at the forefront of SEO strategies.

The selection of best-suited eCommerce platform will depend solely on your requirements like hosting services needed or not, prebuilt or customized store designs, integration of individual business and marketing activities including accounting, inventory management, customer service and email marketing, etc.

So you will have to explore the available options and integration services offered by a specific eCommerce CMS.

My personal choice is WordPress with WooCommerce Plugin for small stores selling only a few products but Magento CMS for large eCommerce businesses.

Magento has proved to be the most efficient website platform for eCommerce functions for customers as well for webmasters. Its market share is also decent as compared to pioneer competitors like Prestashop, Shopify or BigCommerce platforms.

The reasons for this consideration are:

  • Cost-effective Open Source Solution
  • SEO Friendliness – Dynamic XML sitemap URL rewrites, setting up Title or Description meta values all are easy to go with.
  • Promotional Activities – Easy to operate, visual page editor will let you build and customize offerings on the fly. Flexible coupons and pricing rules make the work stress-free.
  • All well for Mobile Shoppers – The responsive stores will give mobile users the better view of shopping carts and products on tablets, smartphones, and other devices.
  • Capacity – The power to host up to 5,00,000 products and handle 80,000 orders (hourly) makes it an obvious choice for owners.
  • Shipping options, localization, and Payment Gateway Supports – Multilingual support for localization across multiple countries, payment extensions in Magento Connect and various shipping options make it an easy to set-up all these things robust. Not surprising at all if Brands like Samsung, Lenovo, Ford, and Nike are using Magento for their eCommerce activities. It’s worth enough!

Eric Brantner

Eric Brantner

~ Eric runs a number of successful, high-traffic blogs in a variety of niches. He now shares his experiences and offers tips to aspiring bloggers at Scribblrs.com

Personally, I’ve always found Magento to be a great eCommerce platform.

I always come at things from an SEO’s perspective, and one of the things I love about Magento is they make it easy to ensure all of your product pages are optimized as best as possible.

It saves you a ton of time on creating optimized URLs, meta tags, and so on. This gives your product pages a better chance of turning up in the search results for relevant queries which can drive quality traffic.

Blair Urquhart

Blair Urquhart

~ Blair is a blogger that has management skills and accounting skills. He has experience is working in SEO and programming.

My favorite Ecommerce platform is Magento.

Magento doesn’t have any limits on how creative you can be with it. It is designed to make it fully operational regarding transactions like taking payments in many forms such as PayPal, credit card or debit cards or Skrill.

Delivery is a crucial aspect of an eCommerce site. You can easy fully customize the delivery costs each time whenever your customers live in the UK, USA or any country. You can preset delivery costs yourself or include leading transportation firms of your choice.

UPS allows each of your delivery process to be joined by the delivery firms so any price changes to done automatically for you. This helps in making smart decisions. It also has easy tax additions and helps in creating a total outlay.

It is very fast and is used by vast companies like Amazon and eBay. Magento is designed for someone who sells own products or services.

Magento is not as common as WordPress or Joomla but can give you a creative advantage over your competitors plus harder to hack than WordPress.

The themes, in general, are usually wonderfully designed, and you don’t need to rely on plugins like in WordPress. In Magento, it is easy to access the code and meta area so you can modify the design quickly.

I get a real thrill out of working Magento since a lot more complicated than WordPress. Coding on Magento normally up to a high standard plus selling on these sites so straightforward and smart. Each time the inbuilt system shows you sales each month and how people got to your site plus site visitors numbers.

You can have it on your site and quickly understand when your stock runs out it will not be shown on your site until stock back in a very smart feature.

You can charge premium prices to people for Magento sites.

Deepak SharmaBest Expert Reviews

Deepak Sharma

~ Deepak is a Manager at Taurus Knight, a digital agency specializing in eCommerce solutions including eCommerce SEO, Email Marketing, and Social Media Marketing.

Though each client has a unique requirement and we take into consideration this unique condition when we suggest an eCommerce platform to our customers, the one we recommend most is Magento.

Magento is a very robust platform due to which you can quickly design it and make the site not only excellent for operational use like merchandising and navigation but also beautiful and attractive looking.

Some of our clients like, Wai Ski Hire, chose the platform as it has international payments and inbuilt tax and cost delivery systems which help in the day to day operations.

Magento has a wide array of themes and the themes are easy to modify and it also has the options of inventory management which helps in the supply chain management which is essential for an eCommerce site.

Tom Shivers

Tom Shivers

~ Tom is the Founder of Capture Commerce. He is an SEO expert specialized in eCommerce.

As an SEO consultant who specializes in eCommerce, I answer this question a lot and wish that more of my clients asked it before plunging in.

Sometimes businesses choose an eCommerce platform because it aligns with their accounting software, distribution system or a friend told them how great theirs is doing.

These are ok reasons but not great reasons to choose an eCommerce platform, such as security, built-in marketing, easy to use, easy to migrate from and to other platforms, tech support that solves problems and maintains the platform’s competitive edge.

The choice boils down to open source software platforms like WordPress or hosted platforms like BigCommerce. In most cases, I recommend a hosted platform over open source because of the above reasons.

Do you want to take on all the hosting responsibilities like security and fixing things when they break? And what happens when the platform’s providers stop supporting it or charge a lot more to do so? Hosted platforms handle issues like this and the prices are very reasonable.

I recommend hosted platforms because they come with plenty of SEO features, integration with search engine tools, analytics tools, product feeds/shopping engines, product review platforms, cross/upsell options, integration with better services like site search providers, cart abandonment messages, automated messages, back in stock notifications, Amazon integration, chat providers, access to the latest marketing opportunities and more.

Essentially you can be making money a lot faster without all the hosting worries. Not all hosted eCommerce platforms are great, so I recommend Shopify, 3dCart, and BigCommerce. However, the gold standard in eCommerce platforms is Magento Enterprise.

Justin Metros

Justin Metros

~ Justin is the founder and lead designer/developer at Radiator.

Coming from an enterprise background with experience on most major platforms, I was drawn to Shopify early on when founding Radiator.

As a designer, Shopify is a dream to work with. Their liquid tempting language is intuitive and relatively easy to learn. You can take just about any design and feature set and implement it very clearly, in a way that is very readable and maintainable over time. When compared to other platforms, Shopify is hands down the winner here for designers.

As a developer, well, Shopify has put together a beautiful eco-system. And because Shopify is Saas, you never need to worry about maintaining servers, dealing with traffic spikes, security vulnerabilities or having to apply updates/patches.

Most important is their API. By design, they keep the core functionality of the admin clean and accessible, while allowing developers to extend it in some unusual and creative ways.

A testament to this is their app store which allows application developers to extend the functionality of Shopify with applications;

You can write your own or choose from hundreds of one-click installs from their app store. Proof of this success can be seen in the number of enterprise solutions that have invested in Shopify integrations.

For day to day operations – not every staff member needs to be trained. When it comes to processing orders, adding products, updating the site… a well built and configured Shopify store can handle it all.

And as far as backends go – it is one of the most beautiful and functional I’ve ever seen.

And the best part is, it keeps getting better every day. You can sell Shopify products on your WordPress site. Sell directly on Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter with one click.

Integrate with every major payment gateway. Apple Pay is launching this fall for one-touch orders. New features are constantly added. We put all our eggs in the Shopify basket, and couldn’t be happier.

Paddy Rohr

Paddy Rohr

~ Paddy is the technical director at Spring Web Solutions.

Shopify is by far our most preferred eCommerce platform.

The main reasons:

  • Very simple CMS (our customers love using the admin interface to manage the orders and products)
  • Very easy to customize (from a developers point of view)
  • Lots of awesome apps/modules to choose from that simply plugin
  • Very quick to get started – you can literally get up and running with a gateway and start trading within a couple of hours.

Benjamin Crudo

>Benjamin Crudo

~ Ben is the CEO and founder of Diff. He manages a team of 25 software developers and engineers focused on providing custom solutions to clients on Shopify since 2010.

Shopify is our preferred e-commerce platform for a few reasons.

For starters, its theme engine is the most elegant one we’ve worked with across any SAAS platform.

They’ve also done a great job with their API, allowing us to supplement the functionality available on both the front and back-end of the application.

Most importantly our customers love it!

Kyle Duck

>Kyle Duck

~ Kyle is an entrepreneur and developer. He is the creator of dozens of eCommerce stores. His company Trend Tape provides stock market analysis to traders.

Shopify.

Want to know what successful programmers and entrepreneurs have in common?

There is a single core principle that unites both. It comes in three letters:

D.R.Y. Don’t Repeat Yourself. Once you’ve solved a problem once, use that solution forever.

Before Shopify, every time you wanted to build an eCommerce site you had to rig together a platform. There were so many little “TODOs” to take care of. Small details that were unrelated to the core concept of your business.

Things like hosting, site design, speed tests, installing a framework and endless customizations to get it to work right. There were other solutions, but implementation for developers was costly and challenging.

Thankfully, Shopify has a great API that allows developers to automate the entire store creation process virtually.

Now, because of its popularity, you’re also assured of long-term support from the programmer community. You don’t have to worry about your gems and packages becoming outdated.

What Shopify has done for eCommerce platforms is what Google did for search. They have created a vastly superior product and taken over the marketplace. You’re assured of security and scalability.

What’s more, when you have an idea for a product, you can run a script to call the Shopify API. Voila! You have a working storefront that will scale to the moon and back.

That way, you can put all of your efforts into marketing and sales and make money.

Shopify puts developers in the business.

Russell Lobo

Russell Lobo

~ Russell is a serial online entrepreneur with 6 years of experience in the field of finance blogging. He also blogs at a Russ Lobo, his personal site where he shares his niche case studies.

From my experience, for a beginner the best platform is Shopify. Shopify gives you a pay per month model and it is highly scalable. It has a very good repository of themes which help in focusing on the product rather than wasting time on the design.

In addition to easy themes and templates, the Shopify platform also has a good number of developers who can modify the theme as per your requirement.

As a platform, it is very scalable and can accommodate a large number of products. One of my success stories on Shopify is http://www.petitevigogne.com/.

A disadvantage I see is that since the products are on the Shopify server, sometimes the site speed tends to be slow, especially for large sites. This causes a bad user experience and also affects SEO.

But overall, in terms of time of setting up, ease of use, SEO optimization, and scalability, Shopify is one of the easiest platforms to build your eCommerce site.

Justin Morgan

Justin Morgan

Justin Morgan is the CEO and founder of what most of us affectionately refer to as the “DMG.” From all circles within the dental industry who address dental marketing as a topic, Justin Morgan is the dental marketing guy that everyone keeps talking about.

Your selection of E-commerce platform should be based on what your goals are and what kind of merchant you are. I’ve worked with small mom n’ pop retailers (under $2MM/year) who have retail stores.

One of the major concerns I have with eCommerce platforms is how the platform will integrate with my client’s retail point-of-sale (POS) system. ShopKeep seems to be one of the most simple, easy-to-set-up POS systems out there.

For this one reason, BigCommerce is appealing because it integrates nicely with ShopKeep. It’s critical that busy retail store owners are able to find help with customer service, and I’ve found ShopKeep to take good care of my retail clients.

Lindsay Kavanagh

Lindsay Kavanagh

~ Lindsay entered the marketing world as a web designer and developer. She now works as an SEO Specialist and E-commerce specialist for seoplus+ in Ottawa, Canada.

Shopify is definitely the leader in eCommerce software. It is simple enough for business owners to set up their online store but complex enough to allow for customization from developers and marketing experts. With countless APIs and app integration – Shopify has become my number one recommended eCommerce platform.

Shopify has everything required in order to start and grow online businesses. From the basics of SEO to the complexities of retargeting – Shopify has the abilities required to grow online traffic and optimize for conversions.

We have a combination of apps (like Receiptful, Shopping Feed, Orange App and Inventory Helper) to keep businesses on track and expanding. These apps allow businesses to keep in touch with repeat customers, expand to other online markets like Amazon and Ebay, complete user testing, while also keeping track of inventory to ensure sales can be fulfilled.

With the most user-friendly interface I have seen and unprecedented support, Shopify allows for marketers and developers to grow their businesses while keeping business owners in the loop with easy to read metrics and order fulfillment.

The main dashboard and back end of Shopify are easy to follow and supplies all the metrics business owners want to see when they log into their online store (traffic, sales, referrers, etc.).

This is a huge factor when recommending Shopify to potential clients as they all want to be in touch with business metrics and see when success happens and where it is coming from.

Other platforms like Squarespace, WooCommerce, and Magento all have limitations. Whether it be issues with tracking, price point, back-end functionality complexities for business owners or general user interface – I have hit road bumps with all three platforms in web design/development, SEO, and eCommerce growth.

Just earlier this month Shopify confirmed that they now have over 300,000 merchants using its platform. This growth confirms that expansion and growth are key.

As a marketer, I can expect that Shopify will soon be just as robust as Magento but maintain simple functionality it has now. The options and possibilities are endless for this ever-growing platform – making it the one I recommend to all clients.

Brock Ingham

Brock Ingham

~ Brock is experienced in e-commerce from concept to launch. He has managed online storefronts and operations, while constantly looking for new opportunities in the digital marketing space.

Having started with the height of all platforms and deciding this just wasn’t doing it for us, I have an appreciation for what Magento can do. That being said my all-time favorite platform for e-commerce would have to be Shopify.

There is a strong and ever-growing community supporting Shopify that is void on many other platforms. This resonates well with the app store as well as work around tutorials from a development standpoint. There are many great features built into Shopify, the following are what keep me from recommending another.

Plug and play themes:

Shopify has an easy to navigate developer side that fits nicely into the WordPress interface. Themes can be changed at the drop of a dime, and many aspects can be changed through their WYSIWYG editors. Keep in mind although HTML and CSS can be written to adjust static theme settings you will likely need the help of a developer if your skill set is a novice.

Tons of supporting Apps:

With an open source gives the rise of privately held apps. Cart to Cart which migrated one of my 5000 SKU sites I worked on with very few errors (despite the bad reviews). Other popular apps like Sumome and Recomatic plug and play just like a WordPress site would.

Although still in its infancy stage Shopify’s own “buy button” app has huge potential. Through dynamic auto-gen scripts, this app turns any outside site into your new side store with exterior carts to match (Java knowledge necessary).

Fraud protection:

While offering Shopify payments gateway, store owners gain the ability to easily oversee any fraudulent activity. This is great for anyone dealing with large volume orders that may be the target of fraudulent guests. Yellow flags for address discrepancies and multiple attempts, red flags for VPN’s and shady purchasing history. All in all a great tool to save your bottom line.

Yellow flags for address discrepancies and multiple attempts, red flags for VPN’s and shady purchasing history. All in all a great tool to save your bottom line.

Last but not least it’s a Canadian Company! As a proud Canadian, I love supporting a platform where I was born and raised.

Swadhin Agrawal

Swadhin Agrawal

~ Swadhin is a professional freelance writer and blogger. He writes about search and social media visibility small businesses on his blog DigitalGYD.com.

For me, my favorite eCommerce platform is Shopify. I have my blogs and websites in WordPress which are great but for my eCommerce store; Shopify is what I chose.

Why did I choose Shopify?

Shopify is the perfect hybrid between WordPress (a lot of coding is necessary to get an eCommerce platform set up) and simple online stores like Wix.com (where you can’t scale your small eCommerce business to a bigger venture).

I actually have a guide for creating a simple online store with Wix which is perfect for beginners. But if you want a full-fledged eCommerce platform, I would go with something like Shopify.

Shopify, on the other hand, is easy, doesn’t need a few coding skills and can be scaled better than a platform like Wix.

Other two reasons why I opted for Shopify would be:

1. The backend control panel: It has everything from inventory control to order management inside one system. This makes it easy to have a bird’s eye view and save the hassle.

2. The availability of apps: If you are a coder, you can integrate almost anything with Shopify, but if you are a non-coder (like me), these apps are a big deal time and money saver.

Mohammad Umer

Mohammad Umer

~ Umer is considered one of the top 10 popular bloggers in Pakistan. He has built many eCommerce sites for clients.

I have experience with some of my online product selling clients as they want any automatic system for their businesses. I provide them the website with great features and they become happy clients.

There are thousands of eCommerce platforms, themes, and scripts available on the internet and many of them are free to use with great features. It’s difficult to say that Shopify is king.

Yeah! But I’ve to say here. As this software or you can say platforms gives me the easiness to do things in a proper way. And believe me, they are the king with 100,000 stores power.

The features of Shopify I love:

1. We can easily set up a social media store on Facebook 2. Trial option so anyone can try its features to make sure it is a good fit 3. Plugins for your store (free and paid) 4. We don’t have to pay for transactions, and you can upload unlimited items for sale 5. Easy to set up for small business owners and newbies

There are many other features of Shopify.

In the final line, I would like to say that Shopify is all-in-one eCommerce platform.

Mitchell Callahan

Mitchell Callahan

~ Mitchell the Co-Founder and CEO of Saucal, an internet firm specializing in WooCommerce development. He began building websites while still in elementary school and first showcased his work nationally at the age of 14 during a live broadcast of a Canadian television show.

WooCommerce

  • Open source
  • Built for WordPress

At Saucal, all of our eCommerce websites are built using WooCommerce. Why? For one, we believe in open-source technology. More importantly, we believe in the ability to edit and own our code.

For that reason, we stay away from closed solutions, which can leave us restricted to basic features and configurations, or be shut down without our consent. Open source ftw.

Elliot Taylor

Elliot Taylor

~ Elliot is an eCommerce and WordPress expert based in the UK. He is also the founder of YoGrow which provides simple eCommerce analytics for stores that want to grow.

Horses for courses! Which eCommerce platform is suitable for you depends on your requirements. That said, our most regularly recommended platform is WooCommerce because it is most flexible.

It is considerably easier to develop bespoke themes and functionality for a WooCommerce install. If you are just dipping your toe in the world of eCommerce, then you might prefer a hosted solution with everything working out of the box.

Once you’re more established and have determined specific requirements for your business, you will need a more customizable solution.

WooCommerce is an ideal option, and because it is built directly into WordPress, there are many WordPress integrations you can also capitalize on.

WooCommerce and WordPress are both open-source, and that also has advantages. It’s a misnomer to equate this to ‘free’. In fact, it will be more expensive to hire designers, developers, consultants and the like to take advantage of this software.

The main advantage is the community that has developed alongside WooCommerce. There is a vibrant marketplace of plugins and themes you can use. Developers are getting more and more familiar with the in’s and out’s of Woo.

The transparency ensures security is tight and best practices are enforced. WooCommerce, WordPress, and associated plugins are in constant development. Updates are regular.

This will mean you need to put aside the resource to manage the updates, but will also mean a more robust store for you to run your online business from.

If you are pushing the limits of your existing hosted system, or perhaps finding your more enterprise platform too bloated for your requirements, then we suggest looking at WooCommerce. It’s not the cheapest or simplest but is a safe and secure platform to build your business upon.

Magnus Högfeldt

Magnus Högfeldt

~ Magnus is a Danish marketing specialist living in Sweden. Besides web development and online marketing, Magnus produces video and audio content and helps his customer selling their knowledge online.

I do have a favorite eCommerce platform, but it doesn’t suit everybody. It’s all about needs and willingness to compromise. For some shops, a turnkey webshop solution like Tictail.com or Shopify is the absolutely best choice– for other, a complex, tailor-made setup with multi warehouse stock management etc is needed.

I’ve found that the combination of the strength of WordPress and the flexibility of WooCommerce often suit my customers needs best. I seldom do large setups that need to handle thousands of products and orders each day, but more content is driven sites with shopping facilities. WooCommerce seems to hold up for those projects – and when my customer asks for specific functions, I can proclaim that there most certainly is a plugin for that.

WordPress + Woocommerce is a CMS with a shop on top, whereas Magento, PrestaShop, etc are shops with a CMS on top. If you have a webshop with much content and a limited amount of products, the W+W combination is ideal.

WooCommerce lets me create shops that sell a combination of physical products, digital downloads, memberships for a closed area of the site and access to courses, all with little to no custom coding.

That makes the solution cheap for the customer, and we can focus on creating the content rather than figuring out how to connect different platforms without making the buying experience suffer.

I can make affiliate deals with bloggers right there, inside the WordPress interface, and tracking sales with Analytics or similar systems is a breeze. Oh, and the SEO-facilities are second to none of the other systems I’ve seen if you set it up after the book.

The strength of WordPress and Woocommerce is also their weakness: The open source code can freely be analyzed by hackers, and the amount of WordPress sites that get hacked and injected with malware and spam is scaring.

You really need to keep your WordPress site secure and up to date, all the time!

Steve Gerencser

Steve Gerencser

~ Steve has been building and marketing successful websites since 1997. He has a depth of real-world experience running wildly different businesses that give him a broad perspective on what a business needs to be successful online.

When it comes to eCommerce solutions, I’m a big fan of ‘it depends on ’.

Over the years we’ve built everything from single product sites with a PayPal Buy Now button to a completely custom rolled shopping solution for a client with international customers selling products as small as a plastic whistle to full containers being shipped by freighter overseas.

There are a lot of viable solutions out there, and each has its pluses and minuses. However, I do have a few ‘go to’ solutions that seem to fit most needs.

WooCommerce has become a great solution for smaller stores and sites that the client may not update very often.

It blends in seamlessly with WordPress, so it does not present a new learning curve to them and has all of the important features I like to see in a simple store. It sets up quickly, and we can get a store launched in hours if we need to.

For larger stores and my test sites, I tend to rely on OpenCart more often than not. Again, it is a very simple install, and we can get the framework of the site in place in a few hours and go live in less than a week depending on the product being sold.

OpenCart has a massive support community with nearly as many add-ons as WordPress so that it can be easily customized for just about any need. Plus, if there is a feature missing that we need, there are a host of developers willing to build that feature for just a few dollars.

The big thing is that it just works right out of the box after a few admin settings. If you can live with the default theme you can have a functioning storefront with PayPal processing in less than a day, but you can also take it the other direction into a full-featured shopping experience.

Zac Johnson

Zac Johnson

~ Zac is an entrepreneur and a super affiliate, with nearly 20 years of experience in the online marketing space.

Over the years I’ve had the opportunity to work with multiple e-commerce platforms. From the early days of Yahoo Shopping Cart to simple one-page order solutions made for online marketers.

From my personal preference, I would like to have my setup be as simple as possible, while also offering the ability to track all angles of my site traffic, orders, and conversions.

For this to take place, my options would likely be to go with an expensive all-in-one solution or go with a WordPress driven solution like WooCommerce.

Since I’m a huge fan of WordPress and like the customization options, while also having the ability to connect with payment processors like Amazon, Stripe, and Paypal — I would stick with WooCommerce as my e-commerce platform of choice.

Neil Sheth

Neil Sheth

~ Neil has been creating and marketing websites since 2009. He is the founder of Only Way Online, a digital marketing agency which specializes in increasing website traffic and sales online. Neil also provides SEO coaching for smaller businesses through “Your Brand Found”.

Woocommerce hands down!

Around four years ago my wife and I wanted to launch a luxury gift store online and carried out at least a month of research. We decided to choose Woocommerce for the following reasons:

  • WordPress is Great – it’s simple, concise, you can create beautiful sites, and the Content Management System is great for SEO and Content Marketing. I’ve been using WordPress for years, so when I found out I can make an eCommerce site with it, it was nearly a no-brainer.
  • Low Cost – there’s no need to buy chunky, expensive software, instead, pick a theme, install WordPress and Woocommerce, link it up with your payment gateway and you’re good to go. Ok, probably not that simple, but you get the gist, right. Also, since it’s self-hosted, there’re no ongoing monthly fees, pay once and forget.
  • Access to Developers – You will never struggle to find a WordPress developer, which also helps keep the entry price for a Woocommerce site reasonable compared to other platforms. I’m working with a client currently who spent thousands of pounds on a new site developed on a platform created by their marketing agency. That means every change they want to make to the site is a sizeable cost and a drawn-out process. The client has felt restricted, and that’s one big reason to choose a platform like WordPress that everyone has access to.

Rohin Dua

Rohin Dua

~ Rohin loves to dig into Affiliate Marketing, explore what’s possible ways to create a passive income online and share his knowledge with the like-minded community. He also runs an SEO Outsourcing Company and provides services to many SEO Agencies Worldwide

The answer to choosing the right eCommerce Platform really depends on your goal and interest. My all-time favorite eCommerce platform is without a doubt WordPress.

It has been considered as a standard in the industry now and when used with Woocommerce paid plugins will get you all the advanced features you ever want to see on your Ecom website.

The best part about WordPress is its Open Source, Free, its CMS is super easy to use, SEO friendly and not much technical skills are required to manage things. When integrating Woocommerce with some Paid Themes like Divi, one can get a stunning looking store in a couple of hours.

There are many big stores we work with still use WordPress and the only reason for their choice is the simplicity of the platform to add sales funnels and integration with popular marketing platforms.

Tip: Many paid WordPress themes these days comes with 1 Click Demo Import Features which helps you to create an eCommerce store with an option to tweak the details to match your product line in the simplest of manners.

Victoria Pavlova

Victoria Pavlova

~ Victoria is a serial entrepreneur and the founder of Starligh MG, Polish digital brands company that owns and operates international online platforms in competitive verticals.

I am a big fan of WooCommerce. Firstly: WooCommerce is a free open source plugin with the code freely available to anyone. It means you can customize it in a way you want or even build your own extension.

Woocommerce is very flexible and easy to use. Even nontech users can master it in a week or so. The reason for that is that Woocommerce is a part of WordPress. Past users can enjoy user-friendly WordPress interface and logic.

Moreover, it means you can use all the free and paid plugins and themes available for WordPress users.Speaking of paid Woocommerce extensions, they are affordable and compatible with almost every WordPress eCommerce theme.

Although WooCommerce is free, it doesn’t mean it’s not professional. With WooCommerce you can build beautiful stores with functions such as coupon codes, detailed order tracking, delivery status, inventory tracking, taxes setting, customer engagement tools and much more.

Large community is another advantage. You can always get free support whenever you need it.

Farhan Syed

Farhan Syed

~ Farhan is a web developer specializing in SEO and a blogger. He helps people manage their online presence with social media marketing and search engine optimization.

I like WooCommerce enterprise for my eCommerce business sites. It gives me a huge advantage concerning flexibility and add-ons as opposed to other Ecom software providers like Magento or Shopify.

Something that I like about WooCommerce is that I can still blog on the same site as the shop. I can talk about the products, and I can personally vouch for them on the site. Also, I get to choose whatever theme I like that works with WC to make a shop.

The best part of WC is that it integrates right into the already built site and works very well with numerous plugins that I wish to add to the site.

Heena Shah

Heena Shah

~ Heena loves to write and read about trending methods in online marketing. Her expertise is designing creative website and Facebook Marketing.

Usually, the best E-commerce platform is decided by several parameters such as client requirement, budget, ease of operations, etc. And Woocommerce fits the bill perfectly.

Our web design company has developed a couple of eCommerce websites on popular platforms like Magento, OpenCart, Drupal, and Woocommerce.

But, we prefer Woocommerce for clients who mostly vouch for DIY solutions, easy to handle functions and affordability. Using Woocommerce, customers can manage shopping, emails, product catalogs, stock, etc. with ease.

Magento and other Open Source Platforms offer almost the same type of functions as Woocommerce. But some features require expert help to execute. And it is not easy to get a qualified developer to handle Magento platform. Plus, they are more expensive than Woocommerce.

Phil Clerkin

~ Phil is a Web Designer for Cre8ive Online.

My favorite eCommerce platform is WooCommerce. I’d tried a few different ones over the years but found that the sheer number of people using WooCommerce meant that help could always be found.

If I came across a request for specific customization, I have always been able to find a plugin to help meet the user’ goals. There are a lot of developers out there making amazing add-ons for WooCommerce.

I have also found WooCommerce works well with a wide range of themes meaning great looking sites are only a few clicks away. The developer woothemes offer endless add-on plugins and while they are expensive they work flawlessly.

Mikhail Khorev

Mikhail Khorev

~Mikhail is an SEO expert. He has over 8 years of experience in web design and digital marketing for small and medium-sized businesses.

There are so many eCommerce solutions exist on the market but in the past couple of years, I’ve preferred to use WooCommerce for all my clients and projects.

Most of the small and medium-size businesses need an inexpensive, simple and customizable platform that can help them to sell 10-1000 products, and WooCommerce is the best choice for that.

From the developer point of view, it’s an open source plugin, which means you will have full access to the source code and can customize it the way you or your customer want. The largest library of available add-ons and extensions can help you configure any payment gateway and shipping provider in a matter of minutes.

The entire set up could take a couple of hours instead of days – critical when the client has tight deadlines to meet. Not to mention amazing and professional templates on ThemeForest, that will make an online store look stunning on all devices, improve conversion rate and create a positive brand image.

Other platforms just don’t provide this level of customization and usability, and in the past, I had to spend hours fixing and updating code on other eCommerce platforms (PrestaShop and OpenCart) because some of the connectors and extensions were outdated or didn’t exist.

To sum up, I always suggest WooCommerce because:

  • Perfect for small/medium online stores
  • The least expensive start-up cost
  • Fast set-up time
  • Full access to the code and database
  • The largest library of add-ons
  • Mobile and SEO ready
  • Moderate hosting requirements (shared hosting)
  • Low maintenance cost
  • The largest community of users and developers (to find answers and solve issues)
  • It’s also much more affordable and easier to find WordPress/WooCommerce developer if the customer decides to hire an internal developer.

Shaikh Aezaz

Shaikh Aezaz

~ Shaikh has around 6 years of experience in website development. He develops websites with WordPress for more than 4 years.

My favorite software is WooCommerce because we can create our website quickly with available add-ons and extensions.

The most important thing is it’s free of cost.

One of the eCommerce websites I created for selling custom rubberstamp took only 3 days to complete.

Ban Markus

Ban Markus

My favorite eCommerce platform is WooCommerce. I love to use WooComerce not only because is newbie friendly but also because it’s easy to set up and free.

It looks scary when you realized, how many plugins you have to buy/get to make it work properly, but ROI is way better than other platforms that offer you all the settings and functionalities for a commission.

It looks scary when you realized, how many plugins you have to buy/get to make it work properly, but ROI is way better than other platforms that offer you all the settings and functionalities for a commission.

Those platforms not only cut a chunk out of your profits but they make you live under their rules. Yes, it’s true that they make it look easy and cheap but in the long run, doing it yourself using WooCommerce is more satisfactory.

Venchito Tampon

Venchito Tampon

~Venchito is a Manila-based link building strategist and is the CEO and Co-Founder of SharpRocket, a link building firm in Asia that offers white hat link building services for SEO agencies, eCommerce business owners and big corporations in English speaking countries.

One of my favorite eCommerce platforms, particularly for WordPress sites is WooCommerce. A few features that may come in handy for startup owners today are:

  • Products can easily be categorized, given with sales prices and other independent attributes. It has a huge flexibility of selling a physical or even a virtual downloadable product.
  • User-friendly WordPress interface. This can help you build an online store without having a confusion, so you can focus more of your time in creating great landing pages.
  • Built-in analytics system that keeps your statistics crystal clear.

Yuvraj Wadhwani

Yuvraj Wadhwani

~ Yuvraj is an E-commerce enthusiast that runs his own eCom business.

My favorite e-commerce platform is WooCommerce. The reason I chose WooCommerce is that it’s extremely easy and user-friendly to set up compared to the other platforms I considered.

It’s also very flexible, and you can create customized solutions very easily. Another advantage of WooCommerce is the extremely large number of free and premium plugins available.

Most of the customizations you need to start a store can be done by plugins which helps you launch faster and focus more on generating sales rather than worrying about the technology.

Al-Amin Kabir

Al-Amin Kabir

~ Al-Amin is a multi-award winning entrepreneur, blogger, affiliate marketer and speaker who teaches how to build profitable niche sites.

I recommend WooCommerce.

It’s hugely flexible You get a whole lot of flexibility when it comes to features, customization and another technical side of things. You can use a WooCommerce platform to sell physical, downloadable, membership products, or even affiliate/third-party merchant based products.

Easy Integration with existing website, blogs WordPress is currently powering over 25.4% of all websites online and responsible for over 76.5 million blogs!

The thing I love about WooCommerce it’s based on WordPress, and you can easily integrate an e-commerce platform/ digital selling platform on your existing site. Bloggers can easily integrate an e-commerce store on their blog, and start selling online.

Hundreds of extensions

The requirement for everyone is almost unique, and you need extensions to fulfill yours. What I love about WooCommerce is, it has hundreds of extensions. Most of them are free.

Other Features of WooCommerce That Made Me Choose It

• Wide range of free and premium templates • Existing WordPress interface • Free, no one-time/ monthly fees

Ashley Faulkes

Ashley Faulkes

~ Ashley is the Founder of Mad Lemmings, a company that helps entrepreneurs and small businesses get more customers through their website

My go-to eCommerce platform for my clients is Woocommerce. Why? Because it is a very simple framework to use and is based on WordPress which gives you so much flexibility and control.

Woocommerce comes with all the basics you need to start an online store from product pages (with a variety of layouts via WordPress Themes), shipping, taxes, pricing, payment gateways, inventory, and localization.

Not only that, but you get all of the functions of WordPress like pages, posts, and rock solid SEO via plugins like Yoast or All in One SEO. It is almost too easy!

Of course, if you are running a massive and complex eCommerce site then Woocommerce & WordPress may (eventually) not satisfy all your needs, but for most online stores it is one of the easiest and best ways to go.

Aaron Jones

Aaron Jones

~ Aaron is an expert in affiliate marketing. He teaches his readers how to find a niche, start a site and to how to grow traffic.

I’ve always used the WooCommerce platform because of its ease of use and the way the platform is set up. Woo Commerce works with most themes and ingrates well.

If you’re a beginner and not interested in writing code than woo commerce is the way to go. I know there are others but the ease of use and integration are key factors in my business.

Your business needs to be strong and you need to learn your audience. With analytics included in this plugin or whether it is built in your theme can make all the difference in the world when it comes to conservations and your business.

Louie Luc

Louie Luc

~ Louie is a full-time internet marketer who’s been working from home for some years now. He runs several niche/authority websites and a few eCommerce businesses.

My favorite eCommerce platform is WooCommerce. It’s the most popular eCommerce solution, being used by 39% of the sites with online stores.

It’s a free plugin that you can install on your WordPress, meaning it runs your own server. If you require additional features, you can add them as you need. These extensions are paid, but they are worth it.

Since picking the right eCommerce platform for your online store is a crucial business step, you need to choose the best: go with WooCommerce.

Ryan BeMiller

~ Ryan runs a website called Shopping Signals that is intended to help online merchants promote their sites and attract more business, through online marketing.

I would like to first caveat this with my belief that choosing an eCommerce platform is one of the least important choices for a new, small eCommerce website.

I understand that many would not agree with that statement, but I just think it’s like number five in order of importance, when it comes to the things you should be focusing on.

Make sure your products, audience, messaging and offers are all dialed in first, then choose an eCommerce platform that you’re comfortable with.

That being said, I tend to lean toward WooCommerce. Being a marketer and developer at heart, I love the flexibility of being able to really customize things and get under the hood. WooCommerce allows this flexibility.

I also value the fact that what you get for free with WooCommerce is fully capable and feature rich. You can run a decent eCommerce site with just the free, out of the box platform.

Additionally, if you want to ramp things up and make customizations, there is a whole community of developers offering free and paid add-ons.

WooCommerce is also very easy and straightforward to implement and manage. I find the user-interface to be friendly and self-explanatory, even for non-technical folks. Several of the folks I’ve implemented it for have a very little technical aptitude, yet they’re perfectly able to manage the store on their own.

There may be an even easier option out there, like Shopify for example. However, they may not be as affordable, and typically are much less customizable.

So to me, the value of what you get for free, plus the ease of use, along with the ability to customize, makes WooCommerce a really strong choice.

Hernan Vazquez

Hernan Vazquez

~ Hernan is an entrepreneur and digital marketer that helps business owners, professionals, freelancers, and entrepreneurs to get more leads and sell more stuff using the power of the Internet.

I love Woocommerce, because it integrates with WordPress, making things so much easier to have a blog, optimize it for SEO and rank it on Google. You can accept all major payment methods like PayPal and Stripe right from your page, or even from a third party service like Samcart.

Plus you don’t need to learn a whole new platform to start selling your products online, which is a huge time saver. I’ve tried with other more robust platforms, like Magento and Zencart, but I keep defaulting back to Woocommerce because of the UX.

Plus if you’re missing anything you can always purchase a plugin or get something coded out specifically for that feature. So if you’re a fan of WordPress like myself, go with Woocommerce.

Andy Crestodina

Andy Crestodina

~ Andy is a web strategist and the co-founder of Orbit Media. He has been in the web design and interactive marketing space since January of 2000. He is also a speaker, content marketer, environmentalist, and author.

At Orbit, the key feature of any platform is easy eCommerce integration. That lets us choose the ideal tool for separate jobs.

For example, when a client wants an open source CMS with lots of features, we can choose Drupal. But for an eCommerce backend that connects with all of their other third-party systems, we can go with a system like Shopatron.

The Gold Eagle website is an example of a fully integrated, hybrid system. A Drupal catalog with a Shopatron Cart and Checkout.

Easy integration is the ultimate eCommerce feature!

Arjun Sarin

Arjun Sarin

~Arjun is a product management professional with a focus on P&L and is well adept at working with cross-functional teams. He loves working on ” Fixing a wreck ” projects, likes to learn new things, solve problems and work on new ideas. He is an MBA and computer engineer, has got the opportunity to work on global projects in his short career of 5.5 years.

With eCommerce market growing at a rapid pace, we are seeing a lot of new trends. When starting out a new eCommerce venture, there are a lot of elements that need to be figured out, and there are a whole lot of specialists out there who can help you with each of these elements.

In such a scenario, figuring out which platform to use when you’re looking to build your online store can be a fairly confusing task – especially if you aren’t from a technical/eCommerce background.

I personally like GetMeAShop which started with a modest aim to help small retail businesses have their own online presence.

It is Focused on giving a lucid, user –friendly technology to these businesses along with the multitudes of services available across different platforms – point of sale, web portal, e-commerce store, CRM, analytics, marketplace management, social media integration.

It is a complete solution to small businesses to compete and grow online, providing the businesses with the opportunity to grow and flourish with a platform to create their online presence and the elements of marketing their business.

With traditional retailers shrinking their physical footprints and rebalancing their investment towards digital, this platform is continuously creating new business models and adapting old ones to adjust to fundamental shifts in technology by helping offline sellers to have a mobile-based, omnichannel retail solution.

With a mobile app, they can not only set up their online store but sell on multiple marketplaces (while managing from a single dashboard), capture customer data, keep their complete inventory in sync across channels (even offline via POS) and have in-depth analytics on their inventory, sales, and customer inflow.

The best thing which I liked about GetMeAShop is a stellar team which has developed the platform from scratch, I think this makes them stand out regarding platform reliability and quality of service.

At present GetMeAShop has many clients from India but slowly they are moving internationally by introducing features such as a multi-currency support, international payments etc. Some of the clients using GetMeAShop are Lucknowi Andaaz, Rangeelo Rajasthan, and Kiligco.

Naveen Kumar

Naveen Kumar

~ Naveen is a blogger by hobby and a digital marketer by profession. He is working with a Web development company and mostly deals with e-commerce websites and his firm is also developing Joomla templates for an e-commerce website.

I love to use Joomla CMS for building eCommerce websites. There are several reasons why I am referring Joomla to other eCommerce software like WordPress or Magento.

I am into Joomla development. So I feel it better than others.

In Joomla, there is so many software to build the eCommerce website like Virtuemart, Hikashop, etc. So you are not restricted to use only one. You can use according to your ease.

The Joomla community is awesome. Everyone loves to help each other to solve their queries.

There are around 8000 extensions available in the Joomla Extension Directory, and the core Joomla team verifies all these. So you can use these extensions without any issue.

It is fully SEO compatible, and the biggest reason for my love to Joomla is its security. I found Joomla more secure than WordPress.

After Joomla, I would love to recommend WordPress (WooCommerce) for eCommerce website because it is easy to use and manage. If anyone wants to use Joomla, there are amazing free Multipurpose Joomla Templates. And you are free to use them for commercial as well as non-commercial purpose without giving any credit.

Drazen Prastalo

Drazen Prastalo

~ Drazen is an online entrepreneur, professional blogger, and affiliate expert. Besides writing for his main blog Income Mesh, he owns a landing page template marketplace called “The Landing Factory.”

My favorite eCommerce platform is Easy Digital Downloads because it’s built specifically for selling digital products, which is what I do.

It’s perfect for my business needs because it has various add-ons available which enable me to expand the functionality of my webshop without breaking the bank. Whatever you need, from payment gateways to email marketing, they have it all.

Also, one of the most important things is of course support, which is great, guys from EDD are fast, professional and knowledgeable. Besides that, they also regularly push new updates and add new exciting features.

It all comes down to what is the right fit for your situation.

What is your budget?

What are you selling?

What kind of shipping do you need?

What kind of functionality do you need?

What currencies will you trade in?

What is your gateway payment system?

Once you know the answers to these questions you can narrow down which platform is right for you. Every platform has their pros and cons.

For example:

WooCommerce – it’s free, there are lots of free plugins to build functionality and integrate PayPal and you’re on your way ready to sell online.

The drawback – Woocommerce can be buggy, the integrations lack support and many times the gateway systems don’t play nicely together.

Shopify – a great platform with great support – however, you’re limited to what’s possible within the framework – and you better be ready to pay a monthly fee every time you’re looking for a functionality outside of the normal framework.

Magento – hands down the most flexible and technical ready eCommerce solution.

The Downside – you better be or hire a great developer to make this framework work for you.

So as you can see it all comes down to what resources, knowledge or budget you have available that will form the answer to which platform will be best for you.

David Krauter

David Krauter

~ David first a marketer first and a “techy SEO geek” second… he is the founder of Websites That Sell providing Website & SEO services with a focus on more traffic, leads, phone calls & sales – not just rankings…

It all comes down to what is the right fit for your situation.

What is your budget?

What are you selling?

What kind of shipping do you need?

What kind of functionality do you need?

What currencies will you trade in?

What is your gateway payment system?

Once you know the answers to these questions you can narrow down which platform is right for you. Every platform has their pros and cons.

For example:

WooCommerce – it’s free, there are lots of free plugins to build functionality and integrate PayPal and you’re on your way ready to sell online.

The drawback – Woocommerce can be buggy, the integrations lack support and many times the gateway systems don’t play nicely together.

Shopify – a great platform with great support – however, you’re limited to what’s possible within the framework – and you better be ready to pay a monthly fee every time you’re looking for a functionality outside of the normal framework.

Magento – hands down the most flexible and technical ready eCommerce solution.

The Downside – you better be or hire a great developer to make this framework work for you.

So as you can see it all comes down to what resources, knowledge or budget you have available that will form the answer to which platform will be best for you.

John Lawson

John Lawson

~ John is the CEO of ColderICE Media, Amazon #1 best-selling author, IBM Futurist and Ebay Influencer. John is a pioneer in the online retail verticle and founder of The E-commerce Group, a global community of commerce vendors and marketers.

My favorite eCommerce store platform is Miva. These guys have been in the game since early 2000’s and that is why I choose them. One of the most important thing for me is to choose a platform that can scale as you scale.

Miva stores were simply tailor-made for my “geek factor” its platform is flexible enough that anything I wanted to be done today, can be implemented.

But also extensible so things that come down the pipe in the future can also be integrated. They have a great team for support and a very vibrant development community.

The possibilities for integration and add-ons are endless and with the constantly changing world of eCommerce that is a huge plus for my needs. Here are my specifics that made me jump in and move to that platform:

  • Easy to get started and up and running quickly
  • Ability to integrate with my back-end processing systems
  • Responsive customer support
  • Extensible, robust platform that would grow as I grew
  • Cross-device support, my site looks good and operates flawlessly on all devices and browsers.
  • Priced competitively for the SMB business owner

Thank you so much to all the eCommerce web designers, web developers, online marketers, and bloggers that contributed to this expert roundup! Special thanks to Russell Lobo and Gabriella Sannino that introduced me to several participants.

Comments

  1. Thanks for the space here Minuca Elena!

    Love to read thinking of other experts here and personally like the way Victoria Pavlova explains WooCommerce.

    Will try this too,

    Regards
    Umer

  2. This definitely makes choosing an ecommerce platform a little easier. I was just helping a friend of mine chose between woocommerce and EDD and this would have been helpful to read first!

  3. All these tips are very nice and unique. And also all the platforms are best in industry and one best ecommerce platform yet to be added in this list namely Ecbilla – an emerging ecommerce portal.

      • Hello Minuca, Hope you are doing Good!

        Ecbilla is an Ecommerce portal where you can create an online store for your physical or offline business and transform it into online. You can create your own store at your own domain and manage your business at anywhere,anytime.

        Also Ecbilla unveiled android app you can do and mange your business handy by using the app.

        You Can Customize your shipping option according to your area of business you need to deliver local, countrywide and global with free or additional shipping cost option.

        For more visit herehttp://www.ecbilla.com/

  4. This article was recommended to me by an American Webmasters Association member. The difference between it and most of what you’ll find online is amazing. Here you read about real people using the platforms in real projects.

    I had already made a tentative choice. What I read here validates it and gives me confidence.

    Thanks for the great roundup!

      • I chose WooCommerce. Or, rather, WooCommerce chose me. I have a WordPress site. It’s hosted by WP Engine. I create logo animations and video special effects. The store theme I found that would best feature this new addition to my services uses WooCommerce.

        It’s not been without problems. The store theme vendor offers limited support. There’s little documentation. I’m confident I’ve made a good choice, in the platform, though.

  5. Thanks for the space here Minuca Elena!

    Love to read thinking of other experts here and personally like the way Victoria Pavlova explains WooCommerce.

    Will try this too,

  6. Good to be here today.
    Yet another amazing and informative roundup post.
    Many experts shared their wonderful experience in this post.
    I know some of the people who shared in this post, and a major one i am yet to see their pages.
    I will surely check their pages. Thanks for telling about their pages and activities.
    Thanks Minuca for this great collection.
    Keep it up
    Keep sharing
    regards
    ~Philip

  7. Very informative and helpful roundup. Thank you, Minuca! In our search for the platform we’ve also came across nopCommerce (we are looking for open source). Anyone can share experience? Many good comments about WooCommerce here, yet it is basically an add-on to wordpress, we would like rather independent solution.

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