How to Find Best Platform for E-Commerce Website Development

Let’s start with an amazing prediction. Statista has estimated that around 2.14 billion people will prefer to buy goods online in 2021. This is indeed a huge number that shows the importance of eCommerce website development. Today, we have many eCommerce platforms are available all thanks to advancing technology. You have many options for building a customized online shop, but then, it makes difficult to choose the right platform for your online business.

Here we compare top three eCommerce platforms- Shopify, Magento, and WooCommerce to help you select the most suitable one. All three platforms have their pros and cons. For example, Shopify is an all-rounder when it comes to speed, security, and user-friendliness but it is pricey and it has less advanced features as compared to Magento. On the other hand, WooCommerce is a very economical and excellent framework for the startups but it is just a plug-in and unable to handle the massive web traffic. Let’s go through the key aspects of these three leading frameworks.

Comparison between Top Three E-Commerce Website Development Tools

We will compare Magento, WooCommerce, and Shopify on different parameters like

• Usage and Market Share

One of the best possible ways to find the right platform is to analyze the market share as well as the usage statistics among the audience around the globe.

Image Source

From the market share perspective, WooCommerce tops the chart with around 21 percent share. Shopify comes second with 18% and Magento is in third place with 13%. Here we can see that there is a small difference between the market share of WooCommerce and Shopify.

• SEO Friendliness

While considering the ideal e-commerce platform, SEO-friendliness surely plays a vital role. WooCommerce features an SEO-friendly interface owing to a lot of in-built customization options and easy access to the source code, which the user can modify to add desirable functionalities to their e-commerce website. Shopify and WooCommerce offer the same type of SEO customization options in eCommerce website development.

But, Magento is probably the most SEO friendly e-commerce developing platform featuring some of the most unique customization options for the users. As a result of such unique and powerful SEO customization options, Magento has aced the SEO Friendliness.

Image Source
Also Read: 7 Ways E-commerce Chatbots Can Help You Get Better Sales

• Price

The price tag plays a significant role while considering almost anything, be it our household goods or an E-commerce website platform. WooCommerce is a free E-Commerce website development platform with regular updates. It also offers several extensions for a wide range of SEO practices. The official pricing of WooCommerce for a single website starts at $49.

Magento E-Commerce Development features two price structures.

▪ Magento Community Edition: Free to Download

▪ Magento Enterprise Edition: This version is primarily for the business sectors and enterprises.

Shopify provides a 14 days free trial to all its customers and then monthly plan starts at $27 for a basic version and $279 for an advanced version.

Here we can see that Shopify is costlier than Magento and WooCommerce.

• Security

When you are dealing with a lot of customers, you need to ensure proper security and protection in your platform to avoid any illegal manipulation and data breach.

To ensure security in WooCommerce, you need to pay $200-300 for the SSL certificates. Moreover, you need to have strong passwords, limited logins, iThemes, etc for ensuring security. When it comes to Magento, you need to have PPL certificates and hosting to ensure proper security. Shopify brings an easy solution for securing your online store. It offers all the SSL certificates within the subscription itself, so the user needs to possess only a strong password. Thus we see that Shopify beats remaining two platforms in the security aspect.

• Stability and Performance

While dealing with images with a lot of variations, WooCommerce slows down considerably.

In spite of being a powerful CMS, Magento also needs significant load time for images. However, it has more features than Shopify. Also, it can readily handle massive traffic like Shopify.

Shopify is the fastest while dealing with different types of images, and thus tops the speed category.

• User-Friendliness

Since WooCommerce is just a plug-in, the eCommerce website development is somewhat challenging. But, it is an ideal platform for beginners or start-ups.

Magento is mostly for the advanced users and the beginners might face several problems while setting it up. Shopify features a drag-and-drop interface which is user-friendly and thus it offers the perfect solution for the rookie and seasoned users alike.

• Customer Support

Being just a plug-in, customer support in WooCommerce is somewhat limited. When it comes to Magento, there are no such dedicated customer support facilities available. But, Magento has one of the fastest growing developers’ communities that can give solutions to your questions. Shopify offers 24X7 customer support via e-mail, live chat, phone call, etc. You can also take assistance from the developer’s community of Shopify.

Here, Shopify has an upper hand over the rest of platforms.

• Who is the winner?

Well, your business requirements will decide the winner! It is better to consult a reliable eCommerce website development company to get a clear idea on the right platform for your business. In the thriving eCommerce sector, you need to have a robust online shop to meet growing challenges and intensifying competition. You can bank on any of these reputed platforms to get a user-friendly and seamlessly-performing online store.

Wrapping Up

At Semaphore Software, we strive for providing the best-in-class web solutions for the eCommerce domain. Our experienced web developers can assist you to come up with an online shop that gives rich shopping experience to your customers. We develop customized eCommerce websites on leading platforms including Magento, Shopify, and WooCommerce. Just send us an email at info@semaphoresoftware.com and our consultants will contact you soon.