Woocommerce Magento Shopify Opencart - the best PHP e-commerce platform

Today, every business planning to achieve online success, and eCommerce platform is the fastest ways to launch a start-up or place business at a better position. But many clients and vendors who are involved in the online business or want to be the part of online business have confusion about which one will be the best and most trustable eCommerce platform, as it's not necessary that every eCommerce platform solutions will work well for their business but the truth is that every eCommerce platform has different ability and possess different benefits. In this article, we are going to discuss the most popular eCommerce platforms and that will help you to figure out the best online business platform. So, let's start -

There is a huge number of platforms available in the market. Here, we will only discuss the best once such as - Woocommerce, Magento, Shopify, and Opencart.

Woocommerce

Woocommerce as an open source platform known as a most customizable eCommerce platform for building online business comes as a free plugin for the PHP CMS system WordPress. The plugin is free and simple to use which makes It is very easy to work on even with less technical knowledge. Easy to install but will include a fee if you need full integration of WooCommerce as a functional shopping cart. Fully customizable with great shopping cart and payment gateway features. Owning an eye-catching interface, high-security level as well as good pricing, WooCommerce officially won in the hard race to become the best eCommerce platform.

Deployment feature

Woocommerce can be deployed on both On-Premise or Cloud-Based.

SEO options

WooCommerce is totally SEO-friendly thanks to a wide range of customizations and access to a source code of your store. WooCommerce simply takes advantage of WordPress content integration, or what's available through third-party plugins. As a result, WooCommerce gives you extremely SEO-specific options. It is mostly due to the fact that WooCommerce is built on top of WordPress, which offers unlimited SEO potential. WordPress usually generates 301 redirects when a product URL has changed, which is great for keeping your website 404 free.

Ease of use

This plugin is pretty straightforward alternative once you install it on your WordPress site. You can customize everything from within your dashboard, test it and change all the options until you’re satisfied with the result. As long as you know a little bit about WordPress, it shouldn’t be a problem. Overall, WooCommerce makes WordPress people’s lives easier when they need an e-commerce store installed. The plugin itself works smoothly, provides helpful features and is user-friendly.

Pricing

WooCommerce is free to download and it does not charge transaction fees. It’s a free WordPress plugin. But you still have to pay some money to run your website. The estimated cost of Hosting is from $5 to $15 per month. Depending on domain type, it will cost you approximately $10 per year. In case the free themes can’t meet your demands (such as contain hidden backlinks, not provide any support), maybe you want to buy a more premium theme. It is can be found in these sites: WooThemes, Themeforest, TemplateMonster, about $59.

Integrations

It has more than 500+ integrations including Zapier, Xero, MailChimp, etc.

Customer support

WooCommerce also has a very large community support where you can find the needed info at $0. It has got three ways for you to get in contact, depending on what you need help with. You can edit the source code and try to solve issues on your own or you can appeal to WordPress forums. It enables you to “submit a support ticket” at WooCommerce.com and get support there.

Preferred Users

Best for those who already use a WordPress site. Gives maximum scalability and control over the website.

Magento

Out many available e-commerce platforms Magento is a powerful e-commerce system which is most flexible and provides users a high search engine optimization capacity, Mobile responsive, secures and safer with the facility of integrating various databases such as cloud, web services, and other third party tools etc. It's an open-source and the fastest growing platforms with cutting-edge solutions for every entrepreneur who wants to make it big with an eCommerce store.

Deployment feature

Magento can be deployed on both On-Premise or Cloud-Based.

SEO options

Magento provides outstanding features such as SEO friendly URLs, Meta tag, Google Sitemap, Google content APIs to enhance your SEO capabilities. It also integrates seamlessly with Google Analytics so you can track the traffic from Search engines.

Ease of use

Magento is quite a little tricky to use if you’re merely a beginner. Also, if you have no experience with any business development plan and are confused about how to work on your site all alone, honestly just skip Magento entirely. It’s particularly for businesses that are not on shoestring budgets. It's a quick and effortless self-hosting setup, and everything is just put up on the navigational menu such as customers, products, promotions, sales, and reports, Magento’s interface is quite reasonable according to developers. It isn’t all that difficult to operate. The dashboard is clean and intuitive, and it’s easy to find the features you need. Adding products with Magento is just as easy as adding products to other shopping carts. One can specify tax and shipping settings using the sidebar and tweak your metadata for better SEO rankings.

Pricing

There are two Magento version including -

Magento CE (Community Edition) is totally FREE, you only need to pay for domain maintenance and hosting, about $10 – $100 depending on your needs.

Magento EE (Enterprise Edition) plans to start at $ 2,000 per month, and you also need to hire a Dev with salary ranges from $10 – $20 per hour.

Integrations

It has 300+ integrations including Mandrill, Zoho, etc.

Customer support

Magento has an extensive developer community. And nearly every platform-related question is already answered. However, users of paid Enterprise Edition may count on Magento provided technical support. It will help to avoid searching answers in the infinity of community forum threads. Magento provides special free and paid educational courses, which could be helpful in understanding platform’s features better.

Preferred Users

Best for large businesses. It is the most extendable platform.

Shopify

Shopify is a hosted shopping cart. It provides you with full control over the coding of your site (HTML & CSS). It's one of the best and most reliable eCommerce software that serves over 325,000 of businessmen worldwide. If you are looking to build a complex, still easy-to-use online web store to sell goods, Shopify is what you need. It is a ‘pure’ eCommerce builder.

Deployment feature

It can be deployed only on Cloud.

SEO options

It offers to its users the best feature for SEO including - editable title tags, meta descriptions, pages URLs, ALT tags for images, customizable image file names, etc.

Ease of use

Shopify offers a simplified way of launching an online store that’s doable for everyone. All you have to do is create an account, select a free theme, easily customize the design, and that’s it. Simply follow what’s going on in the left-hand side menu, add products and their details, and select your preferred options. Making a store operational is really straightforward. Shopify does a lot better job in this department than any other tools.

Pricing

Shopify starter plan, Shopify Lite costs $9 per month, $29 for the basic plan, $79 for professional, $179 for unlimited, represents a cheaper way to sell online while Shopify gold is designed for fast-growing brands and online sellers by providing world-class enterprise commerce technology at a fraction of the cost.

Integrations

It has 500+ integrations including SEO Image Optimizer, Quick view, QuickBooks, etc.

Customer support

It offers 24/7 responsive customer support to its users. You can reach the support team via email, phone or live chat. If anything happens, you will be sure that someone is going to solve your issue. It helps the merchants to maintain the platform in good shape through different guides and tutorials available on the website.

Preferred Users

Suited for fast deployment of an eCommerce website. Good choice for small and medium businesses.

Opencart

OpenCart is a serious competitor in the competition for the best eCommerce Platforms in 2018. It's simple, perfectly designed and has an unlimited range of products and categories, product ratings and product review sections including multiple currencies and language feature and also advantage from logging error. It offers more than 13,000 modules and themes, supports multiple payment methods. Around 11,555 websites are using OpenCart at present. It's a light platform and requires add-ons in order to perform higher-level functions.

Deployment feature

It can be deployed on both On-premises or Cloud.

SEO options

OpenCart offers almost basic SEO features such as - adjust meta titles, descriptions, keywords. However, it requires more tinkering around in code.

Ease of use

OpenCart is also considered to be the easiest to use and user-friendly platform for emerging businesses. It is one of the most highly intuitive and well-designed e-commerce platforms. The best thing is that it offers easy to use and simple toolbars which make setting up a website and online store quite easily. There is a vast variety of templates and designs to choose from. Considering various aspects it is loaded with numerous templates and designs which makes it easier for you to choose from.

Pricing

It provides two plans that are: a $99/month premium support plan and a one-time fix (pricing varies). The premium support plan of OpenCart ort issues like installations and bug fixes, but without unlimited support. You will receive help only up to 5 installations and 3 bug fixes every month.

Integrations

It has 208 integrations including MailChimp, Xero, QuickBooks, etc.

Customer support

It offers free Community and Dedicated commercial support. OpenCart forums are very active, and you don't need to pay. It’s easy to find a developer or shopping cart representative willing to answer your questions. Dedicated Support offers two options: One-time fix and Monthly payment. Both cost $99.

Preferred Users

It's ideal for large businesses. It is an extendable platform and can support many features.

 

All the above mentioned are the top rated and widely used eCommerce development platforms on the internet. Ultimately the decision of a business should be a very personal one, based on your specific storage needs and your eCommerce vision. If you find another one which is great according to your experience, then, please share with us in the comments section; it will helpful for everyone.  Thank you!