E-commerce ranking 2021 — the ecommerce, open source platforms you should know about

Do you plan to build a new online shop for your brand, or perhaps you are not pleased with the e-commerce solution you currently use? If you are searching for an e-commerce platform that will suit your business needs best, you have to check out our ranking.

If you want to have your own online shop instead of selling on somebody else’s marketplace, you need to invest in building it from scratch. It is quite an investment and there are several, big decisions you have to make first, for example, what kind of functionalities should your online shop have, or — more important — what e-commerce platform will enable you to create all functionalities that you need for your business.

Why you should consider a choice of an e-commerce platform carefully?

Great performance, high scalability and capability to build necessary functionalities — that is what everybody needs. So why do various companies choose different solutions? Those three things have a little different meaning for each business. One can invest more in the development process and functionalities, the other’s priority is time and the goal is to build an online shop fast.

Start from defining functionalities you need. Some e-commerce platforms are really complex and if you don’t need all the solutions they offer, it is better to avoid them, because they are rather difficult to use. Choosing too advanced technologies can increase overall costs of development and maintenance significantly. The e-commerce platform with multiple, optional plugins, modules and integrations would do nicely for most of the e-commerce companies. Before you choose your IT solution, make a list of functionalities you need in your online shop and compare e-commerce platforms that can offer it to you for a reasonable price.

What is an open source e-commerce platform?

Open source solutions are available on the free licence. Actual users only have to pay for hosting. Implementation of many of these platforms is easy and relatively cheap, but you will also find a lot more complex — to use those you will require some professional help. Open source software can be modified according to the individual’s business needs. You gain free access to the source code, and you can usually use multiple free plugins. There are many commercial modules that you can leverage as well.

E-commerce, open source platforms are the best solution for many companies as they allow them to decide on their own how fast and dynamically their online shop grows. Open source platforms grant you scalability, so you can start small and develop new functionalities with time, and when you’ll be ready to invest more in additional modules. One of the most important advantages of open source technologies is access to the support from huge and active communities, which improve and create new extensions and features.

Now, you know why an open source e-commerce platform may be a right solution for your business. In our opinion you should learn more about five of them.

1. Magento

Magento is a very complex e-commerce platform. It is available as an open source and commercial solution. It has a lot of functionalities in its basic, free version. The question is: do you really need them. It is often raised that most of the online shops’ owners don’t need a big part of those available features, and access to them actually makes using Magento more difficult. Because it is so complex, you’ll need a special, efficient hosting — it may create additional costs.

2. PrestaShop

PrestaShop is free, but once the standard version will no longer be enough, you can use additional, commercial modules. The nice thing about Presta is that for nearly all commercial modules, you can find a similar, free one. You can manage many online shops from one dashboard. It does not require any specific hosting and if you are capable of administering an online shop on your own, you will have no additional costs of running it.

3. OpenCart

It is an easy-to-use, open source, e-commerce platform with various free plugins that users can leverage to create their online shop. As well as PrestaShop, it enables administrators to manage multiple shops from one admin interface. It has a built-in system for managing sales and discounts. The weak spot of that software is its documentation. Many users consider it difficult to use. There are also some additional steps you have to make to ensure security of your online shop, if you decide to use OpenCart.

4. Sylius

Sylius is an e-commerce platform built in a headless model with framework Symfony. This one will serve you well, if you’d like to develop a customized online shop in a short time. It has both open source and commercial versions — each enables users to create scalable online shops, easy to modify in the future. It is much lighter than other e-commerce solutions available on the market, so you don’t need as powerful and expensive hosting as for other platforms. It has a built-in advanced reporting tool and can be easily integrated with other software and business tools.

Ask us what e-commerce platform will be the best for your project.