How to choose a platform for your online store

Choosing the right platform for your online store plays a key role in your future success. Quite often, merchants use only those platforms which they are familiar with, which can affect the performance of the project itself, as the chosen platform may limit their capabilities. In order to avoid such issues in advance, you need to know which platform it’s best for you to opt for.

Which platform to choose to become an online merchant?

There are a lot of E-commerce platforms out there, however, we suggest that you consider the most popular and reliable options.

Magento

Magento is famous for its flexibility, the level of control that it gives you and functionality. It is considered to be the most powerful open source framework, and it also makes it easy for you to expand and upgrade your store.

In addition to those perks, you also get an easy-to-use administration panel and a wide range of settings. Although Magento makes site development more complex, this fact is fully compensated by the flexibility, user-friendliness, and multifunctionality of the platform making it the perfect choice for your future online merchants.

Nevertheless, it is worth mentioning certain disadvantages. These include high resource consumption required for full-fledged uninterrupted operation but, if you have a hosting that is powerful enough, you will not have to worry about it.

You can also choose between the free Magento Community version, or you can go for Magento Enterprise, which might be more suitable for large online businesses.

OpenCart

This platform is also quite multifunctional and at the same time requires fewer resources than Magento. Despite the fact that OpenCart is free, you might end up paying even more than you would for some paid platforms. The reason being that most of the add-on modules are paid. However, if you are a small or medium business owner, this platform is perfect, as it has some great functionality and a simple user interface.

As for the advantages of this platform, OpenCart allows you to set up your store fast, it offers you some great website performance and it also lets you manage multiple stores.

The disadvantages are the following:
1. It is not fully SEO friendly, you need to buy a paid SEO module to change URL for information, account and other useful pages.

2. It doesn’t have cache management out of the box, so you need to buy a paid module again.

WordPress

Initially, WordPress was designed for creating a personal blog. However, now there are many plugins that can help you create an online store. In order to determine if WordPress is right for you, you need to know exactly what functions you will need and then, based on these requirements, choose the most suitable plugins. Today, the most common one is the WooCommerce plugin.

Wordpress also has several great advantages to offer. The first one being the presence of thousands of themes/designs to choose from, both free and paid and the second one is all about exceptional extension possibilities through plugins.

However, like the other E-commerce platforms, WordPress has some shortcoming, First of all, it is an unsecured CMS platform making your website more vulnerable to security hacks and malicious activities compared to others. Also, WordPress makes use of a complex technical code, which you need to know when creating custom post types, taxonomies, etc. Lastly, Wordpress does not provide technical support to its users.

Joomla

Joomla, just like WordPress, was not originally designed for E-commerce. Nevertheless, today, Joomla has a module called VirtueMart the functionality of which meets most of the requirements a merchant might have. This platform is great for small and medium-sized stores that do not modify their inventory too often.

In addition, Joomla can offer some great website performance and the installation itself does not take much time and it is ready to use out of the box. Joomla also has a great collection of tutorials and useful guides for its users, which is very handy if you are just a beginner.

As for drawbacks, Joomla limits your customization capabilities, and there are some plugins that come with a price tag for Joomla that are free with other systems like WordPress.

CS-Cart

The main feature of CS-Cart is the fact that is constantly improving and new features are added on a regular basis. A simple installation process allows you to open your online store in a very short period time.

In addition, CS-Cart comes with some rich out-of-the-box features that make it fairly easy to administer your online store. The platform also offers a powerful in-built content management tool allowing you to publish all sorts of content on your website. On the other hand, CS-Cart has negative sides, which you should get acquainted with:

1. Lack of extensions disables your store from additional functions;
2. jQuery and Smarty features can slow down your server, the only way out is to move to a remote server.

How do I make sure my online store succeeds?

Let me introduce you to the Actonlytics tool — an actionable task list.

Actonlytics gathers your data from the E-commerce platform that you chose, running checks on your product, store and buyer data. After analyzing the data it will generate for you a list of actions you can take to improve your store’s performance.

Here is how it works:

• You sign up for free & connect your first shop, it’s ok you will later be able to connect more shops;
• Actonlytics will import your data and run different checks on it.
• Based on the checks, it will create an opportunities list with the top business opportunities you should take to improve your store.

In conclusion, no matter what platform you end up choosing, starting your own online store is always a great thing and once you are up and running, make sure to get a free check for your store on our website.