What Works Best — Magento, WooCommerce, or Drupal Commerce?

ECommerce has been around for quite a long time now and has grown into a booming industry, picking up momentum in the global market like a wildfire.

Thanks to eCommerce, people nowadays buy all kinds of things sitting in the comfortable confines of their homes and offices without having to visit an actual market. Not limited to the comfort of buying things online, eCommerce also allows people to sell almost anything, helping save on costs and traveling.

Mobile commerce is no longer a nifty sideshow either. With the proliferation of smartphones and tablets in the technology sphere, and as shopping on smartphones and tablets has now become routine for people, mCommerce has further shifted the retailers’ focus to building and enhancing their online business to stay in the race.

Bank of America forecasts that $67.1 billion purchases will be made from smartphones in Europe and the US by end of 2015.

A wide range of mCommerce platforms is available for building a robust mobile eCommerce site from which GSI, Oracle ATG, IBM Websphere, Amazon Webstore, MarketLive, American Eagle, and Magento are worth mentioning.

If you are contemplating the prospects of building your own eCommerce site, it is important to know which platform will yield the best results. There are a number of platforms and services available for this task, but only a handful of them is considered worthwhile today.

Let’s take a brief look at the three most popular platforms available today.

WooCommerce

The first in line and arguably one of the most popular eCommerce platforms in the market today is WooCommerce — a stand-alone, open source plugin for WordPress that is designed for businesses of any size that use WordPress for their online shop front.

WooCommerce claims to be intuitive and easy to set up with everything you need to get your online business started. Developed to deliver enterprise-level quality and features, WooCommerce offers premium themes and extensions to enhance your shop-front and to give you a birds-eye view of all your sales and performance.

Magento

Next up is Magento, the second most popular and widely used eCommerce platform that powers hundreds of thousands of online stores and can be downloaded for free. This open source solution offers maximum performance and scalability, with advanced capabilities out-of-the-box.

Drupal Commerce

The third most popular platform is Drupal Commerce, the only open-source platform that is built on an enterprise CMS. Highly modular and configurable to fit your business model, Drupal Commerce claims to offer a flexible, easy-to-use, and extensible platform to integrate a rich eCommerce experience anywhere within your environment.

For many business owners and online retailers, the first most important decision when building an eCommerce site is determining which platform is better for their business.

While all three platforms that we’ve briefly discussed are widely used and have an immense user base and online community, the differences in their benefit and functionalities make some stand out above the rest.

To make things simpler for you, we’ve further laid out the comparison between the three platforms to help you with your final decision.

WooCommerce vs Magento vs Drupal

Starting up an online business using WooCommerce or Magento is easy, since both the platforms are hurdle-free and require no specialized knowledge to get your website up and running. With online tutorials and documentation, it is very simple to install and use the interfaces of both the plugins.

However, what makes Magento different from WooCommerce is the added cost of hiring Magento developers if you need to grow your website and add extensions to offer your customers a better shopping experience. Magento developers are a rare find and the ones you do find cost you more than the actual cost of a paid plugin.

WooCommerce, on the other hand, is relatively easier to use and less costly to expand. With Magento, furthermore, dedicated servers or a cloud plan of your own is required to run your website when your business grows.

Whereas, WooCommerce runs smoothly with WordPress hosting and scales evenly as your product portfolio grows. Similarly, if you are already a user of Drupal 7 or are considering Drupal 7, Drupal Commerce is the best solution for your eCommerce needs.

Unlike WooCommerce and to some extent Magento, Drupal is not that easy to use and setup though.

Between these three platforms, if you are developing a website where people will pay an annual subscription fee for premium content, or if a membership service is a key function of your online business, then Drupal Commerce is your best bet.

On the other hand, if you have many products, Magento is an excellent solution. Lastly, if you are running a small business with a limited budget and aiming to market a limited set of products immediately, WooCommerce is, without a doubt, the way forward.

Here is a quick snapshot of all the three platforms to understand the differences better.

So are you switching from an existing eCommerce system? Which platform are you considering switching to?

Well, no matter which platform you plan to go for, it is advisable to take help from an experienced eCommerce solutions provider to make sure you’re on the right path and all your efforts don’t won’t be in vain.