New to eCommerce? Need to choose which platform to use for your store? Or perhaps you already have a web shop that’s in desperate need of a redesign? A bit confused about where to start? You’re not the only one. That’s why we’ve written this simple guide to help you decide which eCommerce platform is the right one for your business.

We’re Liquify – a small web design company in London. We have plenty of experience in building eCommerce stores and web shops for clients all around the world. We’ve also spent years perfecting the art of making complicated things really easy to understand for people like you.

Do I need an eCommerce platform?

If you plan on selling more than one product on your website you need an eCommerce platform. Don’t get confused by the lingo here. Shopping carts, eCommerce platforms, shopping baskets, eCommerce software etc all mean the same thing.

The bottom line is that if you need to sell products on your website you need (what we call) an eCommerce platform.

What does an eCommerce platform do?

An eCommerce platform is a piece of software. It allows you to sell products. These could be physical products (like jars of nice sweets for instance) or they could be digital products (like apps or downloadable courses).

In the olden days when the web was called the information super highway, people used to have an eCommerce stores built from scratch. It was seriously expensive and a bit silly to do things that way, since most stores share a lot of the same functionality.

An eCommerce platform solves this problem. It provides the common functionality required to run an online shop. It will allow you to do things like: create products with prices, manage inventory or stock levels, print and send invoices, etc. It will allow the customer to do things like: add products to the basket and (most importantly) make a purchase. All this functionality is there, ready and waiting to be used.

Which eCommerce platform should I choose?

Deciding which eCommerce platform to use for your online store is a seriously big decision. Make the wrong one and you’ll be setting yourself up to fail from the very start. Make the right decision though and you’ll set yourself ahead of the pack and save yourself a heap of money into the bargain.

Any modern, experienced eCommerce web designer will tell you that there are three, and only three, eCommerce solutions which are worth considering for 2016 and beyond. There are lots of rubbish eCommerce platforms out there. Some of them are legacy platforms which haven’t changed in years and some newer ones which show a bit of promise but don’t yet have the community around them to make them a sensible choice. We won’t be talking about them. There’s no point. We’ll be talking about THE BIG THREE. These three eCommerce solutions offer:

✅ Maximum Flexibility (because your needs will change)

✅ A Great Designer/Development Community (very important because you will almost certainly need the help of some pro’s at some point)

✅ Minimum fuss (for you). You’ll need that. Trust me.

So what are THE BIG THREE eCommerce platforms?

They are (in no particular order):

✅ Shopify

✅ Magento

✅ WordPress with the Woocommerce Plugin

The other (lesser) one’s you might read about include: Bigcommerce, Sana Commerce, Jigoshop, LemonStand, Drupal Commerce, osCommerce, Prestashop, Opencart, Zen Cart, Supadupa, Volusion. Forget these. Some of them are okay. But they are not the best. To run a successful business you need to demand the absolute best.

The good news is that most people will only need to decide between two of the big three eCommerce platforms. And the even better news is that it will be so bloody obvious which is the right solution for you after we’ve compared them that you won’t really need to make a decision at all.

If you have a budget of more than $10k for your eCommerce store – please skip here.

I have a budget of less that $10k/I have no budget and plan on doing most of the work for my eCommerce site myself.

We’ve narrowed it down to two eCommerce solutions for your store. They are called Shopify and WordPress + Woocommerce (or just “Woo”). If you’ve got any sense at all and your budget is under $10k your store should be built on either Shopify or WordPress and Woocommerce.

Below I’m going to give an overview of each of these eCommerce platforms along with a small analysis of the ongoing costs of running a store on each of them.

Shopify

Most Suitable eCommerce Solution For…

• Those who plan on doing most of the work themselves (it’s a really simple platform for beginners)
• Those who want an easy store to manage (any idiot could manage a web shop with Shopify)
• Those who want a very fast loading website (Shopify provide some excellent hosting)
• Those who want a nice selection of modern themes (pre-designed stores which you can tweak and fill with products)
• Those who want to scale effortlessly
• Those who want to accept credit and debit cards easily and quickly (Shopify make this very simple because they take care of PCI compliance.)

Not the Best eCommmerce Solution For…

• Those who want a multi-lingual website (it is possible to create a multilingual website with Shopify but the solution available is not great for SEO)
• Those who want the absolute cheapest ongoing costs (in our opinion however you get better value because of the quality of hosting – see below for comparison of ongoing costs)
• Those businesses that require advanced integrations (Shopify does integrate seamlessly with many other popular platforms such as Quickbooks and Mailchimp. But if you require integration with a 3rd party piece of software you really need to check first that Shopify supports this integration with an app. Developing a custom app can be expensive.)
• Those who want to do some serious blogging (WordPress rocks as a blogging platform, Shopify is just okay).
• Those who are already familiar with the WordPress cms (although this shouldn’t be a deal maker).

Ongoing costs for Shopify

It costs money to keep a website going – regardless of the platform. Here is a breakdown of the ongoing costs associated with running a small to medium sized Shopify store.

$29/Month – Basic plan with Shopify (this plan is suitable for most businesses starting out – it makes sense to upgrade later at a certain point)

Most competitive: 2.9% + 30¢ per transaction – If you are based in the UK, US or Canada and are using Shopify Payments as the credit/debit card processor.

Gateway fees vary and you will need to research which is the most cost effective gateway for you. It will cost more if you don’t use Shopify Payments – since you will need to pay both a gateway and Shopify fee.

WordPress with the Woocommerce Plugin

You might have heard of WordPress. It’s a very popular blogging platform used by millions of people all around the world. We love WordPress and build websites (like this) with it all the time.

There’s lots of confusion about WordPress.org and WordPress.com so before we start – let us be clear – we are ONLY talking about WordPress.org. The difference between the two is simple: WordPress.com is for babies and WordPress.org is for grownups. With WordPress.org you install WordPress on your own server and manage everything.

WordPress is no longer just a blogging platform but rather a content management system (CMS). We use it to power some pretty big and complex websites. Because it’s become so popular as a CMS – some bright developers have come up with a way for people to also sell products on their WordPress websites.

So WordPress is the CMS (content management system). To give the functionality of an eCommerce store – people install a plugin called Woocommerce. Then end result is something like a digital Frankenstein…but it works and is the best solution for some stores.

So when should WordPress with Woocommerce be used instead of Shopify?

That’s a very simple question to answer. WordPress and Woocommerce is what you use when you absolutely cannot do what you need to do with Shopify. Examples might include:

✅ When you need to integrate the store with another application and Shopify doesn’t have an integration.

✅ When you need a multilingual store (you need to look into WPML plugin for WordPress for this).

✅ You need customers to be able to checkout with multiple-currencies (again, you need to look into the WPML plugin for this).

✅ You need to do some serious blogging (although you could always run a WP blog as a subdomain with Shopify quite easily).

✅ You are very tight fisted and cannot but help going for the absolute cheapest (even if it’s not the best value).

Ongoing costs WordPress/Woocommerce

It costs money to keep a website going – regardless of the platform. Here is a breakdown of the ongoing costs associated with running a small to medium sized WordPress/Woocommerce store that you host yourself.

$5-50/Month – Hosting. Cheap hosting is always rubbish. A decent cloud host with a CDN would cost around $20-45/Month – that would be around the same quality that Shopify provide. If you plan on selling worldwide you need that.

2.9% +30¢ per transaction – If you are using Stripe as the payment gateway (there are plenty to choose from, few are cheaper or better than Stripe though).

Whilst it does appear to be cheaper to manage a store with WordPress/Woocommerce – you also need to consider that you are responsible for everything to do with the hosting account. Hosting is boring and complex and there may be times when you need to hire a developer to help you (cheap hosting providers will only help resolve certain issues).

Conclusion

Hopefully the above information will be able to help you make a decision about which eCommerce platform to choose. If you’ve got any questions feel free to leave them in the comments. And if you’d like to get a quote for eCommerce web design – just fill in this form. The following information applies to those who have a budget of over $10k.

I have a budget of more than $10k for my eCommerce store.

Ok, so you’ve got a sensible budget and you want to spend it wisely. You should limit yourself to considering the following platforms: Shopify and Magento.

Which platform you choose will very much depend on your needs as a business. To help in this process you’ll need to work with your web designer/developer to get a clearly defined list of functionality along with integrations. Your designer/developer will then need to look into the options available to see which is the most suitable platform for you. Here a very short overview of the two eCommerce platforms along with major strengths and weaknesses.

Why Choose Magento

Magento is a big, complex platform. A great Magento developer can do just about anything with the platform and it’s more suitable for seriously big eCommerce stores or stores which require complex integrations.

The chief benefit of Magento is that it’s flexible. If your needs change dramatically – a solution on Magento may be easier than on Shopify (not always though – just generally speaking).

Magento would be the eCommerce platform of choice if you needed a muti-lingual store or a checkout with multiple currencies (with Shopify you can display a currency picker to display prices in other currencies – but all customers can only checkout with one currency).

The big downside to Magento is that it’s complex and ugly and clunky on the inside. Many clients complain that Magento is too complex, buggy and requires constant work from a developer. Lots of store owners find it frustrating. Since it’s self hosted you’ll need to ensure you’re PCI compliant (if accepting credit/debit cards on the server) and be responsible for your own hosting.

Given our experience – we think that if you are going to be running a Magento store you need to either have a very technical person on your team (who can read/write code) or you need to have a reliable developer/eCommerce web design company always on standby. That’s just the way things are.

Ongoing Costs Magento

$25 – $500/Month – Hosting & SSL

2.9% +30¢ per transaction – If you are using Stripe as the payment gateway (there are plenty to choose from, foe cheaper or better though than Stripe). Transaction fees with Stripe may also be lower if you have high volumes.

Why Choose Shopify?

Shopify is an elegant and simple to use eCommerce platform. A rough guess would be that it’s suitable for 80% of new eCommerce stores. There are plenty of apps which extend the core functionality of the platform.

The chief benefit of Shopify is that most store owners find it a dream to use. It’s perfect for eCommerce shops of all sizes and comes with a wide range of integrations in the apps store. If you are a mac user you will probably love Shopify (and hate Magento).

It’s not an ideal eCommerce solution for everyone though. The platform itself becomes limited for stores which require complex, custom integrations or multi-lingual functionality. Everything is possible with Shopify but it will be more expensive to get custom apps developed on Shopify than on Magento. There are also some small limitations to the customisations you can make to the checkout pages. This is to do with security and the fact that Shopify take responsibility for the security of the checkout – not you.

Since Shopify is a hosted solution – you do not need to worry about hosting, SSL, PCI compliance. That is all taken care of. And trust us, PCI compliance can be a total headache for some store owners and cost a lot of money!

Ongoing Costs Shopify

$79/Month – Shopify Pro Plan

2.9% + 30¢ per transaction – If you are based in the UK, US or Canada and are using Shopify Payments as the credit/debit card processor.

or

3.9% +30¢ per transaction – If you are based elsewhere in the world (you cannot use Shopify Payments as your gateway). Costs vary between gateways but we’ve used Stripe as a guide because they are one of the best and most competitive. Here’s the maths: 2.9% + 30¢ (Stripe fee) + 1% Shopify Fee = 3.9% + 30¢

Hosting is included in your Shopify plan and is excellent.

Conclusion

Hopefully the above information will be able to help you make a decision about which eCommerce platform to choose. If you’ve got any questions feel free to leave them in the comments. And if you’d like to get a quote for eCommerce web design – just fill in this form. We’re always here to help and give advice.

All done, have fun.

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