How do you choose the best platform for an ecommerce site? I evaluate the pros and cons of WooCommerce and Magento, the two most used systems in the world!
Online shopping is a great opportunity for companies and artisans who want to expand their market and sell their products online through an ecommerce website. Purchases on online sales sites in the UK in 2016 reached almost 20 billion euro, an increase of 18% over the previous year. The sectors that were the driving force were: tourism, IT, clothing, insurance, furniture, publishing and food..
Despite this impressive growth, many people do not yet understand the benefits of having their own online shop, instead of say selling on amazon or ebay.
Worldwide, the two most popular systems to create an ecommerce site are the Magento platform and WooCommerce, the famous WordPress plugin, even though in the UK, according to statistics, the sites created with WooCommerce are 42% compared to only 8 % of online e-stores created with Magento.
Both Magento and WooCommerce allow you to create responsive websites, have a solid architecture and are absolutely reliable. In addition both have a large community of developers behind them for new features and constant support.
On the other hand, their characteristics are very different: management costs, ease of use, flexibility of the platform, are all aspects to be evaluated carefully.
The choice must be made mainly on the basis of the e-commerce site to be implemented and the first question to ask is:
“How big will my online shop be and how will it expand in the future?”
WooCommerce
- Woocommerce is a WordPress CMS plugin specially developed to create ecommerce sites.
- It is very lightweight and requires very little space on your hosting account.
- It’s free
- Better equipped for SEO thanks to its speed and better content management
- Easy to use thanks to intuitive design and navigation
- Plugins and extensions are less expensive and easier to install and configure
- WooCommerce can easily handle a maximum number of products around 2,500
- Graphically the themes are completely customizable and cheaper
- Many features must be added via external plugins
- The use of different plugins could lead to security problems and attacks by hackers
Magneto
- It is a platform developed specifically for ecommerce
- It has many features already integrated such as Multistore or Multilanguage
- Ensures greater security by being built specifically for ecommerce
- Magento can manage thousands and thousands of products and many orders at the same time
- On a graphic level the themes are less customizable and more expensive
- Many versions are paid
- It requires a lot of space on the hosting and possibly a dedicated hosting, obviously with higher costs
- SEO is not as good as Woocommerce because content management is more problematic
- It’s quite complicated to use and it takes a long time to learn it
- Plugins and extensions are more expensive and complicated to install and configure
So, which one would you prefer to create an ecommerce site?
As we have seen, creating a website for online sales requires careful consideration.
To summarize, an ecommerce site in WordPress made through WooCommerce is lighter and faster, allows better SEO optimization and is also cheaper. It is particularly advantageous for small and medium-sized companies where the ecommerce site has a limited number of products.
Magento is more suitable for large online sales portals with a large number of products and many transactions, which also justify a significant economic commitment for the development and management of the platform.
If you are thinking about developing an e-commerce site for your business…
contact me now for a free quote!
