Popular Ecommerce Website Service Comparison
There're millions websites on internet and about 40% are ecommerce websites. From the IT annual report, it shows personal store sites have increased a lot during the past few years. More and more people are selling their products/service online. Thus to get a reliable and user friendly ecommerce solution is crucial for business success.
There're many ways to setup your shopping cart site such as consulting to a web development group, using any existing ecomerce softwares or simply start with a step by step wizard. This article compares advantages/weakness using those different solutions and help find out what you should choose.
Web Development Consulting
The traditional and probably the most reliable solution. You just need to give your ideas and requirements to service provider and they can make fast design. The biggest advantages is such companies have sufficient experience in offering various website solutions. Sometimes they even understand better than ourselves about what we need exactly. From web UI to backend coding, what you see is all about profession. All functions are provided for necessarity with no more or less. Especially when it's the first time to put business online, consulting to web development service is quite important because you can meet in real person and discuss everything in details. Any problem can be solved efficiently.
The weakness? Definitely about its expensive costs. Because your cart site will be custom programmed based your exact requirements, there're also extra discussion involved. This requires time and man power. The project may take days or weeks to complete.
Suitable for: New or big groups who have special requirement on website.
Ecommerce CMS Softwares
To start a cart site is no longer a complicated job. Based the fast tech development, there're more and more powerful ecommerce softwares being provided. You just need to upload products and configure necessary product details to enable online purchasing. Some popular ecomerce solutions like magento, opencart and zencart etc can help with quick store launch in few minutes. Installation of those softwares can be handled via auto installer directly from hosting control panel. You no longer need to deal with the boring process manually.
CMS softwares are more and more popular choice by both companies and individuals for its eas of use and powerful functions. Most softwares are open sourced where you can make custom development to fulfill your needs. You can make full use of all available templates, modules and plugins for any kind custom need. From the development trends, CMS is becoming the leading choice for shopping cart sites.
What would be the weakness of CMS? Well, in order to use the cms software properly you must have some basic coding knowledges. Also, some non-official template or plugin services might have backdoor holes that might bring big security issue. You must find a trustable provider to keep your cart in safe place.
Suitable for: Individuals and groups who have necessary programming skills.
Ecommerce Website Wizard
Simple but come with all basic functions and will provide step by step guidance for entire website setup. There's no programming skills required because everything is provided from GUI. You just need to follow the wizard to complete the store setup. What you need to focus on is all about your products information. The wizard has simplified almost all functions
Ecommerce wizard is easy to work with but it's normally provided as addon service from hosting service. Means you can not purchase it seperately. Also, most ecommerce wizard will not provide your website files. The service provider put all stuff on central server. Users can only export products. That means you have to be linked to your hosting service in order to use the wizard and it's almost impossible to migrate the site to new server space. If you have built a perfect site but your hosting fails some day then you loose all hopes.
Suitable for: Website newbies and individuals who do not have enough website experience.
But you should note that there're not too many ecommerce wizard providers. As far as we can tell, the service is mainly provided by godaddy and endurance group. For fast view, you can check out this Product Tour from godaddy.
Open source is main stream of the current and future IT industry. Thus those open source softwares will definitely become leading choice by more and more users. It's not just about cost but the spirit and passion in building a perfect project. If you would like to start a shopping cart today, we highly recommend to check out opencart and magento which is designed for small and large size carts accordingly.