Best eCommerce Platforms in 2022 — Thorough Review & Comparison
By LitExtension
Introduction
As stated by Salmon, 90% of enterprise-level eCommerce professionals of both B2B and B2C companies claimed that eCommerce platform selection is the most important decision in establishing a multichannel store. Thus, it is of great importance to choose the right platform for your business.
Whether you are starting a new online business or looking to switch platforms, this guideline will help you to find the optimal solution among top 6 most popular eCommerce platforms: Shopify vs Wix vs BigCommerce vs Magento vs WooCommerce vs PrestaShop.
In this article, LitExtension — #1 The World Shopping Cart Migration Expert will help you to:
- Brief introduction of the 6 best eCommerce platforms
- Analyzing best eCommerce platforms (Cost, Support, Design & Customization…)
- Deciding which one will be a good fit for you
Let’s get cracking!
Shopping Cart Migration Trends 2021
Before diving into the top 6 best eCommerce platforms in 2022, let’s go through some interesting 2021 shopping cart migration trends analyzed based on LitExtension’s in-house data. These statistics are one of the important factors we use to define top eCommerce platforms 2022.
When it comes to the most migrated-from platforms in 2021, Magento, Wix, WooCommerce, OpenCart, PrestaShop, and Shopify accounted for 72,25% of the total number of Source Carts.
These top 6 most migrated-from platforms are likely to be compatible with the top migrated-from platforms in 2020. Notably, Magento was the most popular migrated-from cart in 2021, accounting for 21,46%.
With above 85% Target Carts, the top 3 migrated-to platforms in 2021 were Shopify (46,21%), WooCommerce (27,32%), and Magento (12,58%).
Since 46,21% of merchants migrated to Shopify, this platform confirmed its position as the most popular destination. After Shopify, WooCommerce came in second with 27,32%. Magento was placed third, with a share of 12,58%. Bigcommerce and PrestaShop were the top 4 and 5 most popular Target Carts, with 3,47% and 2,93% of migrations respectively.
While open-source carts are preferred over hosted carts in 2020, the proportion of migrations to hosted carts in 2021 was 50,52%, which was greater than the 49,1% for open-source platforms.
What are the Best eCommerce Platforms in 2022 and Why?
#1. Shopify
What is Shopify?
Started in 2004 by a group of snowboarding enthusiasts, Shopify has become one of the most well-known names in the eCommerce sphere, and perhaps the easiest-to-use tool to build your online store.
It’s a full-featured hosted solution that is designed to provide for you everything needed to start selling online. Currently, over 3,5 million businesses across 175 countries worldwide are powered by this platform.
As you can see, Shopify pricing is quite clear and straightforward. It offers 5 different pricing tiers with additional features depending on which plan you are on, which ranges from $9 to $299 per month. Unlike open-source platforms, each of these plans already includes domain name, SSL certificate, and web hosting.
However, you might need to purchase third-party tools and add-ons in order to get some helpful features. As your business grows, these costs will start adding up. Moreover, Shopify charges an additional fee if you use other payment providers than Shopify, which is around 0.5% — 2% per transaction depending on your plan.
Shopify also provides the Shopify Lite plan with just only $9/month. Please bear in mind that this plan won’t give you a complete online store. Instead, it lets you sell on social networks and embed a Shopify buy button on your own website to use the shopping cart functionality.
Why Shopify is One of the Best eCommerce Platforms?
In 2021, Shopify has impressively surpassed WooCommerce to take the top spot in terms of live websites available with over 3,5 million. This platform is also the most popular destination for e-merchants moving from another eCommerce platform.
Shopify Ease of Use
With a plethora of features packed into a user-friendly environment, Shopify makes things easier for e-merchants that are just getting their feet wet in online retailing. Shopify gives it all: a simple setup with an intuitive dashboard area for easily adding products, changing the design of the site, and much more. You can manage customers, orders, and inventory are in the same way.
With Shopify, you can easily set up and open an online store within minutes, without any coding knowledge required. Thus, it would be an ideal option for beginners and eCommerce sites that don’t have lots of in-house technical resources.
If you’re a newbie just dipping your toes into the eCommerce business, don’t worry! Shopify offers a 14-day free trial, so you can try it out before deciding to commit.
In case you want to see everything that Shopify offers and how can it help your business, check out our in-depth Shopify review below.
Shopify Apps & Add-ons
Shopify comes with a powerful API and an App Store with over 6000 apps, helping you to broaden the functionality of your website. The good news is that you can add most apps just with the click of a button. However, keep in mind that some options might require your coding knowledge.
It can be seen that Shopify is much closer to Magento in terms of app and add-on options. Both offer an extensive range of functionality with thousands of apps and plugins for users to choose from.
Shopify also has an enterprise solution called Shopify Plus. For more information on the pros and cons of this platform, check out this detailed Shopify vs Shopify Plus comparison.
Shopify Design & Customization
One of Shopify’s greatest selling points is the visual quality of its themes. From my point of view, they look absolutely out of the box. It is also pretty easy for users to install and apply Shopify themes to design the store’s look. The company claims that “You don’t need any technical or design experience to create a beautiful online store”.
Currently, Shopify provides more than 88 different themes in its theme store, both free and paid. These Shopify themes are all mobile-optimized and support a decent variety of business types with many coloring options. Thus, users can easily choose a theme that suits their business’ characteristics.
Due to Shopify’s proprietary codebase, the platform offers limited customization options. However, you can utilize Shopify’s specialized ‘Liquid’ language to tailor your store’s design and make your brand stand out.
Shopify SEO Features
Shopify offers a basic set of SEO features for users to optimize the store-level content to ensure higher SERP positions. For instance, you can edit meta tags, add alt text to images, create 301 redirects and auto XML sitemap, etc. Notably, this platform provides SSL certificates for your store’s check out, and for any content that’s hosted on your domain.
The Canadian eCommerce platform is also well-known for its fast loading speed. This improves the user experience significantly, and search engines take notice as well.
Shopify’s disadvantage is that it has a rigid URL structure. Users are not allowed to fully customize their URLs (section of Shopify store URLs cannot be changed). Moreover, it is quite difficult to create sub-categories on this platform.
About content marketing strategy, Shopify does have a blog with impressive features like multiple authors, easy-to-set tags, and customizable SEO parameters. However, it still has some limitations, as this platform does not allow to add widgets and maps. Shopify also restricts users from embedding products in blog posts.
Shopify Support
Shopify is renowned for its outstanding customer support which you’ll have access to even before signing up for a Shopify plan. Shopify’s support team is available 24/7 via phone, instant messaging and emails. Notably, 24/7 phone support is considered the second most wanted feature by eCommerce merchants.
Apart from that, Shopify offers extensive documentation as well as a knowledge base and a large community for users and developers. You can also hire Shopify experts in case you need extra help or if you want to integrate a third-party solution.
Best for: Creating a full-fledged website; Most stores; Multi-channel selling; B2B selling.
#2. Wix
What is Wix?
Wix is an all-in-one website builder that allows users to create a website for a variety of purposes rapidly. It comes with a slew of features to help e-merchants succeed, including an easy-to-use design tool and hundreds of payment options.
Over 1,5 million live websites are currently powered by Wix, which accounts for 15% of the total eCommerce market share.
Wix has two major pricing categories: Website Plans and Business & eCommerce Plans. Wix Website Plans are ideal for individuals who want to create and display their high-end websites.
- VIP: $24.50/month
- Unlimited: $12.50/month
- Combo: $8.50/month
- Connect Domain: $4.50/month
Wix Business & eCommerce Plans, on the other hand, include interesting features to help you get started with your online business.
- Business VIP: $35/month
- Business Unlimited: $25/month
- Business Basic: $17/month
Why Wix is One of the Best eCommerce Platforms?
Wix Ease of Use
Notably, Wix has a reasonable price and gives store owners complete control over every aspect of their websites without requiring them to know how to code. As a result, it would be a simple way for new eCommerce customers with few products and limited technological knowledge.
Excellent Website Builder Tools
Furthermore, Wix sets itself apart from its competitors in the industry by providing three top-of-the-line website builder tools. Users can create their website using Wix ADI, Wix Editor, or Wix Editor X, depending on their needs. This platform can easily meet the demands of users, whether they want to create a personal blog or a Wix eCommerce web store.
Wix Payments keeps up with industry changes to keep its systems up to current. Wix can provide users with the most up-to-date eCommerce payment trends, including Buy Now Pay Later or digital wallet. Wix became one of the first eCommerce platforms to accept cryptocurrency payments on their online store.
Wix Design & Customization
Users can choose from a variety of website themes through the Wix dashboard. Notably, all 831 Wix templates are available for free download and customization. It would be extremely useful to eCommerce users who lack a strong financial foundation.
Best for: Beginners, Small and medium businesses, Startups, Users with little to no coding skills.
#3. BigCommerce
What is BigCommerce?
BigCommerce is a top-of-the-line eCommerce website builder in the current market. Similar to Shopify, it’s a robust all-in-one shopping cart solution, which allows users to get an online store built without worrying about any infrastructure-related hassles.
However, BigCommerce is less ideal for beginners due to its use of various tech terms. You may need help from Google a lot to understand all the terminologies even when performing basic tasks like adding a product.
The technical load makes BigCommerce a heavier platform to deal with, however, this is because of its powerful in-built features, which brings you a finer level of customization.
With its uniquely sophisticated customizability and flexibility, BigCommerce is such a great solution for mid-market and enterprise brands.
BigCommerce offers a subscription-based model for its users, like Shopify. You can start your online store with a free demo, but soon you’ll have to pay for the service.
There are three main pricing plans: Standard, Plus, and Pro, which start from $29.95 to $299.95. By paying more, you can get access to a more extensive set of features.
In addition, BigCommerce offers Enterprise plans that provide advanced functionality and are tailor-made for enterprise sites.
At some point, BigCommerce has some edges over Shopify in terms of cost. This is because it doesn’t charge users any additional transaction fees for selecting third-party payment gateways and also provides more native features.
However, your BigCommerce store will be automatically upgraded to a new plan if it attains a certain amount of sales revenue in a year.
Why BigCommerce is One of the Best eCommerce Platforms?
First and foremost, BigCommerce is a full-fledged platform that ranked among the top migrated-to platforms in 2021. This solution may undoubtedly assist users in scaling your business more effectively and efficiently.
BigCommerce Apps & Add-ons
This eCommerce platform deserves a standing ovation for its robust built-in features, such as abandoned cart recovery, single-page checkout, bulk pricing, and so on, which significantly cut your need for third-party services.
Besides, BigCommerce comes with hundreds of third-party apps and integrations to help you add superior features to your BigCommerce store. Like other platforms, the BigCommerce apps cover many different fields including accounting & tax, analytics, customer service, merchandising, payment & security, marketing, etc.
For instance, BigCommerce merchants can easily combine their website building with marketing and conversion apps like Google Adwords and Mailchimp or accounting and tax tools like Sage, Xero, and Quickbooks.
In comparison with its main competitor — Shopify, BigCommerce has a much smaller app store. However, it would be hard to find an app on Shopify that you could not find on BigCommerce. In fact, Mailchimp is not available on Shopify’s app store, but you can download it from the BigCommerce marketplace. Before making a payment, BigCommerce offers a 15-day free trial for a number of apps.
BigCommerce Design & Customization
BigCommerce offers a pretty impressive array of premium and free BigCommerce themes with full responsiveness and cross-platform compatibility for store owners. Notably, the way it approaches themes is kind of similar to Shopify’s strategy. You can simply design your store’s look by choosing and applying many different nicely-designed templates to your store with just a few clicks.
Stencil is BigCommerce’s theme platform, which integrates with state-of-the-art practices in technology, design, conversion, and SEO. BigCommerce merchants can easily personalize and customize all parts of their site if they have the technical expertise or with the help of developers.
BigCommerce is ideal for merchants who don’t have many technical skills, but it also allows tech-savvy people to tweak the website (through editing HTML, CSS, and popular code libraries).
Besides, BigCommerce is considered a growing Headless Commerce provider. Headless Commerce is a solution that allows users to decouple a store’s back-end infrastructure from the front-end design. This gives you full creative control over your website, offering a more flexible and seamless digital experience for customers.
Furthermore, BigCommerce allows you to integrate a different CMS like WordPress or Adobe Experience Manager when using the platform’s headless solution.
BigCommerce SEO Features
BigCommerce could be considered a pretty solid platform for SEO. The platform provides various functionalities with high customizability and integrations with marketing tools to please anyone who cares about ranking high on SERPs.
You can easily edit meta titles and descriptions, add image alt text, get keyword support, and create 301 redirects using BigCommerce. The U.S platform also provides access to HTML and CSS code and advanced tools such as Schema, Sitemaps, and SSL. BigCommerce default URLs are also fully customizable, which is a direct advantage over its main competitor, Shopify.
Notably, Google accelerated mobile pages (AMP) have played a vital role in SEO performance. In this case, BigCommerce has AMP-enabled automatically on quite a lot of its themes, allowing merchants to provide lightning-fast product and category pages on mobile devices.
Another strong point of BigCommerce’s SEO features is its unique content delivery network that can load website pages much faster than other competitors.
BigCommerce Support
As a fully hosted platform, BigCommerce comes with excellent customer support service. There are multiple support options that you can access right from your BigCommerce dashboard, including 24/7 phone support, email support, live chat support, community support, and more. Anytime you run into an issue, you can get assistance quickly.
Additionally, the platform provides a powerful help center for its users, which includes a rich knowledge base, a question and answer community, and blogs for the latest news on BigCommerce. The BigCommerce University series is also very helpful for finding answers to your store-related questions.
Best for: Large organizations and corporations; Headless commerce; Multi-channel selling.
#4. WooCommerce
What is WooCommerce?
WooCommerce is a bit different from other eCommerce solutions. It’s a customizable, open-source shopping cart plugin built on WordPress. However, WooCommerce is the most popular eCommerce platform in the world, about one-third of all online stores are powered by this CMS.
First off, WooCommerce is an open-source eCommerce platform that allows the code to be freely available for anyone to view, modify, and contribute. Thus, users and programmers can customize stores at their will, easily build custom extensions or scale the store without breaking its structure.
If you’re familiar with WordPress, you won’t have to go through a steep learning curve to understand how WooCommerce works. Therefore, this platform would be a great option worth considering for those who already have a WordPress website or blog.
WooCommerce Pricing
WordPress and WooCommerce are totally free to use. You can directly download both of them from the website. Thus, small and low-budget businesses can consider using this platform to build their online stores.
However, you have to pay for a domain name, web hosting, or SSL certificate in order to start your WooCommerce store. Normally, the cost of a domain name is $9 -$20/year, hosting solution $10/month, and SSL certificate $65/year. However, you can have a look at these more affordable web hosting.
Aside from that, you may realize that the basic WooCommerce store is limited in its capabilities when your store grows. Thus, you might need to purchase third-party plugins in order to expand and improve your store’s functionality.
Why WooCommerce is One of the Best eCommerce Platforms?
In 2021, WooCommerce ranked first in terms of market share, second in terms of live websites, and third in terms of migrated-to platforms, as previously stated.
WooCommerce Design & Customization
Some eCommerce platforms are inherently better when it comes to design and customization, and so is WooCommerce. It should be pointed out that WooCommerce is a WordPress plugin, thus, it enables users to take advantage of the full force of super-rich WordPress themes, 5000+ free themes for more specific.
This means that, in most cases, you are able to select any WordPress theme, and still make it work together with WooCommerce. However, it is advisable to use a specific tailor-made WooCommerce theme, as it can help you to optimize your store’s design.
The first place you should have a look at is Storefront, which is the WooCommerce default store theme. It has all the important features of an eCommerce store and is fully responsive on mobile devices.
Moreover, you can customize your store’s look by adding a child theme ($0-$39/piece) and extensions ($69/bundle) for Storefront.
WooCommerce also offers unlimited customization for its users, which is one of the greatest benefits when using this platform to sell online. You can adjust and code all plugins, extensions and themes to tailor the look and functionality of your website. This gives you greater control of your website appearance and the ability to add specific features to suit your business needs.
WooCommerce Apps & Add-ons
WooCommerce is an open-source platform built on top of WordPress. This gives users access to more than 59,000 WordPress plugins, besides almost 700 extensions are specifically made for WooCommerce.
You can use these adds-on to personalize or customize your website depending on the business needs. It is possible to add payment gateways, lead generation, SEO, usability, navigation, marketing, and almost any features you can think of. Notably, you can also hire a developer to create a plugin just for your own website.
The main disadvantage of WooCommerce is that installing too many plugins and extensions tends to slow loading speed and overall performance. It is advisable to implement the desired functions through CSS, jQuery or HTML codes or limit the number of apps installed.
WooCommerce SEO Features
As a plugin based on WordPress, a Content Management System (CMS) considered by experts as one of the most reliable options for SEO features, WooCommerce inherits all WordPress’s available SEO capability. It allows you to easily edit and add content and meta information in order to ensure your products’ keywords can have high-ranking positions on SERPs.
WordPress also provides you with a wider array of advanced SEO plugins, and the most popular one that you might know is Yoast SEO. You can highly optimize your store by using this plugin’s outstanding SEO functionalities such as adding multiple focus keyphrases per page, real-time suggestions for internal links, URL redirects, etc.
However, your site loading time largely depends on the hosting provider you go with, which might affect your store’s SEO performance.
WooCommerce Support
As an open-source platform, WooCommerce has the advantage of a large user base and community. WooCommerce users can seek help or technical support easily from a huge community where peers, developers, and WooExperts are eager to help them.
This is an important aspect for small merchants, as they might not have the budget to hire a specialized developer.
In addition, WooCommerce provides online documentation, reference materials, and tutorials for your WooCommerce products. These online guides will take you through common issues if you follow the instructions carefully.
However, WooCommerce users will not get massive support from the WooCommerce team, including phone and email support. If any problem arises, they usually resort to online resources to find help or have to file a form, which will get the answers via live chat within 24 hours.
Best for: All-size businesses; Tech gurus; WordPress sites; Dropshipping; B2B selling; International sales.
#5. Magento 2
What is Magento 2?
Magento is a self-hosted eCommerce CMS, owned by Adobe. It’s one of the most popular eCommerce platforms, providing scalability and reliable performance for the biggest companies worldwide. Such industry giants like Nike, Jack Daniel’s, and Ford have their stores running on Magento and successfully serve millions of customers and thousands of daily in-store operations.
As a self-hosted solution, Magento (Adobe Commerce) provides you with lots of control over your website. With technical knowledge, you’ll be able to change anything you want in terms of functionality, design, and choose your own server environment. So, if you want a truly customizable and powerful platform and/or have coding skills or a developer, Magento could be a perfect choice.
Since the release of the Magento 2.0 version in 2015, this platform has offered two main eCommerce solutions, namely Magento Open Source (previously Magento Community) and Magento Commerce (previously Magento Enterprise) along with other products.
Magento Commerce also has a managed and automated hosting version called Magento Commerce Cloud, which is an all-in-one solution built exclusively for enterprise-level merchants with high sales volume or medium businesses preparing to grow.
If you want to know more about the difference between Magento Open Source and Magento Commerce, you should have a look at our article here.
Magento Pricing
Magento is mostly used free, especially if you only use Magento Open Source. That’s right, you can download and install this edition without paying a dime.
However, for the Magento Commerce version, it can actually cost you a great deal of money. The annual license fee of this product starts at $22,000 for merchants generating less than $1 million in revenue. This cost will be increasing in accordance with your store’s expected gross sale revenue. In other words, the more revenue you generate, the more you have to pay.
The license fee of running your business on Magento Commerce Cloud is even higher. It can cost you almost double for the same gross sales revenue tier as Magento Commerce, ranging from $40,000 to $190,000. Thus, it is ideal to use this edition if you have a huge business; otherwise, it’s not worth it.
Why Magento is One of the Best eCommerce Platforms?
Magento SEO Features
In fact, Magento is often held up as one of the best eCommerce solutions for search engine optimization (SEO). This is because this platform provides different powerful functionalities and extensions for businesses to guarantee higher search engine results pages (SERPs) ranking positions.
As an open-source platform, Magento allows users to fully customize their stores’ design and SEO functionality. For instance, you can optimize default meta tags, image alt-tags, permalinks, product descriptions or restrict search engines from indexing pages you don’t want to rank for.
Additional features including Google sitemap, no-follow links, redirects, and canonical tags also make it easier for search engines to crawl your online store and understand its structure.
However, if you use the Magento Open Source edition, you might need to purchase marketing extensions in order to have these functions.
Magento Design & Customization
Currently, Magento provides two default themes: Luma, as a demonstration theme, and Blank as a basis for custom theme creation. These themes are based on a responsive design that renders the display of your storefront for different devices.
In addition, Magento offers 5 other ready-made themes for your shop in its marketplace, where the price varies from zero to $499. You can also visit Themeforest, Template Monster, or Magenest for more feature-rich design options on this platform.
Despite the limitation of theme selecting options, you can get endless customization possibilities over the design of your store due to Magento’s open-source nature. You can customize anything at your will or even create your own theme from scratch, without restrictions to a certain level of integrations. However, bear in mind that these customizations may require coding knowledge and technical skills.
Magento Apps & Add-ons
It would be no exaggeration to say that Magento has the most robust marketplace among eCommerce solutions. Its marketplace has a wide range of almost 3,500 free and paid extensions, which allows you to enhance and expand your store’s functionality significantly.
The Magento marketplace provides solutions in every aspect from accounting & finance, content & customizations, customer support, marketing, payments & security to site optimization, etc.
Magento Support
The Magento Open Source edition is a free and open-source eCommerce platform, which allows users to install and develop their site on their own using available guides. That can help you keep the cost low, but it also means there’s not necessarily dedicated support for customers when using the product.
However, Magento has a huge community from around the world to support store owners if they run into any problem. Here, you will receive advice from developers and other experienced merchants. In addition, Magento maintains a knowledge base/help center for its customers.
Meanwhile, Magento Commerce users will get official support from Magento including email, phone, and live support.
Best for: Businesses with a lot of technological know-how and developers; Large businesses.
#6. PrestaShop
What is PrestaShop?
Launched in 2007, PrestaShop has developed very quickly to become one of the most popular CMS in Europe.
The platform is probably lesser-known than WooCommerce and Magento, but it wouldn’t be fair to say that it’s not a great option for business owners to scale their business into the eCommerce world.
Currently, PrestaShop is used by more than 300,000 merchants and has a huge community with more than 1 million members.
Like the three aforementioned shopping carts, PrestaShop is a freemium open-source eCommerce platform. Thus, you are capable of modifying the underlying code to make a unique online store that suits your specific business needs.
The platform is written in the PHP language and runs on Smarty Template Engine, which is compatible with Unix, Linux, and Windows operating systems.
Notably, PrestaShop is well-known for its user-friendliness, as the platform offers a fairly easy-to-use back-office and a well-designed interface. Its dashboard is pretty slick and intuitive that users don’t have to be tech-savvy in order to use it.
Recently, the French platform introduced its hosted option named PrestaShop Ready. However, this edition is still in the early stage and is only available in just a few markets.
PrestaShop Pricing
Similar to other open-source solutions, PrestaShop is totally free to download. You can install and use it without paying a penny. This can help you to keep your store’s initial investment cost low.
However, you still have to pay for a hosting service, a domain name, and an SSL certificate. Furthermore, extensions and plugins might come at a steep price in case you want to widen your store’s functionality.
These costs derived from the free version might make PrestaShop Ready a better option, especially if you don’t have technical skills. Some sources mentioned that this SaaS edition will charge you around $20 per month, which is lower than both Shopify and BigCommerce. However, you should wait until the official announcement from PrestaShop, as this paid version is still in the revamping process.
Why PrestaShop is One of the Best eCommerce Platforms?
PrestaShop had a significant number of store owners flock to this open-source solution in 2021, making it the fourth most migrated-to platform. This solution is expected to maintain its position as one of the leading eCommerce platforms in 2022.
PrestaShop Security
PrestaShop provides e-merchants with world-class support in times of flaws or security issues. This eCommerce platform will assign a primary handler from their security team to resolve the issues as soon as feasible after receiving a security bug report. Store owners will be less vulnerable to crucial and severe concerns that could result in data leaking or a scam this way.
PrestaShop Apps & Add-ons
To enhance your store’s functionality and appearance, you can integrate additional features from thousands of modules and themes available on PrestaShop Marketplace. The Prestashop’s modules support a wide range of features such as design & navigation, shipping & logistics, administration, promotion & marketing, payment, etc.
However, it is worth noting that these add-ons and integrations are made by different developers and are not guaranteed to work well together. This could possibly lead to unexpected glitches in your store, affecting the overall business operation.
PrestaShop Design & Customization
PrestaShop offers a huge selection of high-quality and responsive themes which you can use to enhance your store’s look and make it more appealing for your target audience. And you do need to pay extra for these templates. The only free option is your site’s default theme, which is quite basic.
As an open-source site builder, PrestaShop has enough room for flexibility. You can get as deep into the underlying code as possible to customize your store’s functionality. With technical knowledge or with the help of a developer, you’re totally able to create a whole new store from scratch to suit your principal business objectives.
PrestaShop SEO Features
PrestaShop provides a good inbuilt SEO mechanism for its users. Users have the ability to generate friendly URLs automatically, edit pages and meta tags, adjust XML sitemap and robot.txt files, utilize canonical tags, etc.
However, you might have to purchase some additional modules in order to extend your store’s SEO functionality. These modules can come with a steep price that you should take into consideration.
PrestaShop Support
PrestaShop has a powerful and diversified customer support service. From my point of view, it is one of the best customer services among eCommerce platforms.
There are two main types of support services that PrestaShop merchants can consult: PrestaShop Online Assistance and PrestaShop Technical Assistance. The first one contains many different online resources including documentation, guides, webinars, tutorials, blogs, FAQs, eCommerce training courses (for both merchants and developers), and a forum. Notably, PrestaShop has the largest community compared with other shopping carts with more than 1,200,000 members in total.
Unlike other open-source solutions, PrestaShop offers dedicated support for online merchants. You can schedule a 15-minutes meeting with PrestaShop experts or contact directly with the support team via phone call.
The PrestaShop Technical Assistance service also provides four main support plans that you can choose depending on your specific needs, as shown in the above picture. However, you have to pay for these plans, which vary from €50 to €1,400. Additionally, you can hire PrestaShop agencies to solve your store-related issues.
Best for: Experienced users with coding skills; small or medium-sized business.
Hosted eCommerce Platform or Open-source eCommerce Platform?
In the era where online shopping is the new norm, the market has been flooded with different eCommerce solutions for store owners.
Currently, it is estimated that there are more than 300 eCommerce platforms available in the market, some of which are specifically designed for B2B sales, dropshipping or certain types of business. This decent variety of options helps ensure that online merchants can find an optimal shopping cart for their businesses.
At a quick glance, these eCommerce platforms can look fairly similar. However, they each have their own highlights and some of their characteristics are better suited for specific scenarios and types of users. So, how to choose an eCommerce platform that can fit your business needs? What is the most optimal eCommerce platform for you?
There are a lot of aspects that need to be taken into consideration. Above all, it is advisable to consider the type of eCommerce platform.
Some platforms are open-source shopping carts where the original source code is freely available and can be adjusted or modified easily. Meanwhile, the others could be hosted carts that provide merchants an all-in-one solution to build an online store, including hosting, shopping cart function, and technical support.
For more information on the pros and cons of each platform, check out this detailed open-source shopping cart vs hosted shopping cart.
Best eCommerce Platforms — FAQs
1. Which eCommerce platform is best?
- Shopify is the best all-around product selling platform.
- Wix is the greatest platform for creating a full-fledged website.
- BigCommerce is the finest option for large organizations and corporations.
- Magento is ideal for businesses with a lot of technological know-how and developers.
- WooCommerce is the finest option for WordPress sites.
2. What is the most affordable eCommerce platform?
Wix is the best eCommerce platform with free trials that provides more powerful paying plans that you may experience for free. Wix free trials often last two weeks. Thus, this platform is ideal for trying out a plan before determining whether it’s worth paying for. This solution also includes a free plan, and if you want to use a paid plan, it starts at only $4.50/month.
3. Which eCommerce platform is fastest?
Shopify is the fastest platform in our study, coming in 0.7s ahead of Magento and Prestashop, and WooCommerce is in last place.
Best eCommerce Platforms — Final Words
Although there are hundreds of eCommerce platforms available in the market, there is no one-size-fits-all solution. The key point is to find the best eCommerce platform that is suitable for your business type as well as the future objectives.
This article compares Shopify vs Wix vs BigCommerce vs Magento vs WooCommerce vs PrestaShop in a few aspects. There are also many other elements that you should take into consideration like eCommerce features, scalability, sales features, security, and ease of use. To read more comprehensive reviews on each platform, make sure to visit our Cart Reviews section.
Based on all the above information, here comes a short conclusion regarding the best eCommerce platforms:
- What are the best hosted eCommerce platforms? — Shopify, Wix, BigCommerce.
- What are the best open-source eCommerce platforms? — WooCommerce, Magento, PrestaShop.
- What are the best eCommerce platforms for WordPress? — WooCommerce, BigCommerce.
- What eCommerce platforms have the best UX? — Shopify, Wix.
- What are the best eCommerce platforms to use for dropshipping brands? — Shopify, Magento, WooCommerce.
- What are the best eCommerce platforms for small businesses? — Wix, Shopify, PrestaShop.
- What are the best B2B eCommerce platforms? — Shopify Plus, BigCommerce Enterprise.
- What are the best enterprise eCommerce platforms? — Shopify, BigCommerce, Magento.
Are you planning to switch your eCommerce platforms?
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Our support team is available 24/7, please do not hesitate to contact us if you have any questions. Join our Facebook Community to get more eCommerce tips and news.
