The freedom platform-Magento ecommerce

If you’re one of those planning to open an online store, the biggest decision you will have to make is choose which ecommerce platform to use. A variety of factors weigh into this decision including ease of use, pricing, and integrations. In this article, we look at the factors you need to keep in mind when choosing an ecommerce platform, along with the leading players you can choose from

Customisations

• Magento is fully customisable but you will need to be either technical or have a developer to make the customizations for you.
• Bigcommerce and shopify lets you customise its templates by giving you access to CSS and HTML but not change features or edit the platform code.       

Open source

• Magento is open source which means that you get more flexibility and full ownership of your site, you will not be locked into somebody else’s development cycle.
• However, the responsibility is on you to maintain and support and there is little recourse if there are bugs with the system etc. There is a large community around Magento that can help you.
• BigCommerce and Shopify are SaaS apps. They develop, maintain and support the software for you. It will continue to improve without you needing to lift a finger. However, you have little control over what gets developed and when.

Add-ons, features, transaction fees

• Magento being fully customisable has as many features and add ons as you are prepared to integrate but it is less ‘out-of-the-box’ than the other two.
• BigCommerce comes with a lot of features built in with the initial pay plan so you are ready to go straight away.
• Shopify is missing a number of standard features so you will need to but some add-ons and on lower tariffs a 2% transactional fee may apply.

Your choice of ecommerce engine

Remember that this is rough ride to get you started. All of these solutions have their fans and detractors and it is really worth trailing each of them.

• Magento gives more freedom in how you build it at the cost of requiring or hiring more technical talent.
• BigCommerce and Shopify take a more template approach, building beautiful options but at the risk of looking like another company using the same template.

Managing many channels

Each of these ecommerce choices come with plugins and add-ons and a variety of tools to help you list and manage each one. The problem for a business though is that when they grow and add channels or volume how do they manage all of them as opposed to each of them? That is the stage where it makes sense to technology at the backend to act as a central hub.