Which E-Commerce solution is best for you?

Koded Web - Jul 10, 2017

A question we get a lot here at Koded is “We are looking to set up a store online, however there seems like a lot of different options, what one best suits our needs?”

This is a key initial step for any new online business, exactly what platform is going to suit their business needs the best and mean they can start to take payments and orders online in the quickest fashion.

A lot of this decision comes down to a few key simple factors:

1. Budget

Does your company have the budget upfront to spend on an all singing, all dancing E-commerce solution such as Magento, or do you more want to test the water in the industry and see what is what when it comes to selling your products online. This is often the reason why users will pick one or other of the platforms we provide.

2. Product Catalogue

Do you currently have an extensive product range consisting of different product types and complex products? Or is it that you are looking to start off with a handful of products that might actually be better suited to a more simple, user friendly system such as WooCommerce?

When it comes to large product databases, usually within the thousands of products range, we would advise that the company would look to platform to Magento as this offers far greater support for things such as bulk product uploading, catalogue management and catalogue control as well as page speed benefits for the end user when searching through your catalogue.

3. In house skills

Often when demonstrating Magento stores to people, they are quickly put off by the steeper learning curve that comes with updating or adding products or editing content compared to a more user friendly system such as that provided by WordPress and WooCommerce. However, we do find that once users are trained up on the systems they are able to edit products and run their storefronts without consideration and hassle free.

We often find that if a business has a complex warehousing infrastructure or 3rd party applications that the system will need to interact with, that these are solutions that can be found easier through Magento rather than WooCommerce and WordPress.

4. Shop Complexity

Here at Koded, we work with different Open Source platforms to produce Online retail experiences for our customers, these range from full Magento Builds to WordPress/WooCommerce builds. Whilst Magento is a specialised E-Commerce platform and as such has a wide range of integrated features compared to that of WooCommerce etc, these will never cater for every businesses needs and there will be things you want to do that the core functionality just doesn’t have the ability to do.

Both platforms allow for easy functionality updates through Extensions provided by 3rd party developers that are well renowned in the industry for what they produce. These extensions are usually paid for additions to the build but cut down on costs in the long run as they are using prebuilt code that has been tested over numerous websites etc.

5. Future Scalability

When planning any new business, future planning is key to any businesses success. Obviously you can’t predict exactly what will happen in the future but having in place a roadmap for where you would like the company to be positioning itself in the years to come will help to decide what platform is best for your needs.

If as a business you are looking to build a site that initially is testing the waters of what is possibly for your catalogue, it could be a possibility that in the future you can look to migrate your online store from a smaller platform, such as WooCommerce into a Magento build to fully utilise the industry that you a targeting.

As with anything online and in business, you can’t predict what will happen in the future and there is also no hard and fast rules on what will work, it is about finding the correct solution for your immediate needs with an eye on the future for what you are looking to do.

We have a long history of building online stores and want to buid ongoing partnerships with companies to help them to get the best out of what they are doing online. Why not drop us a message or give us a call on 0161 818 9765 to see how we can help get your business going on the road to success.