Shopify or Volusion or WP eComm or ?????

SirKonstantine

SirKonstantine

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Jun 15, 2011
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The last ecomm site I worked on was a magento site and, after that, I'll never work with magento every again.

I'm planning to start an eComm site soon and a friend suggested shopify for he uses it himself. volusion also looks good to me too and I can't tell the difference between spotify or volusion. Magento Go looks good as well and, given that it has a free plan, it looks tempting.

Do you have any recommendations?

WP eComm looks good to me as well since I know a lot about WP. The site is gonna have about 100 products and mostly stock photos.
 


This topic shows up every 2 months, go do a search. Magento sucks (all versions), Volusion sucks. Read today that Woocommerce is now more popular than Magento according to builtwith.com.
 
Shopify, if you want to pay someone else, but have a ton pre-setup features. *Biggest problem with them... You can't run separate site folders. ie. site.com/store or site.com/blog... Your site.com is stuck to a store... So you have to do forums.site.com, blog.site.com, etc. I hate that... Other than that, it's really nice and perfect. Trusted by some big names, legit company, etc.

Magento is old school... Too bulky, server intensive, costs a ton of $$$ to modify it, and good luck finding people who know everything about it.. There's a ton of features, but more hassle than it's worth unless you're a big brand with thousands of products and have a team to do all that stuff.

WooCommerce. (I use this myself). Simple, but lots of features. NOT as easy as Shopify in terms of reporting/fancy UI, but it gets the job done. You can customize it however you see fit. Everything can be built/changed. And there are a TON of coders who can work with it... It's Wordpress after all, and finding help is cheap! I love I can still run site.com/forums, site.com/blog, etc, etc or whatever I want. Plus I own everything, no fees, all on my shoulders and in my control. Support isn't really amazing, (it's free), so you'll want to find a coder or hire a company that knows their stuff. Nothing you can't do on your own, aside from major coding for massive changes. TONS of plugins on CodeCayon, etc... WC scales just fine too. 1,000's of products it will handle, a lot of database calls, but no problem. It's best for smaller stores 100-1000 goods. Over 10,000 and you'll have to be on your server optimization shit. But it's possible and can run flawlessly.

.....

I've looked at everything else available, paid, free, etc.. Garbage.

It comes down to Shopify or WooCommerce.

Do you want self-hosted or non self-hosted...

I spent ~4 months researching this all.

Plus... In the past 3 months we have literally spent so much time building out the store on WC, we could have rewritten the entire platform, lol. Even after that, I haven't ran into one thing I hate/can't change. Well... Aside from the hard coded credit card form design, but I just need to hire another person in mind. ;)

That's all...
 
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Woocommerce >> eComm.

Shopify is good and i heard Prestashop is good, never used it though.

But really search in the forum, there were a lot of discussions here.

:338:
 
You might want to take a look at squarespace, There are shortfalls, but for ease of use and getting a store up in not time flat it's great. Did I mention it has free and easy stripe integration?
 
I had one Magento site and found it just far too bulky & slow. There was a thread in design board on here a while back that had an excellent discussion about speeding up to fuck and run like a normal site. Can't recall if that included the back-end side too or not, you'd have to search for it, but it sounded like it was some solid advice.
Personally I think it's good for the amount you can customise it but it's bulky as hell for what it does - this probably changes when the number of SKUs hits a certain point, or customised features are required a lot - that sort of stuff, but for the basic site that I really didn't like it.

This is kind of a bookmark, since I intend to start (or even sort of 'restart') that ecomm in a different brand and model, so I'm also curious to hear what the latest is on this front.
 
BigCommerce is buggy as hell and has terrible support. The checkout experience is also terrible and BigCommerce doesn't give users the permissions they need to edit it so your conversion rate is gonna suck compared to other carts.

If you are only dealing with 5-10 SKUs I think WooCommerce is fantastic, but I wouldn't personally use it for a site with 100+ SKUs. I'd go with Shopify if I were you.
 
aeisn said:
BigCommerce is buggy as hell and has terrible support. The checkout experience is also terrible and BigCommerce doesn't give users the permissions they need to edit it so your conversion rate is gonna suck compared to other carts.

If you are only dealing with 5-10 SKUs I think WooCommerce is fantastic, but I wouldn't personally use it for a site with 100+ SKUs. I'd go with Shopify if I were you.
Click to expand...

You can edit as much in BC as you can in Shopify. Their support hsa been great for me and I've seen no bugs.
 
mgrant said:
You can edit as much in BC as you can in Shopify. Their support hsa been great for me and I've seen no bugs.
Click to expand...

True, you can't edit Shopify's checkout page either. The default checkout experience on Shopify is far better than the checkout experience on Big Commerce though. As for the bugs, have look around the BC forums Bigcommerce Community Forum and you'll find many bugs in basic functionality that are years old that BigCommerce still hasn't fixed.
 
Ecommerce solutions are the bane of my existence. I'm not interested in non self hosted solutions, so I can't speak about Shopify.

I've tried Magento, which was the biggest nightmare in the world.

Then I moved to OpenCart, which was better, but still came up seriously short in many departments without some serious customization.

Then I recently moved to WooCommerce, which is better, but still missing obvious functionality (multi currency anyone?). They're all the same. They all fall short in many areas where you would just expect the features to be there and work, but it's like they build the solution to 90% of completion and then they get you on all the premium add ons/3rd party modules to add those much needed missing features, but they are often half thought too.

Not mention they ALL have the most convoluted, fucked up, messy methods for customizing their appearance. WooCommerce's CSS is abysmal. It's shockingly bad.

If I had the time and resources I'd seriously consider building a new ecom platform to destroy all the others out there.
 
Magento is COMPLEX but once you learn it and have good developers, it is well worth it. I use to hate magento till I learned it. Now I use it for my ecommerce stores.
 
JulianTrueFlynn said:
Woocommerce sounds pretty shitty with 100 products. I'm a much bigger fan of Opencart for an ecommerce solution.
Click to expand...

I have woo with 3000+ SKUs, but it can be buggy when importing/exporting (I have to do smaller batches)

But I'd suggest against anything you have to deal with yourself, next time, I'll go with a hosted solution like big commerce or something nicer (the really nice ones are pricey; $1k/month easy + set up of up to $15k)
 
For 100 products, I would go WooCommerce myself and suggest non-techy users to go with Shopify.

I do freelance Magento dev and I do the others as a freelancer too.

Magento is great but there is a dark cloud looming over it called Magento 2.0 which would take a long post to explain the coming storm :)

If you go with WooCommerce, make a dev web server on your local network and do all the work on that and then export and FTP files and data to the live one after testing. Especially when trying new plugins or theme tweaks. Always make a backup before upgrades or changes in a way that it would be easy to quickly restore it if there is an unforseen issue.
If you can do that, life will be easy.
 
I have a 56,000 products site with woocommerce. With cache and CDN, it loads ok.
 
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