How to pick your e-Commerce package

Picking an e-Commerce package.

Choosing an e-commerce package for your business can be an extremely challenging task. Each e-commerce platform supported by Web Tail has various trade-offs that must be considered when deciding which package is right for you.

WooCommerce

Is a fantastic mature product built on the WordPress CMS and has been in development for nearly 12 years. During this time this package has matured significantly and now has a wide variety of features and plugins available.

The platform is open-source (which means that bugs and vulnerabilities are usually quickly patched) and is highly customisable. On the negative side because of how popular the platform is and how many different largely unvetted plugins exist in its marketplace it seems to suffer from much more exploits than some of the competitors. Another challenge with WooCommerce can be the difficulty in configuring it to perform well (it tends to run a bit slow) and how overwhelming all the options can be.

The positives of the platform are that because of its popularity, if there is a feature you can think of, its probably available as a plugin and potentially a free version exists.

We consider WooCommerce a good choice for merchants who expect a medium amount of traffic and who don’t want to get slugged with extra fees for basic features.

Shopify

Is one of the largest and most popular e-commerce packages ever invented. It was originally developed in 2006 but wasn’t considered a mature contender in the e-commerce space until 2013. Since then, it has grown to be the platform of choice for over 1,000,000 online stores.

The most impressive aspect of Shopify is how easy it is to use and how quickly you can get started with your online store, it’s an extremely high-quality user interface and helps you create stores which are aesthetically pleasing (if somewhat simple). However, the default features in a Shopify store are extremely limited. There is a plugin collection that is nothing short of impressive however most plugins charge a monthly fee and this can quickly add up to a very high monthly rate. Further Shopify will take between 2-3% of your transaction costs on-top of any merchant fees which you pay, together this can quickly mean that if your store experience growth you will be paying a significant portion of your sales to Shopify.

We consider Shopify a good choice for merchants who will have a small to medium amount of traffic and who just want to get started quickly.

NopCommerce

Is our premier and specialty product. NopCommerce was originally developed in 2009 which means it’s the least mature of the packages we support but it is developed under the Microsoft infrastructure and was built from the group up to support enterprise level stores.

NopCommerce has a built in extremely rich feature set; while the user-interface can be a little clunky at times if there is a feature you can envision most likely NopCommerce already has it built in. You are able to fully customise just about any aspect of this e-commerce package (most importantly your merchant account provider) and Web Tail can help you build any custom functionality you might require. The plugin marketplace is slowly growing and most common features are available but this is admittedly not a strong suit of this package. However, we do provide a significant number of free plugins and themes which cover almost all common scenarios our users need. If you are intending to use the WebTail School-Books plugin it is a requirement to use NopCommerce.

While there are still some limitations to this package we strongly believe in the future of this system and consider it an enterprise grade system which can grow along with your needs and works well for most scenarios from small stores to large e-commerce businesses with a fully customised workflow.

Conclusion

In conclusion we believe that between the 3 major packages that WebTail supports we cover 99.9% of scenarios which our customers might experience. In most cases there is no absolute right or wrong package and the decision is a series of trade-offs between the features you want, the usability of the product and the ongoing costs of maintaining it and the plugins necessary to run your site successfully.

If you’re still struggling to decide which system is right for you, we recommend you book a free no obligation demo from us where we can discuss your exact needs and help you make the best decision for your business.