In 2024 alone, Revenue of e-commerce market is projected to reach $3.5 billion dollars. E-commerce’s big time players like Shopify, WooCommerce, Magneto (Adobe Commerce) and Bigcommerce are fiercely competing with each other to establish their reign. All of them are widely used e-commerce platform however there’s some big difference in their work. To begin with, the quick overview of each of the e-commerce platform then after continue with details.

Overview of Shopify vs WooCommerce vs Magento vs Bigcommerce

E-Commerce Platform	Price	Ease of Use	Active Users	In-Built Marketing	Rating	Visit Site
	Start from $25	9/10	500,000+	Yes	9/10	Shopify
	Free	8/10	2,000,000+	Yes	8/10	WooCommerce
	Free and Premium	7/10	250,000+	Yes	7/10	Adobe Commerce
	Start from $29/m	10/10	50,000+	Yes	10/10	BigCommerce

Here we go for the details of each e-commerce platform and compare Shopify vs. WooCommerce vs. Magento vs. Bigcommerce on the basis of:

• Key Features
• Pros and Cons
• Ease of Use
• Price and Cost
• Security and Support
• SEO
• ECommerce Design and Templates

Let’s get started.

Shopify:

Key Features:

• Unlimited Products
• Web-based website builder
• 100+ professional themes
• Free SSL Certificate
• Automatic carrier shipping rates
• Mobile Commerce-Ready

Pros:

• It is very easy to use and navigate for beginners.
• With the help of SEO and social media options, it’s getting easier for promotion.
• It comes with free hosting and SSL.

Cons:

• There are limited default product attributes.
• It is only available in the paid version and the URL structure is also not ideal for SEO.

Ease of Use:

• It is a fully hosted platform based on an online tool that has a basic set-up.
• The Shopify app provides easy accessibility.
• It has lots of visual cues, reliable typography, and simple language.

Price & Cost:

• Build an online store on Shopify for just $25/month for the basic plan that provides unlimited file storage, discount code creation, and much more.
• Also, it includes hosting and a shared SSL certificate.
• To access more advanced features, you need to pay a bit more per month.

Security & Support:

• Shopify is secure and fast, to keep your site secure and fast loading it invests lots of time on infrastructure, security, and maintenance.
• It provides 24/7 customer support services even it allows support on the phone, email and web chat.

SEO:

• It is quite SEO-friendly and has features right out of the box, but there’s so much more you can do to climb up in the rankings.
• Use SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) encryption, builds the secure links between a web server and a browser.

ECommerce Design & Templates:

• The themes of Shopify have great visual quality, have unique variations and designs, and have more than 100 different templates (both free and paid).
• Customization is allowed, which means you can change the theme easily and adjust the colors and styles.
• It’s even better that you can edit within the theme editor of Shopify.

WooCommerce:

Key Features:

• WordPress Content Integration
• Reduce Page Loading
• Modern and Clean Interface
• Multiple Shipping Methods
• It comes with a REST API
• Unlimited images and galleries
• Mobile-friendly structure

Pros:

• WooCommerce is among the most popular WordPress plugins. Simply download it and add the required products from the WordPress dashboard.
• It is open-source software that is free for editing and customization.
• It supports multiple payment options: PayPal, major credit cards, bank transfers, and cash on delivery.

Cons:

• Sometimes the WooCommerce WordPress updates create issues.
• Customization can be costly.
• Requires the knowledge to use effectively.
• Hosting is not free; you have to pay for it.

Ease of Use:

• It is not a hosted platform, which means you need to self-install, manage, keep backups, and look out for security.
• Customization options make it super easy to add any functionality to your website.
• Due to the absence of a built-in drag-and-drop design builder, you need to use the WordPress page builder.

Price and Cost:

• Although it is freely available to run a WooCommerce store, you need a domain name, WordPress hosting, and an SSL certificate.
• Technically, WooCommerce is cheaper, but the additional extensions add up to your costs.

Security and Support:

• WooCommerce provides SSL, which provides strong security along with dedicated patches to fix any vulnerabilities, with various updates available.
• They have only provided forum support, where you have to drop the problems and wait for the answers.

SEO:

• WooCommerce integrates with WordPress so there is a plus point in terms of SEO.
• It has its own SEO functionalities that help it climb up the rankings.

Ecommerce Design and Templates:

• They provide the limitless customization that you can make the design on your own concept.
• It comes with a ton of templates, which makes your website design attractive.

Magento (Adobe Commerce)

Magneto, currently known as Adobe Commerce, is one of the biggest and reasonably best e-commerce platforms in today’s tech world. Adobe, being the best in the photo and video industry, has been competing in e-commerce by creating and managing a platform known as Magneto. Now that they have changed to Adobe Commerce, they are getting much more praise and good reviews.

• Free Shipping Functionality
• Responsive Design with 700+ Themes
• Unlimited Product Attributes
• Various Payment Options
• Inventory Management
• Newsletter Subscription Management
• Integration with Google Analytics

Pros:

• It is a feature-rich eCommerce platform that manages multiple storefronts with multi-language and multi-currency support.
• The community version is free and has large community of users who have developed many plugins and extensions.
• Allow you to customize the themes as you want and to develop functionality.

Cons:

• It is an intensely large system so good Magento developers are tough to find.
• It is only hosted on dedicated servers due to the size of the system. Shared hosting creates a slow and annoying user experience.
• Due to its flexible architecture, it takes more time to set up and customize.

Ease of Use:

• To work on with Magento, you should have great experience in web development.
• It has a fast and simple self-hosting setup.
• For advanced users, lots of things are offered to build a larger online store.

Price and Cost:

• The community edition of Magento is free; however, it requires technical setup, which adds costs.
• The enterprise edition starts at $18,000 a year and we also need to provide the hosting.

Security & Support:

• In terms of support, they have their own big community where their own developers and user community provides the supports.
• Magento is a secure platform where online transactions and user data is involved.

SEO:

• Easily implement the on page strategies and edit the meta content.
• Solve the issues by facilitating better optimization of the e-commerce site.

Ecommerce Design & Templates:

• The theme of Magento comes with customizable however sometimes expert developers are required.
• It is a very classic-style e-commerce store that provides robustness in the menu bars and navigation.

Bigcommerce:

Key Features:

• Bulk-import and export products
• Inventory Management
• Multi-Currency Support
• Reporting & Analytics
• Automatic image compression
• Restful API
• Marketing tools
• Mobile-optimized store

Pros:

• BigCommerce comes with an all-in-one solution, which will be great for business starters.
• They offer all of their plans unlimitedly, including bandwidth, products, and storage space.
• You allow selling on multiple channels, such as Facebook, Amazon, Pinterest, Google Shopping, and much more.
• Facility to edit the downloaded theme files offline.

Cons:

• Some of their themes are quite expensive and they provide fewer free themes.
• It does not offer a free plan and sometimes it shows issues during customization.

Ease of Use:

• BigCommerce is a user-friendly solution that comes with an easy setup to create a store website.
• It handles your store, orders, adds products, and so on, which makes the execution of the task easy and simple.
• It is easy to create a discount and coupon code that will be able to be set up for whole orders or a specific one.

Price & Cost:

• It is a paid solution and comes with three pricing plans, and they are:
• Standard: $29/month,
• Plus– $79/month,
• Pro: $299/month.

Security & Support:

• They provided 24/7 live agent support.
• They have an online video series that covers all the questions of the customers.

SEO:

• It automatically optimized the titles, URLs, sitemaps, and more for your pages.
• Provided the SEO box on each of the pages for adding information manually.
• They offer more built-in SEO features, including Facebook Open Graph, Canonical Tag, 301 Redirects, and much more.

Ecommerce Design and Templates:

• Both free and paid templates from BigCommerce include visually stunning designs that fit major industries.
• With the help of these tools, you can create a fully customized and responsive website to streamline your online business.

Wrapping Up

To sum it all up, in my perspective, all of them are the best solution, depending on what you are looking for. Let us know, which one is the best e-commerce platform in the comment box.

I hope this article helped you choose the right platform and for more informative articles, don’t forget to share and follow us on Twitter and Facebook.

Also, I would like to share some of the other informative articles here:

• WordPress Vs Drupal Vs Joomla
• Shared vs Managed WordPress Hosting
• What’s New About WORDPRESS 5.0(Bebo): Features and the New Editor

The post Shopify vs WooCommerce vs Magento vs Bigcommerce – Which one is the best e-commerce platform? appeared first on MYSTERY THEMES.

Whatever you offer and no matter your level of experience with running a business, with WordPress and all the new technology available today, just about anyone can make money online by opening an eCommerce site.

But how do you build an eCommerce site that drives traffic, keeps customers happy, and brings in a ton of sales? There are a number of easy-to-use tools for WordPress beginners and pros alike that will help you build a successful online store.

Let’s take a look at this list of five must-have WordPress plugins for your eCommerce site.

OptinMonster

If a user visits your website and leaves without buying anything, you may have lost them forever. But if you can convince them to become an email subscriber, you can make sure they’ll come back to your site and you can send them tempting email offers to convince them to buy.

With OptinMonster you can easily create eye-catching pop-up offers to generate leads and convert visitors into customers. Whether you want to build your email list or keep in contact with your most loyal customers, this is the perfect plugin for your eCommerce site.

Features:

• High-converting template library (100% responsive, mobile-friendly).
• 8 different types of option forms.
• Powerful page-level targeting to build a hyper-segmented email list.
• Signature Exit Intent technology to convert abandoning website visitors into subscribers and customers.
• Powerful A/B testing that helps you eliminate guesswork.
• Easy integration with over 25 different email marketing service providers

Rating: 4.4/5

Active Installations: 1+ Million

Tested up to 6.4.3

WooCommerce

Probably the most popular WordPress eCommerce plugins of all time, WooCommerce is an essential tool to build your digital storefront from the ground up on WordPress. This tool offers hundreds of free and paid extensions so it’s super easy to build and enhance your customized store and start selling in minutes.

And if you’re a newbie when it comes to eCommerce, don’t worry. WooCommerce provides extensive, easy-to-follow documentation to walk you through all of the steps involved in opening an online store.

Features:

• Seamlessly integrates commerce with content.
• Sell anything, from physical products to digital downloads.
• Entirely open source: modify and customize anything and everything.
• Rest API: to manage everything from products to orders.
• More than 400 official extensions: payments, shipping, marketing, and accounting

Rating: 4.6/5

Active Installations: 5+ million

Tested up to: 6.4.3

MonsterInsights

It’s vital to know how much traffic your eCommerce site is getting, where those users are coming from and which pages they are visiting in order to keep those visitors coming back again and again. That’s why MonsterInsights is a must-have WordPress plugin for your eCommerce website.

MonsterInsights allows you to view your Google Analytics directly from your WordPress dashboard. After installing the plugin, with just the click of a button, you can now view all your most important reports inside WordPress so that you can increase your traffic with ease.

Features:

• Quick and Easy Setup (no coding needed)
• Real-Time Stats: See real-time stats inside your Google Analytics dashboard.
• Universal Tracking: Get better insights with Google Analytics’ universal tracking.
• E-commerce Tracking: Add Google Analytics tracking for WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads stores.
• Ads Tracking: Track your Google Adsense ads with Google Analytics.

Rating: 4.5/5

Active Installations: 3+ million

Tested up to: 6.4.3

ShortPixel Image Optimizer

A fast-loading site is important to your SEO as well as the user experience, and one element of your site that can drastically slow down your page speed is the size of your images. As an e-commerce site, your website is probably very image heavy because, of course, you need images to sell your products, but you also need to optimize those images.

ShortPixel Image Optimizer is a plugin that, once installed, will easily compress all of your existing images and PDFs with a single click and all your new images will automatically be resized, rescaled and optimized to ensure your online store is at top speed.

Features:

• Compress JPG, PNG, GIF (still or animated) images and PDF documents.
• Option to automatically convert PNG to JPG if that will result in smaller images. Ideal for large images in PNG format.
• No file size limit.
• Option to freely convert any JPEG, PNG or GIF to WEBP for more Google love.
• Optimize thumbnails as well as featured images.
• ‘Bulk’ optimizes all the existing images in the Media Library or in any gallery with one click.

Rating: 4.7/5

Active Installations: 300,000+

Tested up to: 6.4.3

Easy Digital Downloads

From ebooks to PDF files to WordPress plugins – if you’re only selling digital products in your online store, Easy Digital Downloads is the perfect WordPress eCommerce plugin for you. This lightweight plugin comes with all the essential features you need to sell digital products online, including a full shopping cart, a customer account page, file access control, and full data reporting.

While WooCommerce does offer the option to sell digital products, it’s bogged down with a ton of features you won’t need if you’re not planning on selling physical items, such as shipping options. Selling digital products will be a breeze with this user-friendly plugin.

Features:

• Choose ‘Buy Now’ or “Add to Cart’ buttons.
• Allow customers to save their carts.
• Support registered users or guest checkouts.
• Track customer lifetime value and activity.
• Create a customer account page.
• Allow for flat rates or percentage-based discount codes.

Rating: 4.7/5

Active Installations: 50,000+

Tested up to: 6.4.3

Free Gifts for WooCommerce

The WooCommerce plugin does not offer free gift offers to online stores, therefore, if you want to use different marketing strategies for giveaway promotions, you need to install the free gifts for WooCommerce plugin.

With the help of this plugin, you can create various rules and apply methods such as BOGO, Buy x Get y, Subtotal Amount, Tiered Pricing, Tiered Quantity, etc. to offer free gift products to a customer when they add a product to their cart.

You can choose any of the WooCommerce products as a free gift to encourage customers to buy. One of the most important features of this plugin is to set conditions to the rules and customize your offers, for example, you can apply the rule only to products in a certain category or limit it only to newly registered customers. 

There are also other amazing features available in this plugin, such as reviewing reports about the applied rules or customizing how the gift list is displayed to customers on the cart page.

If you want to make a great experience for your customers and entice them to order from your online store regularly, use this awesome plugin to offer them valuable free gift products.

Features:

• Set different methods like Simple Adjustment, Subtotal, Buy x Get x, etc.
• Review reports & statistics about applied gifts.
• Add free gift products to the customer cart automatically.
• Display gifts as a dropdown list, table view, or grid on the cart page.
• Set date and time conditions.
• Offering specific products as gifts.
• Set various conditions to customize the rule.
• Create and apply unlimited rules.

Rating: 4.7/5

Active Installations: 10,000+

Tested Up: 6.4.3

Helpie Knowledge Base

The Helpie Knowledge Base plugin helps to create a customer self-help portal, so that your customers can find the answer to their most nagging questions. When you give customers the option to find answers to their questions by themselves, it reduces the time you spend on customer support. Also, customers will be satisfied when they see that you have a well-written knowledge base to answer all their questions.

Features:

• Powerful Search: to quickly find the matching article
• Automatic Table of Contents with in-page navigation options
• Advanced branding and styling options to match your brand.
• Knowledge: Elementor page builder integration for easy customization.

Rating: 4.8/5

Active Installations: 10000+

Tested Upto: 6.4.3

Get ready to sell, sell, sell. With these must-have plugins, your eCommerce site will be prepared to handle a ton of customers and start making sales the second you open your virtual doors to the public.

The post 6 Best WordPress Plugins for Your E-commerce Site (2024) appeared first on MYSTERY THEMES.

1. Facebook ads
2. Instagram
3. Whatsapp
4. Online e-commerce shops

Sellers are now smart and know how to get more sales through market segmentation and targeting the right audience. But to do this, you must have your online store and product portfolio, from where customers can pick and choose products before taking the final buying decision.

Nowadays you have so many options to create awesome online shops. Whether you are techy or a non-techy person, you have platforms which give plug n play options to build online shops. I’ll discuss them later in the article. Also, if you need a customized solution which enables you to create more customized features with coding you can also do that.

Some of the best and popular platform to create online e-commerce stores in PHP are:

1. Woocommerce
2. Magento
3. Drupal
4. Opencart
5. Sylius
6. Aimeos
7. Zencart
8. Xcart

The e-commerce platforms market share picture given by built with is as follows:

Woocommerce

Woocommerce is one of the most popular CMS for creating online shops. With the largest share of community, you can find thousands of themes and plugins to create the awesome woocommerce store. You can also customize the functionality with code for creating required features. According to BuiltWith, until now 2,906,789 websites are using woocommerce to create online shops which are 23% of the entire internet websites. This huge adoption has stood out woocommerce from the list of competitors.

Magento

Magento is yet another robust CMS used to create complex and large e-commerce shops having thousands of products. It can work seamlessly for big scale applications on any hosting for PHP MySQL. If you have products with multiple variations and other options, Magento has got your back. You can enjoy the free and paid versions both to create shops.

Magento also provides the ability to customize the interface as per the requirement.

It also has a great community who regularly creates thousands of themes and extensions to integrate into Magento for your every need like payment, order, emails, customer management, security, performance etc. It has the flexibility to scale and deliver the content fast with core caching mechanism.

According to BuiltWith, until now 825,262 websites have used or still using Magneto which is 13% of the complete market share.

Drupal

Drupal is a CMS platform made particularly for professionals. This is just to mention here that you can create any kind of website in Drupal on any e-commerce web hosting. Similarly, you can create online shops with Drupal using its separate module called Drupal Commerce. This module provides a nice experience and connects content with the products so that merchants can easily drive sales using a rich user experience.

Drupal Commerce works with flexibility and provides different options for product payments just like recurring, subscription and membership etc. You can also configure products according to SEO needs. It can also work with 3rd party integrations to fulfill customer needs.

According to BuiltWith, until now 576.766 websites have used or still using Magneto which is 2% of the complete market share.

Opencart

Opencart is another open-source e-commerce platform that provides you everything to create scale and run your business. It provides a vast availability of extensions and themes to give a fresh look to your store. Opencart also provides almost every payment and shipping method including PayPal, Skrill, 2checkout, Amazon and Authorize.net.

You can also set up multiple stores in one domain so that the products can appear specifically in different locations. You can also set up products price according to the locations. Opencart can handle any type of products variation and attributes.

According to BuiltWith, until now 346,015 websites have used or still using Magneto which is 0.53% of the complete market share.

Sylius

For the uninitiated, Sylius is a lightweight open source e-commerce framework that lets you create/start online shops for absolutely free. The platform is built on the Symfony framework and has all the latest tools, libraries and components to nurture e-commerce business requirements such as invoicing, storefront maintenance, user and product management.

Sylius is growing fastly and the adoption rate is high this year. That is why their community has reached up to thousand and is downloaded more than million times. Currently, Sylius has 500+ contributors who are adding commits day to day.

You can also check out there showcase to see how websites are building in Sylius and the easiness of product management etc.

Aimeos

Laravel Aimeos is the open source package for Laravel 5+, allowing the developers to set up a fully functional e-commerce store that supports 100000+ products. Developers could further customize the store to the unique specifications of the user. It is easy to install and setup with the composer and you can install it in any existing Laravel application and it starts working.

According to Packagist Aimeos have been download 30,198 times and have been getting thousands of stars on Github.

Zencart

Zencart is developed by true like-minded developers, designers and shop owners which sees the needs of merchants and customers first. Like other complex e-commerce shop systems, Zencart doesn’t clutter you in so many options and works on first requirements. If you have basic computer knowledge and know how to set up a website, you can easily create shops on Zencart. There is no need to be a ninja for it.

According to BuiltWith, until no 259,420 websites have used or still using Zencart which is 0.08% of the complete market share.

Xcart

Xcart is another top e-commerce platform which puts you on the driver seat to create flexible and scalable shops. You can get control over everything whether the products, admins, orders etc. The best thing about Xcart is its skin flexibility which adjusts on every screen size including laptop, mobile, tablet without any customization in code.

Xcart is equipped with some of the important options includes:

1. Quick Inventory Updates
2. Export/Import Inventory Data
3. Cost-effective packaging
4. Bulk Product Editing
5. Effective SEO Tools
6. Auctions, coupons, and discounts
7. Powerful Email Marketing
8. Integrated analytics tools

So, If you are planning to launch online shop this Christmas, you can count on Xcart.

Final Words

You can see there are lots of options available to create online e-commerce shops. You must see your requirements and much-needed options to available in e-commerce solution. Do not make your shops fat with lots of code-files and bigger platforms if you are running a small shop.

Better to consult with an expert or e-commerce consultant to go full fledge in the market.

The post Best Ecommerce Platforms Built with PHP To Kick Start Your Next Online Store appeared first on MYSTERY THEMES.