Choosing the right e-commerce platfom

E-commerce is the backbone of many businesses, especially those looking to sell online. Whether you’re a multinational brand trying to reach consumers around the globe or an online only store trying to compete with brick and mortar, the requirements of your e-commerce platform can vary widely.

Choosing the right platform to build your store around is one of the questions we get asked most when brands first get in touch with us. Migrating to a new platform or developing further on an existing platform is always a daunting task, so knowing you’ve made the right choice can be vital for confidence in the project.

Overview

For most businesses we work with the conversation usually revolves around two key players: Woocommerce & Shopify. Whilst there are countless options, Woocommerce & Shopify offer the most flexibility and developer control so that’s primarily what we will be focusing on. For smaller DIY projects Squarespace & Wix offer a good option, but for scalability and a polished shopping experience, these options are limited.

Woocommerce

Woocommerce, WordPress’ answer to E-commerce, has been around for a long time now and has a substantial market share to show for it. It’s free and open source, meaning developers can really “get under the hood” and push the platform to achieve really bespoke needs of a business, completely customising checkouts, stock management, site structure and more.

As with WordPress, its downfall depends on how it is executed. Both Woocommerce and WordPress can range from fully bespoke built solutions to DIY solutions using themes, plugins and page builders. This often leads to bad impressions on the platform from clients we’ve worked with who have experienced this approach, stuck with bloated page builders that often don’t work properly, plugins that only do half of what the business needs and just generally feel like they’re fighting with the platform rather than working with it.

Our approach to Woocommerce has always been to build from scratch, bespoke to the businesses’ needs and create a Content Management System (cms) that is both easy to use but also gives website managers powerful tools to radically improve and enhance their customers’ experience. Some of our most bespoke E-commerce solutions have been built on Woocommerce for this exact reason.

Shopify

Shopify takes a different approach to an E-commerce platform, offering a Software as a Service (Saas) route. This means that Shopify runs a paid, closed platform that developers can interact with to create great shopping experiences for their customers. Whilst it doesn’t offer as much control to developers, its platform offers a lot more management control out of the box.

Similarly to Woocommerce it can vary from DIY theme and plugin solutions right up to fully bespoke considered solutions built around the business working with developers. However the main limitations in Shopify surround it’s Saas approach. Every store essentially gets the same tools to create their store, which can be limiting for shops with different requirements as “one size fits all” for an e-commerce platform can be hard to negotiate. This can be remedied with creative solutions, plugins and other techniques, but fundamentally the core platform is still off limits to developers directly which can lead to compromise.

Two key examples of these limitations in action from projects we’ve worked on would be database backups and editorial content. In a traditional website and even Woocommerce, the database of content, products etc, is all stored in a database, which if your website is hosted with a reputable hosting provider will be regularly backed up. However Shopify never exposes these databases to backups and structures their data in such a way that reversing a change is often not possible. Editorial is also often a key tool in not only driving sales and traffic but also building brand world and awareness. Shopify offers very little in regards to editorial, it is built primarily to sell and completely overlooks this aspect. We have been able to create Shopify stores with rich editorial content, but it’s often far more complicated for not only the developers but also the editorial team and limiting what can be achieved.

When tackling a Shopify build we take the same approach we would with any e-commerce platform and build a fully bespoke digital experience for customers and push the platform as far as possible. Working with Shopify as a platform we’ve been able to create great stores that have helped clients push their online presence to the next level, but we always have to negate some of the limitations of the platform with some outside of the box thinking.

Wrapping up

So, which platform is better and which should I pick? This is a question that you could ask to any number of people and get a different answer every time. From designers and developers to store managers, people’s opinions will be formed around their existing experiences, good and bad, with either platform. In our opinion – it depends, if you have the right team behind the project from both the digital agency and the instore staff, you can create amazing online shopping experiences on either platform.

Our recommendation is always to go into your next e-commerce project without any pre-existing notions of which platform is good or bad and have a wider discussion about the goals of the project. Let your digital agency partners offer solutions that cover any limitations you may find from a specific platform so you can make a well-informed decision with information specific to your business and how you can make either platform work for you. The answer might be neither, it could be a different platform altogether or even a headless hybrid solution, but headless is a topic for another day!