What is the best platform for online shopping

Today, online trade is constantly growing, where more and more companies are selling their products or services online, and where many people choose to buy a large part of their products in online stores. Then, as there are so many consumers looking for products in online stores, it causes much more competition to take place and therefore needs to be differentiated from the rest.

One way to differentiate yourself from competition is to put your products on sale via a web page with an innovative design and focus on web positioning. So the first step is to choose the best online selling platform for your business, that is, to find the CMS suitable for the quantity of our products and that is very customizable.

What is an online store platform (CMS)?

An e-commerce platform is a software programme that allows company owners to sell their products and services on the Internet, that is, an online system that enables us to launch a website in a practical and rapid way.

Therefore, a CMS allows you to create, organize, publish, and remove content from your website in a simple way.

What's the best online store platform?

The five most popular CMSs for creating e-commerce or online shops are WooCommerce, Prestashop, Magento, BigCommerce and Shopify. Each has its advantages and disadvantages and there is no clear choice beyond the project for which they are intended.

Woocommerce

WooCommerce is noted for its power, versatility and contrasted stability.

WooCommerce is ideal for a not very large catalog of products and all features that include WordPress.

It has an uncontroversial advantage over the other platforms: its large community, which means that for any customization, you will not lack options in terms of templates (themes) and plugins. In addition, it has a multitude of features specialized in online commerce and is ideal for creating a store in different languages.

However, among its main drawbacks is that WooCommerce is not easy to use and you might need to know how to program, even to change little things on your staff.

Prestashop

Prestashop is a French project that works with a wide catalogue of products and has incorporated many features such as the SEO on the product's card, promotions and marketing actions. In addition to its built-in features, you can also extend the platform using plugins (Addons) and themes. 

The platform allows a base design for simple projects that may satisfy some customers. In addition, it has advanced product management settings and multiple options for payment processing. But the best thing about Prestashop, and its most important advantage as an ecommerce platform, is that it allows us to work directly on its code, which allows us to develop custom modules to solve the different functionalities required.

Magento or Adobe Commerce

Magento is a very powerful platform with multiple functionalities for catalogue management, SEO, marketing actions, integration with social networks, among many other options. It offers a lot of flexibility, all the eCommerce features you want, and is perfect for companies with internals developers.

One of its main advantages is that it is perfect for large online shops with high technical requirements in terms of advanced functionality. The main criticism of Adobe Commerce, formerly Magento, is that it is powerful but slow, consumes too many resources and requires the use of overly powerful and expensive hosting.

Shopify

This online shop builder provides all the necessary tools to create an e-commerce site offering a complete solution of hosting, website builder and integrated payment system. Within the main tools, Shopify offers the ability to customise the look and feel of your site as you prefer.

One of the main advantages is that it provides additional tools to help you expand your online business, but there are fees for additional transactions and most of the interesting and almost obligatory modules require a monthly fee and it has a very limited section of free themes. It is a very good option to get started in the world of e-commerce but its costs are higher than you might think when someone accesses the platform for the first time.

The Shopify platform wants to shed the label of being exclusively the ideal platform for small businesses and has launched Shopify Plus, a system aimed at large companies and start-ups that are willing to pay $2500 per month, transaction fees aside. It obviously includes premium features.

BigCommerce

This CMS allows you to create online shops directly from your website in a similar way to Shopify. It is an alternative to Shopify although with less community, functionalities and features but with a substantial advantage: it does not charge per transaction, so it is much cheaper. It has different plans to adapt the features to the growth of the business.

Use of e-commerce platforms in 2024

Worldwide, according to builtwith as of January 2024, Shopify is the most popular platform with a market share of 26%, followed by WooCommerce with 19%. Further behind are Wix Stores and Squarespace Add to cart with 17% and 11% respectively.

If we analyse Spain, the figures vary substantially, with WooCommerce leading the market with 24% of online shops, followed by Squarespace Add to Cart and Prestahsop with 15% of the market. Shopify stands at 13% and Wix Stores drops to 7%, while Magento-Adobe Commerce is only used by 1% of all e-commerce in Spain.

Conclusion on the best e-commerce CMS

We believe that the best option always depends on the client's needs and resources. From experience we know that each client asks for different things and each client is different, so we prefer to work with WooComerce and PrestaShop because of their versatility and great community. They are also options that allow us to program directly so we can solve any casuistry that appears.

For smaller projects that are in their early stages and want to do a controlled launch to see if their project works, Shopify would be a very good option in the short term.