Shopify vs Magento Go vs Bigcommerce vs Tictail vs Volusion vs WooCommerce

KonFusion

So, has anyone worked on them all, or a few? Or more than one? (I imagine a lot of you have worked with WooCommerce).

Interested in opinions on them all. Working on developers/designers perspective comparison.

devildriver

Just starting a project with it now. Will report back on any findings.

Do you have any specific questions about BC - can't guarantee I can answer them in any great detail but I'll try!

daymobrew

If those only used WooCommerce. I am a big big fan of WordPress and WooCommerce too. The biggest reason is the ability to hook into numerous areas of the code to customise things without modifying the core code.

Example: WooCommerce multi quantity or volume discount

devildriver

rwd425 wrote: »

Hey KonFusion,

I've worked with Volusion, BigCommerce and Shopify. I've demo'd them all and found Volusion to be my favorite of the three, although it does require a small amount of HTML/CSS knowledge to customize certain areas of your online store.

If you have any questions about them let me know. (they all provide free 2 week trial periods from what I remember)

I haven't worked with Magento, but I know it's the most popular open-source ecommerce provider.

Good luck!

Hi rwd425,

I'd be interested to know what features/functions makes Volusion better than Big Commerce in your opinion.

Thanks.

KonFusion

Although it does require a small amount of HTML/CSS knowledge to customize certain areas of your online store.

This is a big plus to me, not a negative.

Trojan

rwd425 wrote: »

I've demo'd them all and found Volusion to be my favorite of the three

devildriver wrote: »

Hi rwd425,

I'd be interested to know what features/functions makes Volusion better than Big Commerce in your opinion.

Thanks.

I think the paycheck for spamming forums is rwd425's favourite feature.

KonFusion wrote: »

(also, are you spam/employed by Volusion? )

Hell yes, he is. Nuked

KonFusion

Trojan wrote: »

Hell yes, he is. Nuked

Thought so. Had an "I need an Admin" moment :P

Merci!

devildriver

Trojan wrote: »

I think the paycheck for spamming forums is rwd425's favourite feature.



Hell yes, he is. Nuked

Ha! Nice catch!

KonFusion

Update:

Been playing around with them all, and I'm thinking of dropping Volusion.

It's kinda ****. And there doesn't (waiting on they're support to verify) seem to be any way to set up a demo store and play around before going live.

Verdict: crap. :rolleyes:

Further update:

So just got a call from my customer support contact (Who turned out to be more like a sales rep) and you cannot set up a demo store.

"What if I want to make a theme and sell it...or compare it to another platform before I buy?"
"You don't need to. It has everything. You can do it all. For just one installment of X, I'll even throw in..." etc. You get the idea.

So yeah. Volusion is out. Don't sell me your product. Let me decide.

devildriver

KonFusion wrote: »

Update:

Been playing around with them all, and I'm thinking of dropping Volusion.

It's kinda ****. And there doesn't (waiting on they're support to verify) seem to be any way to set up a demo store and play around before going live.

Verdict: crap. :rolleyes:

Further update:

So just got a call from my customer support contact (Who turned out to be more like a sales rep) and you cannot set up a demo store.

"What if I want to make a theme and sell it...or compare it to another platform before I buy?"
"You don't need to. It has everything. You can do it all. For just one installment of X, I'll even throw in..." etc. You get the idea.

So yeah. Volusion is out. Don't sell me your product. Let me decide.

Strange. I set up a demo store yesterday to give it a whirl:

http://www.volusion.com/free-trial

I'd agree with you though. I'm not keen on the interface. And AFAIK you can't get direct access to the template files via ftp or WEBDAV only through the browser interface which is a pain if you want to use your own text editor.

On a related note, Konfusion, have you looked at Lemonstand. They've just launched their cloud offering, they had a downloadable version for a few years. It's a bit thin on features at the moment but the admin interface is clear and well designed.

KonFusion

devildriver wrote: »

Strange. I set up a demo store yesterday to give it a whirl:

http://www.volusion.com/free-trial

I didn't regard this as a true demo store because I have no access to the template files/html/css etc. For me a true demo store is one with no trial limit, but you can't sell anything, yet have full access to change the design.

For example if I wanted to sell Volusion themes etc, I can see no way of doing this. Also the UX of the admin side is a piece of crap

Did you give them your number? I'd be interested to hear your feedback on their initial call and hard sell.

On a related note, Konfusion, have you looked at Lemonstand. They've just launched their cloud offering, they had a downloadable version for a few years. It's a bit thin on features at the moment but the admin interface is clear and well designed.

Nope. Added to list

KonFusion

Lemonstand:

I want to see what Lemonstand has to offer. I don't want to sell, I want to explore it so I can decide whether to use it for future clients.

Why limit me to 30 days? Why limit me at all?

Give me an unlimited trial that I can mess around with, but can't sell anything with.

The Only Cloud eCommerce Platform Made for Web Developers

No it's not.

And if it is, why are you limiting these developers to having to learn your platform in 30 days?

devildriver

KonFusion wrote: »

I didn't regard this as a true demo store because I have no access to the template files/html/css etc. For me a true demo store is one with no trial limit, but you can't sell anything, yet have full access to change the design.

For example if I wanted to sell Volusion themes etc, I can see no way of doing this. Also the UX of the admin side is a piece of crap

Did you give them your number? I'd be interested to hear your feedback on their initial call and hard sell.



Nope. Added to list

I was able to get into the template editing section on Volusion for a poke around. Didn't actually edit anything but was able to see the template structure. Messy to say the least.

I got an email from Volusion aying that my personal account manager would soon give me a call. Hasn't happened yet.

Whereas BigCommerce are all over me like a rash after signing up for demo. Phone calls and emails galore.

I still like Lemonstand though. In fairness time-limited demos are pretty standard across the board. And 30 days is a hell of am lot better than the 7 day demo you get with some.

Also when I spoke to BigCommerce they were happy to keep on extending the demos well past the standard limits.

KonFusion

devildriver wrote: »

Whereas BigCommerce are all over me like a rash after signing up for demo. Phone calls and emails galore..

Also when I spoke to BigCommerce they were happy to keep on extending the demos well past the standard limits.

Yup. Just got my first call from BigCommerce. Initial reaction is good. There was no hard sell/sales pitch. Was very genuine, and got set up with a demo store which they said they'd be happy to extend until I was happy.

As an aside, got up and running with a Mageno Go demo store. No phone calls emails from them yet though.

tramoreman

helped someone i know out a few months back the person wanted to administer the site herself. Went with wordpress and woocommerce was easy to setup and administer had no problems with it.

KonFusion

Shopify 2013 year in review: http://www.shopify.com/2013

Kenny Logins

I've just this week been weighing up Shopify against WooCommerce for a small shop and came across this -

http://www.shopify.com/compare/shopify-vs-woocommerce

I think that has sealed the deal - WooCommerce it is. :pac:

KonFusion

Lol! That is cringe-worthy! :pac:

willows

All depends on the requirements of the store. My experience is the life cycle of ecommerce products.

try the idea on a Saas based ecommerce cheap and cheery
make a few bob move to a opensource ecommerce, own the stack and the data
make a few more bob start doing multichannel, amazon, ebay et al.
make a few more bob ...... just keep going, automate everything 100%.

devildriver

devildriver wrote: »

Just starting a project with it now. Will report back on any findings.

Do you have any specific questions about BC - can't guarantee I can answer them in any great detail but I'll try!

Guess it's time to report back on my BigCommerce experience.

Feature-wise it's pretty hard to beat.They pretty much have more features "out of the box" than most other SaaS platforms that I have seen.

Support looks good initially, they will assign an account rep when you sign up for the trial and that rep stays with you throughout the trial i.e. constantly keeping in touch asking how they can help and gently coaxing you towards a paid account.

Once you have forked over the cash they will still keep in contact but not as much. You can use this rep to ask any questions about the platform and they will relay issues to tech support on your behalf. However as they operate on a strictly 9-5 basis from Austin, Texas you can end up waiting quite a while for a reply.

The control panel / backend is reasonably well laid out but looks a little bit dated at this point.

Which brings me to the templates. :eek:

This was not a very good experience. They have a selection of about 100 templates that you can apply to your store. Of that 100 there's probably about 30 that are in any way attractive. Of that 30 there's only 2 or 3 that are responsive. Most of the others use a generic mobile theme, not necessarily a bad thing.

However it's the template structure that will bring a tear or two to the eye.

If you want to customise an existing template, add code, remove elements etc you will need to get stuck into the BigCommerce way of doing things. And this is messy.

Templates are split into many different components (there's nothing new about this if you've worked with Wordpress or any other CMS before). But it's the sheer number of pages, "panels" and snippets that is the problem.

Some of the snippets contain just a line or two of code which can be infuriating when you are trying to find a specific function or tag. You basically have to do text searches across the entire codebase within Coda or your text editor of choice just to find what you need to edit.

For example the template I selected has 764 separate files in it. I understand complex sites require more complex code but this is seriously inefficient.

Going back to the plus side of things, setup for payment gateways (Paypal and Stripe for me), purchasing and adding SSL certs, domain and email setup are all very simple and hassle free.

So my final word would be BC is a no-brainer if you need lot's of features and a custom design is of secondary or no importance.

If the stock templates are not to your taste and you know that you will need to edit them then you may be in for a rough ride.

Hope that's of some help.

ThrowinShapes

I've only built with Shopify and WooCommerce, both with their pro's and con's.

Shopify is great for getting up and running rather quickly. The client has reasonable control over the content, and it's ridiculously straight forward if you just want to drop in a pre-built theme.
The issues I had were when developing a theme - I had to do quite a lot of it in their online editor to take advantage of the Liquid Template tags that I could drop into the CSS. But apparently they support SCSS flavour of Sass which is really nice.

You can't go too heavy on the customisation of a product page without delving in a little more. So for example I had to use this plugin http://apps.shopify.com/metafields-editor to add a custom video to each product page.

WooCommerce is nice in that it's WordPress. When creating a theme it's fairly straight forward to integrate with it.

This is what I've added into my functions.php

/**
 * Add WooCommerce Support
 */
add_theme_support( 'woocommerce' );

// Remove default WooCommerce styles
add_filter( 'woocommerce_enqueue_styles', '__return_false' );

// Remove breadcrumbs from WooCommerce pages
add_action( 'init', 'remove_wc_breadcrumbs' );
function remove_wc_breadcrumbs() {
    remove_action( 'woocommerce_before_main_content', 'woocommerce_breadcrumb', 20, 0 );
}

Then you just create a folder in your theme folder called woocommerce and drop in template files that you want to overwrite. This is useful as any updates to the plugin won't reset your custom templates.
Only issue I have is that with a complicated product with variations, you don't set the individual cost of each part. It just sets up the total price. So if you select option A with option B then the total price is €XX.XX, and so on.

devildriver

ThrowinShapes wrote: »

I've only built with Shopify and WooCommerce, both with their pro's and con's.

Shopify is great for getting up and running rather quickly. The client has reasonable control over the content, and it's ridiculously straight forward if you just want to drop in a pre-built theme.
The issues I had were when developing a theme - I had to do quite a lot of it in their online editor to take advantage of the Liquid Template tags that I could drop into the CSS.

Can you edit their themes "offline" or do you need to do it all through the browser interface?

One good thing about BigCommerce is that you can get direct access to the themes via WEBDAV.

Trojan

Another option for people to check out: www.selz.com

They do embedded Add to Cart with transaction processing on the page. Transaction fee: 5% + $0.25 so it's not for everyone, but could work for some.

KonFusion

devildriver wrote: »

Can you edit their themes "offline" or do you need to do it all through the browser interface?

One good thing about BigCommerce is that you can get direct access to the themes via WEBDAV.

If you've got a Mac you can download their editor and work locally via whatever your text editor is (Sublime etc).

big_fella

Know this is an old post but my 2c anyway.

Have built quite a few ecommerce sites and by far the easiest is woocommerce sitting on Wordpress. Easy enough to edit the shopping template files. Just drop a folder into your child theme and copy over originals. Also plenty of forums and free hacks knocking about online if you come unstuck.


cheers

EIREHotspur

Very interested in this thread because I have to build a few Shopping Websites soon.

Coming from a Designer background I am always swayed by the design first and foremost and then look for the features.

All of the Shopping Solutions offered have all the base features you need.

I looked at Magento, Opencart, Prestashop, Woocommerce and Zencart.

My Hosting has Quickinstalls of Magento, Prestashop, & Zencart and I looked at all of them...but ruled out Prestashop & Zencart because I don't like their design...small old fashioned graphics..

I tested Opencart too and also didn't like their design either.

So my choice is between Magento & WooCommerce....both are excellent, modern top notch design and have a lot of features but I chose WooCommerce because a few clients need a few features that can only be added through add on extensions.

Talisman

EIREHotspur wrote: »

So my choice is between Magento & WooCommerce....both are excellent, modern top notch design and have a lot of features but I chose WooCommerce because a few clients need a few features that can only be added through add on extensions.

Magento is not for beginners and not really worth the hassle for small eCommerce websites.

lightgrey

Hey, I'm looking at Bigcommerce for a small side business, approx 50 products but with the possibility to increase this to 100/200. I don't have a domain, nothing at all at the moment. Do I need to go to somewhere like Blacknight for the domain/hosting or can this all be done through Bigcommerce?

Also in terms of html/css, I have no idea about any of this (or do I need to know anything?). Is it necessary to get a designer on board? Bear in mind that I'm looking for something clean and basic and is responsive on all devices.

EIREHotspur

lightgrey wrote: »

Hey, I'm looking at Bigcommerce for a small side business, approx 50 products but with the possibility to increase this to 100/200. I don't have a domain, nothing at all at the moment. Do I need to go to somewhere like Blacknight for the domain/hosting or can this all be done through Bigcommerce?

Also in terms of html/css, I have no idea about any of this (or do I need to know anything?). Is it necessary to get a designer on board? Bear in mind that I'm looking for something clean and basic and is responsive on all devices.

Why are you going with BigCommerce in the first place?
There is a fee each month??

My advice would be to go with Wordpress/WooCommerce and make sure Training in how to update your products is part of the deal.

Then off you go yourself...only hosting Fee each year or extra design fee if you ever need new features.

lightgrey

Would Wordpress/WooCommerce not require me to do most of the work myself? I guess I just like the look of Bigcommerce, it's presenting itself as a simple enough way of getting your store up and running. I know there's a fee each month but I would be looking to with the silver plan which is only $30 p/m. There must be a reason why some choose Bigcommerce over WooCommerce?

devildriver

lightgrey wrote: »

Would Wordpress/WooCommerce not require me to do most of the work myself? I guess I just like the look of Bigcommerce, it's presenting itself as a simple enough way of getting your store up and running. I know there's a fee each month but I would be looking to with the silver plan which is only $30 p/m. There must be a reason why some choose Bigcommerce over WooCommerce?

Yes you are correct. There would be a bit of setup work required for the WooCommerce/Wordpress option. Also some knowledge of Wordpress would be required.

BigCommerce is a decent enough solution but you should also have a look at Shopify, Lemonstand and Highwire. All will offer you an "out of the box" solution that you can get up and running fairly simply. If you are willing to learn a bit you should be able to get by without using a designer or developer although if you want to customise the stock templates you may require some professional help.

The one downside to BigCommerce is that the templates are unnecessarily complicated and can be a pain to edit.

lightgrey

I'll take a look at those. Have heard of Shopify but not the other two. Thing is, Bigcommerce is an out of the box solution but playing around with the free trial is hinting at me that I still need some outside help. I'm willing to learn but don't want to spend x amount of hours on it only to learn that it doesn't all flow the way I want it to. Might be just better to pay a designer to edit one of the stock templates for me. Very much off topic, and obviously you don't have to answer, but minimal adjustments to a stock template (I'd imagine something like an hours work), how much typically?

devildriver

lightgrey wrote: »

Might be just better to pay a designer to edit one of the stock templates for me. Very much off topic, and obviously you don't have to answer, but minimal adjustments to a stock template (I'd imagine something like an hours work), how much typically?

The sheer amount of options in BigCommerce can be a bit daunting so it would definitely be a good idea to get some professional help.

However what you can't do is make estimates on the amount of time it will take to get something done. You'll need your designer to do that. As I mentioned earlier the templates in BC are complicated so any edits will take longer than they should. This is one of BC's weaknesses, not a deal breaker but an annoyance nonetheless.

kaloshma

Definately shopify over every other ones.

Gerrymandering reborn

Sorry to drag this up but I have a question.

I see shopify plan for $29 per month. I also see there is a 10% paypal discount https://www.shopify.com/paypal

Does this mean I'll pay €23 per month for first year

Gerrymandering reborn

Sorry to drag this up but I have a question.

I see shopify plan for $29 per month. I also see there is a 10% paypal discount https://www.shopify.com/paypal

Does this mean I'll pay €23 per month for first year

SixtaWalthers

My vote is for BigCommerce.