e commerce platforms

MizMix

Hi,
I am setting up an online retail outlet. My web guy has recommended a woopress (wordpress) template. Any limitations I need to be aware of (he says no but just looking for independent advise). E.g. limitations over paying an ongoing subscription with shopify for instance. He'll help with maintenance issues for the next 12 months but quite inexperienced with websites so want to make sure I'm not going for a cheaper option which will cause headaches down the line.

Separate to this he will look after and advise on the best hosting companies and he'll set it all up for me (black knight etc)

TheWaterboy

I suppose it depends on what type of e-commerce store you are opening and how many products it will have. Wordpress is fine for a small e-commerce store using the Woocommerce plugin. There are plenty of payment provider plugins available also for the likes of Stripe / Paypal etc etc.

I suppose one of the key things you should ask your developer is why the recommend using Wordpres as opposed to the more traditional ecommerce platforms such as Magento or Opencart - hopefully the reason is that they only have experience in Wordpress!

MizMix

mmm what exactly does 'small' mean? Although in fairness yes in terms of product types I will initially have under 100 I'd say. I must ask about alternatives and do some more research myself also on alternatives such as magneto- thanks!

martyoo

I really like Prestashop. It does a lot "out of the box". Magento is good but fairly resources heavy. Best of trying a few demos.

Buttercake

I agree with Prestashop, I find magneto annoying

Prestashop is pretty much out of the box ready and the default theme it comes with is fine to get a shop up and running.

Only thing is the Prestashop extensions are pricey.

_Brian

Opencart is a decent platform.
Easy to learn, easy to modify, plenty of free extensions and commercial extensions are very reasonably priced.

It's very possible to teach yourself how to use and how to modify.

adsw

I have two sites on Opencart and Prestashop. Much prefer Opencart, easier to use, cheaper extensions which can do a lot, nicer themes available on themeforest and not as clunky!!

That being said, the disadvantage of using these platforms is that they never do everything you want and you have to maintain database/file backups and may have issues with extensions not working with each other etc..

With the Prestashop site, I'm tied to staying with Prestashop due to an extension which we're using which is not available elsewhere and is pivotal.

Considered moving the Opencart site over to a hosted solution and I recently demoed Shopify and Bigcommerce hosted solutions. Benefits of these was sites were faster, more extensions available and less hassle making sure everything works so you can concentrate more on marketing and running the business. However, found Bigcommerce templates didn't let me do what I wanted to do and were a bit limiting (might be fine for most) and was put off by Shopify's charges. Shopify have removed the transaction charges in the US and UK where store owners use their payment facility (similar to Stripe) but the payment facility isn't available in Ireland yet.

MRTULES

Sorry to hijack but I'd love to know peoples recommendations where there would only be a few products (less than 10) and monthly billing would be possible. So one time sign up for continuous monthly subscription.?
Any thoughts would be much appreciated.

Axwell

http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=2056283992

Graham

http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=2057395057

Axwell

smcdub wrote: »

Looking for help with converting an existing Shopify template to be responsive.

This is not a jobs forum - please use http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=2055802922