One of the biggest challenges of establishing a successful e-commerce business is creating a well-functioning website that can adapt to shifts in consumer needs and shopping behaviors. Thankfully, there are many high-quality website builders e-commerce brands can leverage to build a beautiful and dynamic online shop. But with so many outstanding options to choose from, it can be difficult to determine which of these tools will best meet your business needs.
At Snap Agency, our mission is to empower your company with the resources it needs to find success in the world of e-commerce marketing. Over the years, we’ve worked with a range of e-commerce website builders, which taught us a great deal about where each of these tools excel and where they can fall short. So today, we’ll be running through the strengths and weaknesses of four popular e-commerce website builders to help you find the right platform for your business.
1. WooCommerce
WooCommerce is an e-commerce plugin for WordPress. Small and large-sized online merchants alike can leverage this builder to develop a fully customizable online store for their products. WooCommerce offers over 400 official extensions built by experienced developers, allowing you to optimize different aspects of your WordPress store, including payments, accounting and marketing.
One of the most compelling aspects of WooCommerce is that the basic plugin is incredibly easy to learn. It uses the same tools as WordPress, making it easy to customize your store with webhooks, custom AJAX endpoints and more. If you have a decent amount of experience with WordPress, then WooCommerce will come very naturally to you. It’s also worth noting that the basic WooCommerce plugin is completely free, but you’ll need to invest in premium extensions for more advanced store customization. There are hundreds upon hundreds of free and paid add-ons you can use to customize your WooCommerce store, granting customers different ways to shop online, personalize orders and develop online bookings.
WooCommerce has a handful of noteworthy downsides, too. To start, the platform doesn’t offer any unique themes. Your WooCommerce store will be entirely based on your WordPress theme, which makes it relatively inflexible in terms of design. WordPress plugins also take up a great deal of memory and can negatively affect the performance and speed of your site. Lastly, the costs of paid WooCommerce add-ons add up quickly, which can become a big problem if you need to utilize a large number of premium plugins to perfect your store. Fortunately, WooCommerce’s out-of-the-box features are pretty extensive, so this won’t be a major problem for most e-commerce companies. In spite of these flaws, we highly recommend WooCommerce if you’re looking for a highly adaptable and easy-to-use WordPress solution.
2. Shopify
Shopify is one of the most popular e-commerce website builders available, providing users with the ability to fully customize their online stores and incorporate new sales channels with ease. One of the most compelling aspects of Shopify is its wide selection of pre-built themes. Whether you’re looking for a block-style theme with bold colors or a minimalist look replete with space for powerful photography, this platform has you covered.
Shopify also offers a wealth of versatile apps you can harness to improve the functionality and performance of your store. For example, if you need help with fulfillment, there are multiple Shopify applications you can use to automate shipping, warehousing and tracking. The platform also features apps for marketing, inventory management, customer service, social media and more, bringing much-needed simplicity to your store operations.
Despite its many perks, there are a few significant downsides to this robust e-commerce platform. Firstly, there are a few important functionalities that Shopify doesn’t provide straight out of the box, such as customer ratings and reviews. You’ll need to pay for these features via apps from Shopify’s App Store, and the monthly costs for these apps can add up very quickly if you invest in too many. Creating custom design assets on the platform, while not impossible, is pretty challenging, too—so bear that in mind if you think you’ll need to enhance one of its themes. That being said, we highly recommend looking into Shopify if you need a fast and flexible e-commerce site builder.
3. Magento
Magento is one of the world’s leading commerce platforms, handling over $155 billion in gross merchandise volume each year. The builder offers a variety of cloud-based omnichannel solutions, ranging from order management to retail associate and in-store technologies. Because Magento is an open-source platform, you can customize its templates and source code to achieve the functionalities your store needs. And thanks to its capacity for third-party integration and diverse pricing options, Magento is one of the most flexible e-commerce website builders around.
Magento allows for extensive theme and design customizations, empowering you to create unique, personalized user experiences that drive conversions. The platform also enables you to develop multi-language websites quickly and easily, which is a huge perk for e-commerce companies that need to accommodate a diverse range of users. Moreover, Magento can accommodate social media functionality, allowing you to populate your site with automatic social media links. In short, if you’re looking for a highly versatile e-commerce website builder that can adapt and scale to meet the needs of your business, then you should definitely give Magento a look.
That being said, Magento does have a smattering of problems. Like WooCommerce, the platform can be pretty resource intensive, which has the potential to cause site performance and speed problems. Additionally, because it’s so powerful and utilizes such advanced store customization tools, Magento can be challenging for newer developers to work with. And while Magento is a popular platform with several developers in the community, the cost of hiring these experts can add up quickly. In any case, Magento is an excellent choice for e-commerce companies in need of a highly customizable and scalable website.
Find the Right E-Commerce Website Builder With Snap
Are you interested in learning more about the different e-commerce website builders at your disposal? Then don’t hesitate to call or message Snap Agency today. Our digital marketing experts can help you find the best e-commerce platform for your company’s unique needs and constraints. You can also shoot us a message for more information on the best ways to make your e-commerce business successful. We’re always here to help.