WooCommerce and Magento — The Best Choice for an Ecommerce Platform

It is not easy to set up your business online. This is why many business owners today have started using online software applications that can help them manage their products, monitor their sales, run their operations, and maintain their e-commerce websites.

If you want to use WordPress there are many plugins you can use to improve the performance and functionality of your website. You can install these easily through your admin dashboard. From a simple contact form to advanced payment gateways you will find may WordPress plugins that add functionality to your site.

There are about 55,000 plugins that can be installed on WordPress. One of the best WordPress plugins for ecommerce is WooCommerce. It is an open source plugin that can be used to create online stores within a couple of clicks. You can add more plugins to customize your store or hire a WooCommerce development company to do it for you. The latter can help you scale your store and cater to the growing traffic, without worrying about breaking the structure of your store.

Absolutely free for use, WooCommerce is your best option if you have just stepped into the world of ecommerce. You don’t need to have extensive knowledge about WordPress to start using WooCommerce. If you are not looking at hiring any of the WooCommerce development services you can always learn how to use it by yourself, by going through a few online tutorials and documentation.

You will need to run WordPress on a self-hosting site, if you want to use WooCommerce. Certain hosting companies such as SiteGround, InMotion, and BlueHost offer pre-installs of WordPress, WooCommerce and other e-commerce specific features to keep websites secure.

How to use WooCommerce?

There are three ways of installing WooCommerce on your WordPress website. You can visit WooCommerce.com and create a free account. You may download the WooCommerce plugin. You can search for the WooCommerce plugin right from your website.

To create a free account on WooCommerce.com, you will have to get a pre-installed solution from a trusted host and then auto-install WooCommerce. Alternatively you can download the zip file from WooCommerce.com and start installing it manually.

To download the WooCommerce plugin, logon to WordPress and go to Dashboard. Under Plugins select “Add New” and upload the downloaded plugin. Once installed all that you need to do is activate it.

If you would like to look for the WooCommerce plugin right from your website, you can follow the following steps:

Logon to your website on WordPress
Go to your Dashboard and select the “Plugins” option
Select “Add New” and “Search Plugins”

You should find “WooCommerce” as one of the Plugins. Select it, install, and activate it. Once you activate and start using WooCommerce, you can think of improving the functionality of your website by going in for WooCommerce extensions. Although you might have to pay for these extensions they add a lot of value to your website, if used rightly.

WooCommerce extensions are available as subscriptions, memberships, bookings, shipping, payment gateways, and more. However, you can first start your ecommerce store for free and buy the extensions at a later date once you have scaled up and built a strong customer base.

Using Magento for ecommerce

Magento is another platform you can use to establish your ecommerce store. It is a standalone open source ecommerce platform which is self-hosted, customizable, scalable, and powerful. Because of its ability to handle large requests, Magento is often the number one choice of many large scale shopping platforms.

Again, you have the option of learning how to use Magento by yourself or hiring a professional Magento web development company. If you are choosing the first option, there are many CSS customization options available for you. Any of these could be used for your web design. The team at Magento is very supportive to interact with you and answer your queries.

Being a platform that supports all currencies and languages, Magento is an ideal ecommerce platform for companies that wish to open stores in the USA and other parts of the world. Since Magento allows third party integrations, you can expect a bigger space for your online store.

Known for quick customization and instant flexibility, Magento offers advanced solutions in a much simpler way. You can use the friendly community of Magento to get updates about security fixes, upgrade your ecommerce abilities and avail free support.

An ecommerce content management system platform, Magento is up-to-date with the many security features, SEO ranking factors, latest design trends, and other online store requirements. It can work with many large-scale shopping platforms and can handle large requests.

Being a mobile and SEO-friendly platform, Magento keeps up with the standards of mobile web design and provides advanced SEO solutions to users. It produces web pages that load faster so that the online customers can receive their information more quickly. The best part about Magento is that you get your choice to select any hosting company as per your preference.

With its product management options, custom reporting features, and top-of-the-line order security, Magento can make things a lot easier for online store owners. They will be easily able to add or remove items, change product descriptions, export reports, and view periodic transaction histories.

The Conclusion

Both WooCommerce and Magento seem excellent choices for improving the performance, security, usability, customization, and many more of the new website. Small businesses might find it easier to adopt WooCommerce over Magento because of its simple GUI, page builder plugin, and ability to manage better using fewer resources.

For larger enterprises, on the other hand, you can use Magento with its built-in advanced level cache, various built-in features, wide range of free extensions as well as themes, and strong framework. If you are tech-savvy, you can even build your own Magento theme right from the scratch. Else you can hire a professional to do it for you by looking up Magento development company India.

What you use depends on the way you want to present your business to your audience and build rapport. You will have to consider various factors such as the number of items to display, the way to show products, the budget, and the kind of user experience you want to provide.

As one of the expert WooCommerce development services, Litmus can offer you satisfying solutions to increase your sales. Our team is always looking forward to offer you the best of our services and help you achieve your organizational goals, as quickly as possible.