The best engine for the online store. Review of the best engines for online store

In the digital age, any brand needs an online presence. Content management systems or CMSs for e-commerce are a quick and easy way to launch commerce online. A functional CMS gives you the flexibility to effectively create, populate and manage your store. For users who have no coding knowledge, it is important that the CMS provides easy-to-use tools for managing websites.

Types of CMS for online store

Today there are hundreds of solutions for creating online stores. Among them, there are products installed on hosting, hosting solutions with different pricing plans. There are 4 broad categories of CMS software:

• open source;
• CMS out of the box;
• designers;
• SaaS solutions.

They have similar functionality, but different tools and features.

Wordpress + Woocommerce

WordPress has gained popularity as a platform for blogs, but with the plugin Woocommerce this CMS allows you to create a full-fledged store. WooCommerce is an open-source plugin that allows you to run an online store on WordPress. WooCommerce is now considered one of the most effective solutions for online commerce.

The most striking advantage of WooCommerce is the ease of installation, configuration and launch. With additional widgets you can easily expand functionality, add multiple languages, payment forms and feedback. Most templates are adaptive and properly displayed on mobile devices. Even a beginner can create an online store without much effort, if you order from us hosting for WordPress with a CMS already installed.

Joomla!

Joomla – another popular CMS on which you can create an online store. The engine itself is easy to operate, it can work with beginners and people who are not familiar with HTML or Javascript. CMS has a modular system, so you can build a store on the principle of the constructor. For this, the developers offer more than 8,000 add-ons and templates, among them there are paid and free solutions.

Thanks to the advanced SEO settings, the site is easy to promote in search engines. The disadvantages include the complex integration of external services. Stable operation will provide reliable hosting for Joomla from Tuthost.

Opencart

OpenCart is a free, open-source content management system. It is enough to install CMS on hosting to create an online store. Even the basic set of options will be enough to start, although the design is unlikely to please. OpenCart – one of the most popular CMS for e-commerce because of its simplicity, flexibility and versatility.

The platform has a user-friendly interface that allows you to perform many tasks from a single admin panel. In addition, OpenCart comes with more than 13,000 modules and themes for easy scalability. Most of them are paid. The engine supports multiple languages, currencies and payment methods.

Magento

Magento is an open-source e-commerce platform written in PHP. Officially launched in 2008, the system has proven to be a popular choice. Magento is used by many major brands such as Coca Cola, Ford, FoxConnect, etc. In addition, various extensions and themes can be downloaded from the Magento Marketplace.

Magento offers three products:

• Community;
• Enterprise (also known as Commerce);
• Enterprise Cloud Edition.

Thus, the engine is suitable for projects of all sizes. You can start with the free Community. As your business grows, you can expand the capabilities of your store with Magento Enterprise and Enterprise Cloud Edition plans. Hosting for Magento from our company will make your work easier – you won’t have to install the CMS manually.

Shopify

Shopify is a SaaS (Software as a Service) platform. Shopify is a hosted solution, so you don’t have to worry about hosting, installing the engine, or upgrading components. The platform is easy to use, feature-rich and multilingual. All you have to do to get started is register on the Shopify website, after which you will get a free 14 test days. After this period, you will have to choose one of the tariff plans with a monthly fee:

• Basic Shopify – $29;
• Shopify – $79;
• Advanced Shopify – $299.

Shopify offers paid and free website templates, flexible customization and support. Opportunities for SEO-optimization are limited.

Horoshop

Welltop is a product of Ukrainian developers, which operates on the principle of SaaS. The engine provides fast operation of the site even with a large number of categories and products, simple SEO-settings, configurable filters, accounting products in stock with automatic unloading from Excel or 1C. Fast export of goods to marketplaces and aggregators Prom, Rozetka, Hotline, Price.ua and others is available.

To start a small store with an assortment of up to 1000 products suits BASIC plan for 120 UAH per month (if paid for the year). Free test 7 days are available to evaluate the work of Goodop. With the growth of business you can expand opportunities with tariff plans STANDARD (400 UAH), PRO (1000 UAH), B2B (2000 UAH). Enterprise plan with individual conditions is available for large customers.

Mercurio CMS

Another engine from the Ukrainian developers, designed for online stores. The out-of-the-box platform is based on Laravel, Elasticsearch, Vue.JS frameworks, so it opens up a lot of possibilities for customization. The engine is easily integrated with popular delivery services Novaya Pochta, Ukrposhta, Meest, Justin. Mercurio CMS offers customizable filters, product comparison, search by site with tips, multilanguage, automatic customer notification through TurboSMS service.

The basic Cloud plan costs $50 a month, for which you get hosting and free tech support. By paying $2,000, you become the full owner of the software “out of the box” and can host it on the hosting service of your choice. The terms and costs in the Enterprise tariff are discussed individually – you can order the design, the team to support the site outsource and other services.

Criteria for choosing a CMS for your online store

For an online store to work steadily, it is important to consider different factors.

• Speed of operation. The higher it is, the more convenient it will be for visitors to use the store. Page load speed – an important factor in ranking the site by search engines.
• Clear interface and controls. You shouldn’t make a choice just based on features and capabilities. If you need knowledge of higher mathematics and programming languages to manage the store, the work is unlikely to be effective.
• Available languages. Popular solutions offer a Russian version, less often a Ukrainian version. If you choose a less common CMS, make sure it supports multilingualism.
• CMS age. Oddly enough, this indicator is indirectly indicative of quality. Popular engines have stood the test of time – they have fixed many bugs and vulnerabilities. New projects are more likely to have such problems.
• Popularity also says a lot about the quality of the engine. If only 200 people have installed it in 2 years of its existence, the product hardly meets the requirements of entrepreneurs. Popular engines such as WordPress and Joomla have an audience of many millions.
• Easy integration. Who needs a store without the ability to pay, quick unloading of products, customer reviews? Not every programmer can create such functions from scratch, so it is better to choose an engine with a simple integration of third-party services.
• Adaptability is one of the main requirements today. Most users place orders through mobile devices, so the site should work correctly on PCs, tablets and phones.
• Scalability. To expand business, many engines offer advanced settings, modules and plugins.
• Simple SEO optimization. Search traffic is difficult to attract without additional site optimization, so the engine must be SEO friendly and offer the appropriate settings.
• Cost. Most popular engines are free, and their functionality is sufficient even for large stores. Before you buy a paid CMS, look carefully at the free solutions.

If you choose an open source engine, you will need hosting to install it. We have a line of tariffs “Gigabyte ” – it is suitable for online stores that do not have enough disk space on conventional tariff plans.

What platform to choose for the online store?

Choosing a CMS can be a difficult task if you’ve never dealt with website creation. Choose products that solve several problems at once:

• quick launch of the store;
• simple sales management;
• easy accounting of goods;
• advanced marketing tools.

At the start you are unlikely to use complex features and plans that offer 50,000 products. The easier it is to work with the platform, the more likely your business will start to grow. And when that happens, it will need to scale – so the CMS needs to have that capability. In the engines with open source or out-of-the-box such a possibility exists, but may require the assistance of professional developers. In SaaS solutions, you have to switch to a more expensive pricing plan in order to expand.

Conclusions

Today it is not difficult to launch an online store. It is not necessary to know programming languages or hire professional developers. It is enough to choose a CMS – content management system. By choosing the right platform, you can quickly start trading and provide customers with all the features they need: search, filters, an order basket and convenient payment methods. And the engines of the Ukrainian and other developers will integrate the store with popular marketplaces and delivery services.