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Magento -
DemandWare -
Ottemo -
osCommerce -
Shopify
Magento offers flexible, scalable eCommerce solutions designed to help you grow and succeed online. Cost-effective technology platform makes it possible for you to control the content, functionality, look and feel of your online store.
Pros
- Feature-rich – the Community (free) version boasts features not commonly available in other solutions such as ability to manage multiple store fronts, multi-language and multi-currency support and is mobile and search engine friendly.
- User-friendly – the administration area is one of the more user-friendly ones we’ve come across. A simple back-end with intuitive navigation and well organized store management features.
- Cost – community version is free.
- Community – wide community of users who have developed many extensions and plugins and can help with support.
- Flexibility – Magento’s templating architecture allows you to pretty customize everything so you can create your site exactly how you want The software is open source so you have full control over the code so you can develop the functionality you need.
- Scalable – as previously mentioned, Magento is built to scale so whether you’re selling 10 products or 10,000, Magento can handle it.
Cons
- Developers – good Magento developers are hard to find. Magento is an extremely large system (over 20,000 files and 200 database tables) so it takes a fairly clever developer with good understanding of object oriented development and experience with the core software to really know what they’re doing.
- Hosting – due to its largesse, Magento should only be hosted on dedicated servers that you can configure or providers who specialize in Magento hosting. Running Magento on normal shared hosting will create a slow and frustrating user experience for visitors.
- Time – Magento’s flexible architecture also makes it complex. It usually requires more time to make the same customizations as in other solutions. It usually takes developers more time to get up the learning curve than other solutions.
Demandware is enterprise-class cloud commerce platform which set the standard for omni-channel commerce solutions. The core of the solution is a flexible digital commerce platform that minimizes the complexities and costs of running extensive global commerce operations and enables retailers to respond with speed and agility to new market opportunities and unforeseen consumer expectations.
Pros
- No hosting needed – everything (including source code and database) hosted by Demandware on highly performance servers.
- Time – developing of the extensions for Demandware requires much less time than for another platforms.
- High customers value support – Demandware hosted on closed, well configured, high-end servers with amazing performance, which allows to handle huge amount of customers at the same time.
Cons
- Totally closed – you can’t look inside Demandware and see how it works.
- Cost – there is no free or trial version, you have to pay for it. Its only Enterprise level platform.
Ottemo is changing the eCommerce game by bringing Fortune 100 features to the Small and Medium Enterprise in a quick-and-easy downloadable solution. Mobile-first platform allows you to access all the eCommerce tools you need for your business from anywhere. Ottemo also provide a versatile API and sample configurations so you can kickstart your online store!
Pros
- Unified Channel Engagement – Providing a seamless shopping experience across channels on desktop, mobile and social
- Enterprise Support – Passionate Technical Account Management and Customer Support
- Comprehensive Customer View – Merge customer data from all channels to build a comprehensive view of every customer
- Analytics / Personalization – Ability to use predictive analytics to understand customer behavior fully and create highly targeted offers and personalized service
- Scale With The Cloud – Support your digital channels with our ondemand enterpriseclass applications and scalable infrastructure with the cloud
- Page Load Speed – Innovative technology stack enables best in breed platform speed to streamline commerce transactions across all channels driving increased conversions
Cons
- It’s a SaaS platform, not great for companies that like selfhosted platforms
- While Ottemo is easy to theme, the theme selection is limited as the platform is still new to market
osCommerce provide you the tools to create your very own online store to start selling products and services to customers worldwide.
Pros
- Open source – It is totally free and open source system. An open source license, meaning you can view and even change the code to suit your purposes.
- Large community – It is supported by a large community of developers and has an extensive library of plugins available.
- Automatic browser based installation – Version 2.2 is widely available from Web hosts on the popular cPanel domain management console, and has an automatic browser based installation and upgrade procedure, meaning it’s easy to implement and keep up to date.
Cons
- Upgrade problems – When you upgrade, your plugins might stop working due to changes in the base code.
- Susceptible to attacks – Free to you also means free to hackers, who can and do search the Web for standard installations to target.
Shopify help emerging small businesses get off the ground and grow into successful companies Shopify platform lets users easily and quickly create their own online store, without all the technical work involved in developing their own website, or the huge expense of having someone else build it.
Pros
- Built-in Speed & Security for Hosting – An all-in-one solution like Shopify allows you to turn that side of the business over to the pros and just let them worry about hackers, caching, compliance, and a whole range of issues that come with hosting an online store.
- Great Customer Support – Shopify has really fast, correct, and helpful support – from both a developer and store owner perspective.
- Shopify App Store – Shopify provides the platform and all the core features, and allows developers to offer hyper-specialized products that plugin seamlessly to Shopify’s platform.
Cons
- Pricing – client has 14 days trial period, after that he has to pay monthly fee.
- Initial setup – with the release of Shopify 2 – Shopify has definitely made initial setup of your online store much easier – but it still isn’t a “just add water” step by step. For anyone who buys into Shopify expecting to be making money in 15 minutes is going to be disappointed.
