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E-commerce and multi channel retailing are sectors that rely on technology to provide the route to market and mechanics of merchandising and selling products. Selecting the right technology platform for your business is therefore of paramount importance, much the same way as selecting the right retail premises is of paramount importance in ‘bricks and mortar’ retailing. Unfortunately, identifying the best technology involves navigating a crowded market with options ranging from free software as a service (SaaS) platforms, through to multi million pound bespoke builds. Which route to take will very much depend on:

Business Requirement

If you require a number of bespoke features that are unique to your proposition or want to really differentiate your website from that of competitors, an ‘off the shelf’ shopping platform is unlikely to be fit for purpose.

Budget

The cost of e-commerce platforms can be broken down into licence fees (if proprietary technology), design costs, development costs, hosting and management costs. For most retailers, the single biggest cost is development, as it is this that enables them to tailor the platform to meet their business requirements.

Ambition

Just like any business venture, launching an e-commerce website is an investment that needs to deliver a return. Whilst a free SaaS platform will provide a quick to market, low cost option, it is unlikely to provide the functionality, customer experience or scalability to grow a significant market share.

Here at Zoocha, we thought we would review what we believe are some of the better e-commerce platform and framework options that are available to all businesses:

• Magento
• Drupal Commerce
• Drupal Ubercart
• Shopify
• Opencart
• Presta Shop
• Interspire
• CubeCart
• X-Cart
• Spree
• osCommerce
• Zen Cart
• VirtueMart
• Business Catalyst
• WordPress eCommerce Plugin
• Satchmo
• Batavi
• Broadleaf Commerce
• Interchange
• nopCommerce
• Ofbiz
• osCMax

Magento

Big names such as Nokia, Samsung, Fred Perry and The North Face are among the 100,000 merchants that currently use Magento as their ecommerce solution. The feature-rich and fully supported Enterprise edition is directed towards larger companies with costs starting at $12,990 USD/yr. Features include email marketing along with a rich merchandising suite to target marketing, CMS, highly tuned page performance, private sales, special events and permissions just to name a few. A hosted edition available called Magento.go aimed at small businesses which ranges from $15 to $125 per month offering from 200MB to 5GB of storage, 4GB to 32GB of bandwidth with free set up and no transaction fees. A free version is also available; you get the code – that’s it!

Drupal Commerce

Drupalcommerce, also being fully integrated with the Drupal content management system moves a step up from ubercart to be enterprise aware by being scalable and secure, PA-DSS compliant with multi-currency support to name a few. Extended modules allow you to add payment service integration, coupons and affiliates, paid file downloads, shipping calculation, stock management and SEO tools to further enhance the already search friendly Drupal. Being a Drupal module Drupalcommerce has access to the large list of modules available to the CMS along with it’s expansive community of developers and themes available in abundance with consultants offering theming services if needed.

Drupal Ubercart

Ubercart fully integrates with the award winning open source content management system Drupal and thus has full access to all of its functionality for URL optimisation and a host of modules to make your site search friendly, its secure application framework along with the ever growing community of developers for drupal and ubercart. The flexible product attributes system allows shoppers to choose selectable attributes that may modify the price, SKU/model, and/or weight of the item as the shopper adds it to their cart. Single page chekckout then allows the shopper to pay for their item(s) and all checkout information is found on the one page along with integrated payment gateways such as; PayPal, Authorize.net, Cyber Source etc. There is currently a development version of Ubercart (version 3 beta) to be fully compatible with Drupal 7.

Shopify

A very easy solution for creating a professional looking online shop. There are plenty of free and premium themes available that are completely customisable in the Shopify admin area. Or you can design your own theme from scratch.

Shopify will host your site along with setting up SSL so you get plenty ‘out of the box’ with Shopify. Major credit cards and PayPal payments are accepted and Shopify does provide their own analytics, although you can use Google Analytics. Shopify do take a percentage of each sale for providing all of the above for you.

Opencart

OpenCart allows storeowners to create unlimited categories, products and even add unlimited manufacturers to sell products in multiple languages and currencies via 20+ payment gateways and 8+ shipping methods. The administration user interface is clear and easy to navigate along with some sleep looking templates. A big plus point for OpenCart is the ability to create and run multiple stores from a single admin interface where storeowners can set products to appear on specific stores, theme each store differently, localise each store by setting a default currency and tax class.

Presta Shop

As winner of the best open source ecommerce application 2010 [PAKCT] with more than 50,000 live shops and a 240,000 member community PrestaShop comes packed with features including customer referral program, quantity discounts, returns management, unlimited shipping carriers and destinations, user statistics and localisation. The biggest plus point for PrestaShop is the attractiveness of the sites created using the popular Smarty Template Engine. However, it is believed that the backend is slow to manage and maintain lets hope this was addressed in the 1.4 version release.

Interspire

The latest version 6 has been enhanced with features such as; the ability to sell on ebay as well as mobile commerce, integration with MailChimp, pre-orders and min/max order quantity to name a few. Interspire is offered as a hosted plan or a licensed edition so the shop owner can decide how simple they wish their ecommerce platform to be along with the user-friendly admin area that comes with Interspire. There are over 90 design templates available and each design is easily customisable to suit the storeowner’s needs.

CubeCart

CubeCart is a basic ‘out of the box’ ecommerce available for up to £110. There is a cut down version available free of charge that has limited features to play with such as a choice of three skins, five payment steps and mandatory registration. The premium version comes with more features but further add-ons and a familiarity with PHP and MySQL are necessary to really make CubeCart work for you.

X-Cart

A commercial package with open-source code that is affordable for new business start-ups as well as established businesses. X-Cart uses the Smarty Template Engine that is popular amongst developers due to its approach of separating presentational code with application code.

Custom META tags and URLs for products and categories make X-Cart search friendly. Sales analysis and tracking data that is integrated with Google Analytics, you can target your HTML emails to specific customer groups integrated with MailChimp (this module does include a one-time fee). Extra modules such as Facebook Tab and X-PDF Invoices are also available but at an extra cost.

Spree

Spree is an open source platform constructed in a very clean and lightweight fashion using the popular framework Ruby on Rails. Being an open source platform Spree comes with a strong community that has provided over 100 extensions and continued support through active development. Spree also provides support for over 50 payment gateways, single page checkout and custom tax logic along with built in Google Analytics. Spree sites can be translated into over 25 languages to give your shop a worldwide presence along with being cloud-tested so you can host your store on the next generation of server technology.

osCommerce

osCommerce is an out-of-the-box shopping cart that is easy to setup, run and manage in a cost effective fashion. If you want to differentiate your store from the thousands of other osCommerce stores, there are over 5,000 add-ons available, some of which come at a cost, however, modifying the stores design is a little tricky. Version 3.0 of osCommerce that was released in March 2011 includes a template system and an administration area username and password definition during installation. Supports authorize.net, paynova and paypal gateways to name a few. More gateways are available via add ons.

Zen Cart

This open source platform is easy to install, customise, manage and generally just easy to use so great for someone new to ecommerce. There are a large variety of add-ons available to enhance Zen Cart including template packages, pricing tools to enable discount coupons and gift certificates, language packs and a newsletter manager to market to your clients. However, installing too many add-ons can leave you with a very cluttered user interface. On the downside, a lot of the templates do appear to be somewhat lacklustre; although Zen Cart is easily customisable so implementing a bespoke design should be easy.

VirtueMart (Joomla extension)

VirtueMart is an extension of the well-known content management Joomla! As a shopping cart it allows shoppers to create and manage their own account along with sending a product ‘back in stock’ notification to shoppers. VirtueMart is available in multiple languages and currencies along with allowing storeowners to sell downloadable products (virtual goods), add product ratings and testimonials that can be moderated or auto-published. There are a plethora of extensions and themes available to customise your shop and differentiate from the crowd.

Business Catalyst

Being managed and hosted by Adobe, Business Catalyst is an eCommerce platform that includes a content management system, customer database, email marketing, along with analytics and reporting. Arguably the most impressive part of Business Catalyst is its powerful customer relationship management features. All interactions a customer makes with the interface is tracked and recorded making this data a great resource for targeted email campaigns. Being an Adobe product it does favour Flash to JavaScript for the majority of all moving parts and looking at a lot of the live sites the Flash used tends to be heavy and buggy. This could be seen as a negative to Business Catalysts ‘Awesome Web Apps Without Coding’ approach.

WordPress eCommerce Plugin

With this being a WordPress plugin it is obviously only available to WordPress users as an add-on to their existing site. However, if you decide to have a shop as an after thought to your existing WordPress site, this would prove to be a decent option. Providing easy setup/use, integrates with PayPal, Google Checkout and Payment Express among others along with the getshopped! Facebook application that will allow storeowners to promote products on their profile.

Satchmo

Satchmo is built using the popular Python Web framework, Django and has support for range of product types including downloadable products, subscription products, custom configured products, product variants and gift certificates. Continuing along the lines of Satchmo being feature rich the customer model allows multiple ship to and bill to addresses along with being available in multiple languages and supporting discount codes to allow free shipping, set amount of percentage discount, set start and end dates, limit to certain products. The requirements list is somewhat extensive and definitely worth having a look through before making your decision.

Batavi

Batavi is a relatively new open source platform that is an extension of osCommerce as the Batavi development team is the former, well known, osCommerce core team. A particularly impressive aspect to Batavi is the ICEcat PIM module. This Product Information Manager has the ability to handle millions of product data sheets, provides a graphical menu structure, support for multiple Linux distributions such as CentOS, Gentoo and Ubuntu along with easy integration with external sources. Batavi is currently under heavy development and each release brings a host of new features and bug fixes to provide a more customisable and robust platform for your web shop.

Broadleaf Commerce

This open source Java EE eCommerce platform is the first eCommerce framework to be developed based on the widely adopted Spring framework, the leading framework to run and build enterprise Java applications. Broadleaf Commerce offers simple and easy integration with any database and back end system you currently have. Broadleaf Commerce has a user-friendly merchandising tool enabling you to manage products, promotions, designate featured products, customise product search and reporting with ease. Broadleaf Commerce was designed to be highly customisable and easy to configure, extend and maintain so you can make your store stand out from the crowd with ease.

Interchange

Interchange is an open source eCommerce application written in Perl for building customised eCommerce and catalog solutions. A powerful tool that can automate and data-enable your site and build online applications. Interchange supports sales, order processing, content management, customer service, digital goods delivery and auctions. Integration is the big thing for Interchange as it integrates with payment processing services, ERP systems, point-of-sale systems, accounting systems, external content management systems and Java-based application servers. So whatever your existing platform, Interchange will make a great add on.

nopCommerce

nopCommerce is stable, usable and highly customisable and one of the best free .NET shopping cart solutions. This platform is easy to use with its quick and simple installation instructions and pluggable architecture, adding additional functionality or presentation elements is made easy. nopCommerce is also optimised for search engines with the use of friendly URLs, properly structured content and products to enable potential customers to find your store. However, it appears to have some heavy server requirements and tends to require more design and development expertise than other shopping carts.

Ofbiz

This open source enterprise project can be used out-of-the-box or customised to suit further business needs based on this reliable, secure and scalable foundation for enterprise solutions. Ofbiz provides a suite of enterprise applications that incorporate and automate plenty of the business processes of an eCommerce enterprise. You will get a well tested and proven architecture that adopts best-practise design principles and is highly customisable for you to adapt the architecture for the most specific of business needs. However, the user documentation is not particularly fantastic. If you have a specific problem, you are unlikely to find the answer in the documentation as it is very generic.

osCMax

osCMax is an open source ecommerce platform derived from the popular osCommerce platform that has been extended and rewritten. osCMax is a fully templateable solution that comes with a default template, However, other pre-designed templates come at a cost, although the template store is empty. Strengths include; the ability to use your own rented server without further licenses, pricing for different customer groups, allowing users to sell to retail and trade customers, ease of use when creating and uploading new products, downloading and processing prders along with the ease of setting up payment gateways. osCMax does lack multi-store support and one page checkout.

Need help with your e-commerce platform selection and implementation? Contact us!