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Online business are an attractive area to get into the digital age. ECommerce sales worldwide will reach $1.672 trillion online in 2015. Moreover, increasing of eCommerce platforms allows businesses to have many opportunities to approach new customers and many choices to maximize the potential of resources. People witnessed an amazing comeback of WooCommerce plugin in eCommerce market share in 2015.
Most of the Top 100 online retailer use in-house-built eCommerce platforms.
WooCommerce becomes the new leader at the end of 2015 with the share of 26%. Magento Community decreased by 0.5% from 25.3% till 24.8% that is the result since May 2015. Magento Enterprise and Prestashop slight increased by 0.5% and 0.4% respectively. Three biggest platforms (WooCommerce, Magento and Prestashop) take 65% of eCommerce market share.
WooCommerce has lower barrier to entry about technology and finance, which is the reason why it is difficult to stop WooCommerce plugins expanding its share. Experts predict that interest line of WooCommerce continues to increase in the coming year. While WooCommerce is conquering user’s heart, the interest in Magento and Prestashop slow down.
Interest Over Time
Experts and developers work continuously to make features more advanced and convenient for users. Releasing Magento 2 in November is one of the most anticipated events of 2015. LitExtension will draw a big picture about features and enhancements of three largest eCommerce platforms including Magento, WooCommerce, and Prestashop up to 2015.
WooCommerce is one of the best shopping cart plugins available for WordPress. Founded in 2011, WooCommerce is a young platform with high development potential.
Advantages
Cost-effective
WooCommerce is an open source plugin. It is easy to transform your WordPress website into a thorough-bred eCommerce store free. Users can find many free themes, extensions and install them quickly. Other extensions are required payment but they are cheaper than different platform extensions.
Flexibility
Business can categorize products and give sale prices and independent attributes. WooCommerce stores are able to provide physical, virtual, downloadable and even affiliate products. Moreover, this platform accept many types of payment with POS solution.
Familiar
WooCommerce is a plugin of WordPress. If users have used WordPress before, they benefit from recognizing the user-friendly WordPress interface. It is available for beginners to save a lot of time to create and manage your site.
Customization Options
Users can download about 2000 different themes in https://wordpress.org/themes/. With each selected theme, users can availably change pre-set CSS styles and color themes, tweak the code and experiment special features.
Professional platform
It helps you to control detailed order tracking and customer engagement tools. From that, users can view open orders, update delivery statuses, apply discount code, set up taxes. This platform gives customers a picture of professional service.
Analytics
WooCommerce provide some analytic tools, which allows to calculate daily sales, total sales, measure the statistics for different customers individually, follow the number of order, and determine change in trend. It is helpful for managers to measure the metrics of their site to improve sales.
Community
WordPress community has millions of users and thousands of active members on hand to give advices for people who have problem in setting WooCommerce up.
Disadvantage
Performance
WooCommerce is not an e-commerce website. It will not fulfill the eCommerce funnel. Developer has to add multiple extensions and customize their site before running it.
Scale
WooCommerce is a light platform, so it is not suitable for a big eCommerce store that has thousands of products.
Releasing from 2008, Magento is the most popular eCommerce platform with over 200.000 retailers worldwide and 2 versions: Magento Community and Magento Enterprise.
Advantages
Open Source
Magento is free for download in the Internet, except Enterprise version. It includes most of the necessary features to have your store up and run it.
Feature-rich
Magento’s admin area is second to none. It allows users to be enabled full features by the click of a button. It is easy to look at your website performance and real time information. Magento allows third party integrations to import products from spreadsheets, manage newsletter system, start-to-finish manage an order of a customer.
Flexible CMS
It supports you manage multiple websites, integrate Google website optimizer and over 50 payment gateways. WYSIWYG editor is friendly to help non-tech individual refresh website easily. Magento is perfect choice for product editing and capable of handling large database smartly.
Strong Community
Magento is owned by eBay. Magento users receive an abundance of helps and advices from eBay advocates to manage effectively. There are over 800.000 developers worldwide with Magento experience.
Extensions
There are about 15.000 Magento plugins and extensions.
Disadvantage
Cost
Magento EE is not a free version. Users can start with Magento CE with no fee. However, you need to pay high cost for extensions and plugins. Sometimes, companies have to hire a third party to install extension for their site.
Technology
Setting up and customizing Magento is more complicated than other platforms. It offers high requirement in server and developers. Magento hosted on dedicated servers or cloud plan to keep store running stably. Developers need to have core technical knowledge and experiences in coding to install and control Magento properly.
Time
Magento’s flexible architecture also makes it complicated. The more Magento is complex, the more time it need to set up and customize as in other solutions. It requires developer’s time to get up the learning curve and be experts.
Prestashop is a free open-source eCommerce solution. After appearing in 2007, it is gaining its popularity very quickly. This platform gives business flexibility and a low entry barrier to build an online store.
Advantages
Installation
Prestashop is really easy to initial install and customize with basic features. Developers ought to download files and upload them to their host. It is suitable for PHP5 with MySQL5 (or later). If hosting company provides one-click installation, everything will be very simple for even non-tech individual.
Interface
User interface is relatively friendly. All needed information is available on Dashboard. WooCommerce keeps technical terminology minimum. Most of the emphasis are ease of use and clarity.
Feature
Prestashop supports some impressive features such as email follow-up automation, SEO, catalogue and site management, recently viewed products feature, promotional tools, international shipping. You can find more 25.000 plugins and extensions of Prestashop.
Flexibility
Prestashop allows developer to customize eCommerce store easily according to his opinions and customer’s need. You can add or delete different features through the admin panel.
Official marketplace
You can choose from 3500 modules and themes in the official marketplace: http://addons.prestashop.com/en/
Languages
Prestashop is available in 41 languages, but only supports fully in English and French.
Disadvantage
Expensive modules
Most of full functional modules is not cheap. When upgrading and expanding Prestashop, you need high budget to purchase templates, themes and extensions.
Minimum scalability
Prestashop is suitable for small and medium scale business. It does not support multi-store feature.
Support
When users of Prestashop have trouble in managing site, they can find help from Prestashop forum. However, Prestashop do not have an official support team.
Source: http://blog.litexten...rce-comparison/
