SerLampRex

Today the world had transformed into a more digital one compared to the previous decades. Online business has become more popular than ever before. But we all know that starting an online business can be both rewarding and challenging. Knowing where to start, how to run a sustainable business, and how to be successful are very important questions to every entrepreneur.

If now you decide to start an online business, the first thing you need to do is to choose a shopping cart for your website. However, in such a complicated market like ecommerce platform market, it seems to be difficult to give right decision between several available options. Therefore, this article will show you top three favorite shopping carts that are best-loved all over the world. They are Magento, Prestashop and WooCommerce.

Magento

If you need a completely customizable online store, Magento will fulfill your needs. Being a reputation open-source e-commerce software, Magento lets you tailor-make any aspect of your online store and make it work as exactly what you want.

Why do we say that Magento is the best choice for merchants? Because since it was first launched in 2007, it has quickly become one of the most popular carts online with its powerfulness and a rich feature set. Magento also offers plenty of customizations to give you the flexibility to maximize sales and optimize your operations; therefore, it seems to be available to all types of businesses.

Another advantage of Magento we want to mention here is it cost-effectiveness. With two different editions: Community Edition (CE) và Enterprise Edition (EE), Magento offers different types of solutions to fit your business. For small businesses, Magento Community, which is free version, is a great way to get started with. The company also offers Magento Enterprise, which gives you enterprise-level functionality and support to configure your website and back-end workflows.

Prestashop

Prestashop was launched in 2007 and quickly impress users by its decent efficiency, good functionality list and rather simple modification. Today more than 200,000 ecommerce stores run on PrestaShop technology. If Magento requires a little technical knowledge to use, PrestaShop seems to be more suitable to who are just starting their online store because administration panel is quite intuitive and easy to master. It’s especially important for those who are just starting their Internet adventure.

The significant feature of Prestashop is free of cost & open source. We believe that Prestashop is the best choice if you have a tight budget but still want to run on an efficient ecommerce platform.

There are a lot of functionalities built in PrestaShop. Many of them which are no match for Magento are sufficient for beginners and intermediate online shop owners. Prestashop provides extensive feature sets for managing product listing, payments, shipping, manufacturers and suppliers.

WooCommerce

WooCommerce, which is a free WordPress plugin, is one of the fastest growing shopping carts. This plugin was created in 2011 and is now used by thousands of e-commerce websites worldwide. If you are thinking about creating your own online store, you definitely should give WooCommerce a chance because it does not take very long to install but works great.

Like Prestashop, WooCommerce is completely free to download. Despite being free, WooCommerce offers extensive features out of the box and especially it will not cost you a thing.  All you have to do is download this plugin, and you will have it in just a few minutes. However, it still looks professional. We are sure that customers will be impressed by how organized your online store is and how easy it is to pay for the products.

Moreover, the WooCommerce plugin allows you to build a WordPress-based online store quickly and easily. As a popular shopping-cart software, WooCommerce also gives you unlimited capabilities and endless customization options from a variety of themes and extensions throughout the Web.

In conclusion, we suggest Magento, Prestashop and WooCommerce for your website because these outstanding feature. We also know that it is not easy to choose the right shopping cart at the first time especially to the starter. But don’t worry because LitExtension will help you to correct the mistake with shopping cart migration tools.

Source: http://blog.litexten...-carts-in-2015/

Prestashop Cloud is an alternative solution for hosting website with Prestashop users. Cloud hosting is a network of servers that allow websites to be hosted on multiple servers.

After its launch in January 2015, Prestashop Cloud is an exciting move and becomes a new choice for e-merchants beside self-hosted Prestashop. While self-hosted Prestashop allows you to download and install on your website, it is easy and quick to create Prestashop Cloud store with an email address.

Should or not should use Prestashop Cloud is still a hot debate topic for businesses. If you have plan to use Prestashop Cloud instead of self-hosted Prestashop, you should read the article that shows overview about Prestashop Cloud.

Advantages

1. It is easy to create an account on Prestashop Cloud and host shopping cart free.
2. Do not need to install software. You can start to sell products on Prestashop servers in no time.
3. You can add a custom domain name at any time.
4. Speed hosting is high.
5. Developer can choose any of the hundreds of themes and modules on Prestashop Addons

Disadvantages

1. Registering Prestashop Cloud account free, but you need to purchase built-in modulesfrom Addons to add more features and extend functionality of website.
2. It only supports to use modules and themes on Prestashop Addons. You can’t use new themes from other sources. Different modules and themes are warned that they are unsafe and incompatible to Prestashop Cloud, so which are not allowed on the platform.
3. It is limited to customize the default template. Storeowners can only change some of the default theme’s setting including color, font and lay-out; adjust logo, website icons of standard theme.
4. You don’t have full control on management of your store. After logging in to your account, you can see dashboard to manage on your PrestaShop Cloud back-office. However, it is the fact that you only change products and services by store editor. The store is yours, but Prestashop has the highest power on managing your site.
5. It does not allow you to access to database and change SQL database.
6. Prestashop do not give members permission to get their hands in the code. If storeowner want to expand scale of store, they can’t export the code, which means that developers have to rebuild the website.
7. SSL security is currently impossible.

People recognize that Prestashop Cloud is only suitable for small business to start an online store quickly with a little technical knowledge. It solves the problem about budget in the first period. However, when the number of products increases, Prestashop Cloud is not a good choice, you must build your website again from the beginning. Experts recommend you to choose self-hosted Prestashop to be independent in editing and managing your website, especially with stores carrying frequently changing product. Storeowners have full control on source code. Developers can customize e-commerce store according to their necessary.

If you want to migrate your shopping cart to Prestashop site now, migration tool of LitExtension supports you to implement hosting for new Prestashop.

Follow website to update Prestashop migration tool and Prestashop hosting.

Source: http://blog.litexten...estashop-cloud/