What is the best CMS for your eCommerce site?
โUntil just a few years ago, if you wanted to create, maintain and develop an internet business it was necessary to have a software professional to set up, develop and maintain your website. Now things have changed significantly however and CMSs simplify the process and ensure that you can do it yourself. Let's take a look at the best CMSs for eCommerce.
The catalogue of CMSs for eCommerce we have at our disposal is spectacular. This is why it's always worth conducting a comparison between them and evaluating which one best meets your needs. In fact, they're going to form the foundation on which your store is built. We need to evaluate many aspects in order to decide between them.
What is a CMS in eCommerce?
CMS stands for Content ManagementSystem. This is what's going to enable you to create, manage and administer your website. But the best thing of all is how easy they are. It's normally sufficient to watch a couple of tutorials for the eCommerce CMS you've chosen to start gaining a deeper understanding. The way they work is highly intuitive and if you have any queries there's usually a large community focused on the system that will help you to resolve them.
CMSs have democratised the creation of websites. There are many types of content management depending on what you want to create: from the most basic that enable you to generate a blog from nothing to ones that require a little more and help you to create a corporate website. There are also of course CMSs for eCommerce which enable you to create all the features you need for an online store.
These specific management systems for digital business facilitate the development of the main aspects any eCommerce site should have. This means entering content, incorporating the catalogue of your products and services, inserting purchase and call to action buttons in the locations that seem most appropriate, managing orders and establishing appropriate customer service forms.
Top 4 CMSs for eCommerce
The first thing you should bear in mind when choosing a content management system are the specifications of your business. They don't all offer the same possibilities and it's important to evaluate what your type of enterprise is, what you want to sell and how you want your online store to be perceived and the values you want to convey with it. In this comparison of CMSs for eCommerce you'll find the most popular and those that yield the best results.
Prestashop
PrestaShop is an open-source CMS for eCommerce and is dedicated exclusively to the creation of online stores. This circumstance makes it one of the most used. It's free, but you have to pay for the modules you want to incorporate. It's a very useful tool both for small eCommerce businesses and for larger, more complex stores.
Advantages of Prestashop
The fact that it's free makes it one of the most attractive options. You can have an online store created by Prestashop without spending a penny.
Ease of use: Its interface is very intuitive and once you've delved into how it works, on a day-to-day basis it won't give you any problems whatsoever.
It accepts many references. As has already been mentioned, it's perfect for stores both large and small. This popular eCommerce CMS enables a wide variety of references to be included, maintaining optimal speed and performance.
Disadvantages of Prestashop
Expensive modules Despite the fact that it's in all senses one of the best CMSs for eCommerce and in principle is free, usually you need to incorporate modules that offer more purchasing options on your website. These modules have to be paid for and are not cheap.
Technical difficulties when making changes. As already mentioned, the interface and usability is simple, but when you want to go a step further, to make the website more comprehensive, you'll probably need help from programmers or people with advanced programming knowledge.
LogiCommerce
LogiCommerce is the Headless eCommerce platform that provides cutting-edge technology for medium and large companies and connects all the sales channels in a unified B2B & B2C platform. Major brands of worldwide renown use LogiCommerce.
Advantages of LogiCommerce
Advanced functionalities. LogiCommerce offers more than 200 top-of-the-range native functionalities that will strengthen the capabilities of your eCommerce site, notable among which are its multi-invoicing, multi-currency, multi-language, omni-channel and multi-channel features, advanced B2B capabilities, multi-shipment and an advanced set of SEO tools.
Gentle learning curve. Its back office is highly intuitive and easy to use, will save you time in management and enable you to work more nimbly.
High scalability and profitability. LogiCommerce will reduce the Total Maintenance Costs; it devotes less time to maintaining the software and invests it in improving the customer shopping experience. Its auto-scalable worldwide infrastructure ensures that you'll receive high standards of security with an activity time of 99.9% with SLA, uninterrupted updates and 24/7 global support.
Disadvantages of LogiCommerce
Compared to other eCommerce platforms, LogiCommerce does not currently offer a large number of plug-ins, although it's working to rectify this to add new plug-insto its platform and make them available to its customers.
Woocommerce
When comparing CMSs for eCommerce it's impossible to leave out Wordpress. Woocommerce is none other than a plug-in from the most renowned and utilised content management system. Almost 50% of the world's online stores are developed with this platform. You can also use it without spending a penny.
Advantages of Woocommerce
SEO-friendly. We all know the importance of SEO for an eCommerce site. Woocommerce is one of the platforms that most easily allows you to implement the techniques that help in the positioning of the store.
Endless possibilities. Woocommerce enables you to customise the website to your taste. It places hundreds of screens at your disposal and it's very easy to add labels, products and categories.
Disadvantages of Woocommerce
It's not the best option if you have many references. If you want to introduce many articles it loses considerable dynamism and the management process slows down.
You'll need to pay if you want a complete website. The free version is very basic and you'll need to incorporate paid-for plug-ins to have a store that stands out from the competition.
Magento
An option chosen by large companies, which find in this eCommerce CMS a very comprehensive tool where its possible to include all you want about the products and elements that help to add value to your brand. Magento also offers a free version, but because it's designed for companies with considerable market share, use of the paid-for versions is more common.
Advantages of Magento
Fantastic customisation options: The Magento Marketplaces offers around 5,000 extensions to supplement your business You don't need any knowledge of programming languages and you'll be able to have a highly comprehensive eCommerce site.
A very large community. Around 400,000 people use Magento and they can help you resolve any query and make good use of one of the best CMSs for eCommerce.
Commitment to scalability: Magento offers you all the possibilities of an online store from the outset. In other words you can start with a very simple eCommerce site, which enables you to sell a few products easily, but also scale up the business and make it more complex and complete without too much difficulty.
Disadvantages of Magento
The payment options are expensive: A common aspect of this kind of professional store. The more complete your eCommerce site becomes the more costs are involved. And in comparison with other management systems they're significant outlays.
They don't manage registration of the domain. Many of the systems we're including in this comparison of CMSs for eCommerce manage the registration of their users' domains. Magento don't do this, since they oblige you to house your website on a hosting service.
Shopify
This is a CMS for eCommerce that's used a great deal particularly in the United States. Its operations are based on the SaaS model (Software as a service), which enables you to work without downloading any program whatsoever. It's very easy to use.
Advantages of Shopify
It's one of the most comprehensive options, because as well as making it possible to sell all manner of products and services, you can manage orders and after-sales and it enables a very thorough analysis of data to be conducted.
You don't need any technical knowledge to run your online store. It enables you to work swiftly regardless of your technical knowledge.
It's a very user-friendly CMS.
It offers excellent customer service whether by chat, email or social media. The Shopify Academy platform also helps you manage all your content thanks to the innumerable free courses on offer.
Disadvantages of Shopify
Unlike other products covered in this comparison of CMSs for eCommerce, there's no free version available. If you want to use Shopify you need to make a monthly payment.
The checkout processes are very limited and offer you very few ways of customising them to your preferences.
If you have an eCommerce site and you need advice or want to clarify anything, you only need to contact us and we'll advise you in a personalised way. At SeQura we offer eCommerce businesses a wide variety of payment methods so you can reduce the obstacles to payment that users visiting your site run into. We thereby offer a solution to the high percentage of people who abandon their basket at checkout and increase the number of purchases that are made.
Increase your eCommerce sales now!