Nowadays, OpenCart and Shopify shopping carts are widely use for eCommerce. They serve different goals and have their own weakness and strengths. Depending on usage’s requirements like Easy to Use, SEO, Community, Budget, Mobile Friendly, and Support, you will choose the right shopping cart for your eCommerce websites.
The basic understanding you should go with is that there are 2 types of shopping carts for building an online business: open-source and hosted.
The open-source shopping cart needs some technical skills but offers more features and customization opportunities. Otherwise, a hosted shopping cart is more user-friendly and easier to start with.
Now let’s go for details with the two best eCommerce platforms – OpenCart and Shopify – Open-source VS hosted.
Know about OpenCart VS Shopify
OpenCart
-
- OpenCart theme is open-source software, free to use.
- Unlimited Products Selling
- It is a popular eCommerce platform suitable for a wide range of online stores from a small one with a few products to a very large one with unlimited products. Also, you can display product reviews, ratings and comments on any product page.
- Easy to Operate & Develop
- It allows you to easily operate and update your store using a single admin panel. So, you don’t require to hire a developer to manage your business.
- If you have experience with PHP and knows the MVC structure well, you can immediately get familiar with the matter, and each, start making extensions and modify topics.
- Multi-Store Functionally
- With OpenCart using platform, you can set up and manage various stores using a single admin panel. It allows you to sell various brands through various stores.
- Then you can localize each store for different countries by setting different default languages, currency. Also, it is possible to use separate themes for each store.
- Multilingual and Multi-Currency
- It lets you sell in any language and currency. You can reach more users from different areas.
- Plenty of Themes and Extensions
- It is well know for its high level of functionally. There are many of opencart extensions develop by various providers. Also, some of them are free for download.
- You can easily expand your storage opportunities. In the other hand, there are tons of OpenCart themes available, both premium and free for giving your stores an attractive, slick and sales-worthy look.
- Unlimited Products Selling
- It is popular eCommerce Platform is suitable for a wide range of online stores from a small one with a few products. Besides you can display product ratings, reviews and comments on any product page.
- Report and Matrix
- It allows you to track your business activities with it’s set of reports and matrix. You can customize the reports to fit your business’s needs.
- Besides the ability to calculate the total number of sales per day/week/month, you also have a possibility to track which products customers are most interested in.
Shopify
Shopify theme is a hosted platform, offers monthly fees.
- Marketing Tools
-
- It gives you access to a huge range of marketing tools including discount system and coupon codes, email marketing system, free advertise credits, store statistics and various social media platforms integration.
-
- Security and Reliability
- It takes care of upgrades and maintenance of the servers in order to keep the security and reliability.
- You do not need to worry about delicate customer information as credit card details, plus impatient customers.
- Quick and Easy to Set up
- It is extremely easy to set up and use with no technicalities related to the development and hosting of the online store.
- It also offers the software and hosting that is need for launching the website. The admin interface is user-friendly and clean and pretty intuitive.
- SEO Friendly
- It comes with a powerful Search Engine Optimization features. Shopify designer allows designing landing pages for the campaign, which is a big distinguishing factor from other eCommerce platforms.
- You have access to advanced analytics to see where your clients are coming from so you can tailor your marketing respectively.
- Besides, Shopify Features also support friendly URLs, meta descriptions and automatically generated sitemap.
- Set up a mobile version of your store by default
- It provides a free built-in mobile commerce shopping cart, therefore, your Shopify themes are mobile responsive and look great on all devices and your customers can shop freely whenever they are.
- Customizable
-
- It is available with lots of premium and free templates for the Shopify theme store, along with hundreds of Shopify themes from various developers.
- So, is easy to create a beautiful and unique online shop that fits with your brand identity.
-
- App Integrations
- With over 3100+ apps available, It lets you easily add some extra features and functionalities for your online stores like loyalty programmes, reviews, customer wish list, in-depth analytics, print labels and more.
- Multiple Shipping and Payment gateways
- It supports dozens of payment gateways, but it also offers its own stripe payment option and makes it simple for the store owners to set up the payment gateways.
- Customer Support
- It has an excellent customer support service. It provides 24*7 days customer support for their customers via email, phone or webchat.
- Also, there is a number of community forms and support documentation. Visit Webibazaar and get more information.
In conclusion, the final choice depends on your personal needs and business requirement.