eCommerce alternatives

I have a woocommerce website that has worked for me so far. But I need custom functionality now and I’m thinking of adding more plugins. Again, too many plugins are making it more complicated to manage.

I’ve looked at Magento, but it’s extremely complicated. Another option would be Shopify, but the price is crazy. I’ve also come across VirtualSoft but it seems expensive as well. Please suggest more alternatives.

 

The only way you are going to get custom functionality without bloat is to design your own site. Adding custom functionality to platforms already suffering from bloat just adds more bloat to the web. And more bloat means more security issues, slower response, more bugs to fix time after time, and so on.

 

• Wix.
• Shopify.
• 3dcart.
• Yotpo.
• Pinnacle Cart.
• SellerPrime.
• Jazva.
• Volusion.

 

When I was on Shopify, I too faced a similar problem of having too many plugins in my store which in turn was swelling my costs. If you don’t like Magento because of the complexity, you should go for hosted solutions that help you to set up stores easily, almost like it’s DIY. And if you think plugins are a hassle for you, you can go for solutions with in-built features and plugins that you can install with just a click.
You can check out StoreHippo. I have built enterprise-level stores with it. It’s flexible and scalable, thanks to the MACH architecture. The decoupled backend and frontend help me customize my store however I want. Since it’s Saas-based and hosted, I don’t have to worry about the complex hosting and all the coding that goes behind the store. Overall it has worked well for me.

 

Shopify is a popular e-commerce platform packed with all features and tools you need to build, operate and grow your online business. I also facing some issues with it but can't that describe by you.

 

Have you considered open source e-commerce platforms outside of Magento? These are free to use and developed by community members. Instead of using plugins, you would ask the community members (i.e. developers) what they thought about developing it. The only main costs I can see are hosting the platform (you can use Digital Ocean) and adding new features (you can use Upwork to find affordable developers) that the community will not develop for you.

 

Good points here. Technical debt is not a buzzword for no reason. It can quickly become a reality, especially if you are growing fast. Another option, outside of open source e-commerce platforms, is to take a "modular approach". For instance, get an open-source product information manager (PIM), an open-source order management system (OMS), and an open-source headless CMS. These independent modules can connect with one another through an API gateway yet scale independently. You can also develop on top of them. You can learn more by checking out practices such as headless commerce, modular commerce, and and microservices-based commerce.

 

If you don't mind me asking, you guys keep talking about plugins and plugin bloating. How many plugins are actually required for a simple product or services site other than payment gateways?

 

1. WooCommerce
2. Magento
3. Bagisto
4. Drupal
5. Joomla
6. Opencart
7. Prestashop
8. OsCommerce
9. Zencart
10. X-Cart
11. Virtuemart
12. Jigoshop
13. Zeuscart

There are plenty options. It depents how good ur at programming.

I would start learning php. Cuz feels like ur going wrong direction. Less plugins = better. Laravel is flexible and efficient and extremely fast framework. Take ur time, do some reading. There are plenty tutorials out there.

cf7, woocommerce and wp-rocket is appreciated. Ofc you can use something else instead of wp-rocket, but i appreciate their work. Imo plugin is made very well and they definitely deserve every single penny

 

Thanks for the list. I am learning Laravel these days from Stackdevelopers youtube channel. Is it fine to create an e-commerce website?

 

You'd better think of designing your own site. Surely, it looks more complicated and expensive, but it is worth it. I believe that it is better to do it on your own, so that you'll understand how it works and you will be able to modify it the way you want in the future.

 

Own coding is always better .... If you are good coder and know what you are looking for in a eccomerce or in normal website.

 

I have been using Laravel for a long time and when I discovered Pimcore - everything started to be easier

Anyone else here using Pimcore to build ecommerce?

 

I use godaddy for my site. It's 29.99 a month but pretty easy to manage and they have were you can except payments right threw them. Only down fall is you can see real time stats. It say my site is in top 100 site on godady.

 

I'm currently working on a new platform from scratch. It's written in LARAVEL and so far it's performing really well in the beta testing.

My motivation for this is simple. What I needed for my ecommerce store was not too expensive, difficult to use/understand, poor documentation, slow, or all of the above.

Hopefully, I will have something up and running soon to share with you guys.

In the meantime, the best solution I have found and am currently using is WooCommerce. It is really packed with as many features as you need, however, it is very clunky/slow.

 

I will suggest self business website with online payment build with Wix, Wordpress, Joomla etc.

 

Would say that Wix and Shopify are the best options out there. Shopify can be pricey, agree on that, but this is definitely the best platform for e-commerce businesses so it's worth investment. Wix is also pretty simple to manage and organize and I think the price is lower here, so you could give it a go. Of course, you may encounter some free options, but the question is would they give you some real value.